Philosophical problems in Tolstoy's confession. Tolstoy Lev Nikolaevich

Lev Tolstoy

"Confession"

I was baptized and raised in the Orthodox Christian faith. I was taught it from childhood, and throughout my adolescence and youth. But when I left the second year of university at the age of 18, I no longer believed in anything that I was taught.

Judging by some memories, I never seriously believed, but only had confidence in what I was taught and in what the great ones confessed to me; but this trust was very shaky.

I remember that when I was about eleven years old, one boy, long dead, Volodenka M., who studied at the gymnasium, came to us on Sunday and, as the latest news, announced to us the discovery made at the gymnasium. The discovery was that there is no God and that everything we are taught is just fiction (this was in 1838). I remember how the older brothers became interested in this news and called me for advice. I remember we all became very animated and took this news as something very entertaining and very possible.

I also remember that when my eldest brother Dmitry, while at the university, suddenly, with the passion characteristic of his nature, surrendered to faith and began to go to all services, fast, and lead a pure and moral life, then all of us, even the elders, without ceasing They laughed at him and for some reason called him Noah. I remember Musin-Pushkin, who was then a trustee of Kazan University, inviting us to dance with him, mockingly persuaded his refusing brother by saying that David also danced in front of the ark. At that time I sympathized with these jokes of the elders and drew from them the conclusion that it is necessary to study the catechism, it is necessary to go to church, but one should not take all this too seriously. I also remember that I read Voltaire when I was very young, and his ridicule not only did not outrage me, but greatly amused me.

My falling away from the faith happened in me just as it happened and is happening now in people of our educational background. It seems to me that in most cases it happens like this: people live the way everyone else lives, and they all live on the basis of principles that not only have nothing in common with religious doctrine, but for the most part are opposite to it; religious doctrine is not involved in life, and you never have to deal with it in relationships with other people and never have to cope with it in your own life; This creed is professed somewhere out there, far from life and independent of it. If you encounter it, then only as an external phenomenon, not related to life.

From a person’s life, from his deeds, both now and then, there is no way to know whether he is a believer or not. If there is a difference between those who clearly profess Orthodoxy and those who deny it, it is not in favor of the former. Both now and then, the obvious recognition and confession of Orthodoxy was mostly found in people who were stupid, cruel and immoral and who considered themselves very important. Intelligence, honesty, straightforwardness, good nature and morality were mostly found in people who recognized themselves as non-believers.

The schools teach the catechism and send students to church; Officials are required to provide evidence of the existence of the sacrament. But a person of our circle, who no longer studies and is not in public service, and now, and even more so in the old days, could live for decades without ever remembering that he lives among Christians and is himself considered to profess the Christian Orthodox faith.

So, both now and before, a creed, accepted out of trust and supported by external pressure, gradually melts away under the influence of knowledge and life experiences that are contrary to the creed, and a person very often lives for a long time, imagining that the creed that was communicated to him is intact within him since childhood, while there is no trace of him for a long time.

And they said nothing more to each other. And from that day on S. stopped going to prayer and going to church. And now he hasn’t prayed, taken communion or gone to church for thirty years. And not because he knew his brother’s convictions and would have joined them, not because he decided anything in his soul, but only because this word spoken by his brother was like a finger pushing into a wall that was ready to to fall from one's own weight; this word was an indication that where he thought there was faith, there had long been an empty place, and that therefore the words that he spoke, and the crosses, and the bows that he made while standing in prayer, were completely meaningless actions. Realizing their senselessness, he could not continue them.

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Lev Tolstoy

Confession

(Introduction to an unpublished essay)

Judging by some memories, I never seriously believed, but only had confidence in what I was taught and in what the great ones confessed to me; but this trust was very shaky.

My falling away from the faith happened in me just as it happened and is happening now in people of our educational background. It seems to me that in most cases it happens like this: people live the way everyone else lives, and they all live on the basis of principles that not only have nothing in common with religious doctrine, but for the most part are opposite to it; religious doctrine is not involved in life, and you never have to deal with it in relationships with other people, and you never have to deal with it yourself in your own life; This creed is professed somewhere out there, far from life and independent of it. If you encounter it, then only as an external phenomenon, not related to life.

From a person’s life, from his deeds, both now and then, there is no way to know whether he is a believer or not. If there is a difference between those who clearly profess Orthodoxy and those who deny it, it is not in favor of the former. Both now and then, the obvious recognition and confession of Orthodoxy was mostly found among stupid, cruel and immoral people who considered themselves very important. Intelligence, honesty, straightforwardness, good nature and morality were mostly found in people who recognized themselves as non-believers.

S., an intelligent and truthful man, told me how he stopped believing. About twenty-six years old, once while camping for the night during a hunt, according to an old habit adopted from childhood, he began to pray in the evening. The older brother, who had been hunting with him, lay on the hay and looked at him. When S. finished and began to lie down, his brother said to him: “Are you still doing this?” And they said nothing more to each other. And from that day on S. stopped going to prayer and going to church. And now he hasn’t prayed, taken communion or gone to church for thirty years. And not because he knew his brother’s convictions and would have joined them, not because he decided anything in his soul, but only because this word spoken by his brother was like a finger pushing into a wall that was ready to to fall from one's own weight; this word was an indication that where he thought there was faith, there had long been an empty place, and that therefore the words that he spoke, and the crosses, and the bows that he made while standing in prayer, were completely meaningless actions. Realizing their senselessness, he could not continue them.

This was and is the case, I think, with the vast majority of people. I’m talking about people of our education, I’m talking about people who are truthful with themselves, and not about those who make the very object of faith a means to achieve any temporary goals. (These people are the most fundamental non-believers, because if faith for them is a means to achieve some worldly goals, then this is probably not faith.) These people of our education are in the position that the light of knowledge and life has melted an artificial building, and they either already noticed it and made room, or they haven’t noticed it yet.

The creed taught to me from childhood disappeared in me just as in others, with the only difference being that since I began to read and think a lot very early, my renunciation of the creed became conscious very early. From the age of sixteen I stopped going to prayer and, on my own impulse, stopped going to church and fasting. I stopped believing in what I had been told since childhood, but I believed in something. What I believed, I could never say. I also believed in God, or rather, I did not deny God, but which god, I could not say; I did not deny Christ and his teaching, but I also could not say what his teaching was.

Now, remembering that time, I see clearly that my faith - what, in addition to animal instincts, moved my life - my only true faith at that time was faith in improvement. But what was the improvement and what was its purpose, I could not say. I tried to improve myself mentally - I learned everything I could and that life pushed me towards; I tried to improve my will - I made up rules for myself that I tried to follow; I improved myself physically, using all sorts of exercises to refine my strength and dexterity and, through all sorts of hardships, accustoming myself to endurance and patience. And I considered all this as improvement. The beginning of everything was, of course, moral improvement, but it was soon replaced by improvement in general, that is, the desire to be better not before oneself or before God, but the desire to be better before other people. And very soon this desire to be better in front of people was replaced by the desire to be stronger than other people, that is, more famous, more important, richer than others.

Someday I will tell the story of my life - both touching and instructive in these ten years of my youth. I think many, many people have experienced the same thing. I wanted with all my soul to be good; but I was young, I had passions, and I was alone, completely alone, when I was looking for what was good. Every time I tried to express what constituted my most sincere desires: that I wanted to be morally good, I was met with contempt and ridicule; and as soon as I indulged in vile passions, I was praised and encouraged. Ambition, lust for power, greed, lust, pride, anger, revenge - all this was respected. By surrendering to these passions, I became like a big man, and I felt that they were pleased with me. My good aunt, the purest being with whom I lived, always told me that she would like nothing more for me than for me to have a relationship with a married woman: “Rien ne forme un jeune homme comme une liaison avec unt femme comme il faut"; She wished me another happiness - that I should be an adjutant, and best of all with the sovereign; and the greatest happiness is that I marry a very rich girl and that, as a result of this marriage, I have as many slaves as possible.

I cannot remember these years without horror, disgust and heartache. I killed people in war, challenged them to duels in order to kill them, lost at cards, ate up the labors of men, executed them, fornicated, deceived. Lies, theft, fornication of all kinds, drunkenness, violence, murder... There was no crime that I did not commit, and for all this I was praised, my peers considered and still consider me a relatively moral person.

I lived like this for ten years.

At this time I began to write out of vanity, greed and pride. In my writings I did the same thing as in life. In order to have the fame and money for which I wrote, it was necessary to hide the good and show the bad. That's what I did. How many times have I managed to hide in my writings, under the guise of indifference and even slight mockery, those of my aspirations for good, which constituted the meaning of my life. And I achieved this: I was praised.

When I was twenty-six years old, I came to St. Petersburg after the war and became friends with writers. They accepted me as one of their own and flattered me. And before I had time to look back, the class writers’ views on the life of those people with whom I became friends were internalized by me and had already completely erased in me all my previous attempts to become better. These views, under the licentiousness of my life, substituted a theory that justified it.

The view on the life of these people, my fellow writers, was that life in general is developing and that in this development we, people of thought, take the main part, and among people of thought, we - artists and poets - have the main influence. Our calling is to teach people. In order to avoid that natural question being presented to oneself: what do I know and what should I teach? In this theory it was clarified that one does not need to know this, but that the artist and poet unconsciously teaches. I was considered a wonderful artist and poet, and therefore it was very natural for me to internalize this theory. I - an artist, a poet - wrote, taught, without knowing what. I was paid money for this, I had excellent food, premises, women, society, I had fame. Therefore, what I taught was very good.

This faith in the meaning of poetry and in the development of life was faith, and I was one of its priests. Being her priest was very profitable and pleasant. And I lived in this faith for quite a long time, without doubting its truth. But in the second and especially in the third year of such a life, I began to doubt the infallibility of this faith and began to investigate it. The first reason for doubt was that I began to notice that the priests of this faith did not all agree with each other. Some said: we are the best and most useful teachers, we teach what is needed, while others teach incorrectly. And others said: no, we are real, but you teach incorrectly. And they argued, quarreled, scolded, deceived, cheated against each other. In addition, there were many people among them who did not care about who was right and who was wrong, but simply achieved their selfish goals with the help of this activity of ours. All this made me doubt the truth of our faith.

In addition, having doubted the truth of the literary faith itself, I began to more carefully observe its priests and became convinced that almost all the priests of this faith, writers, were immoral people and, in the majority, bad people, insignificant in character - much lower than the people I I met in my former riotous and military life - but self-confident and self-satisfied, as only completely holy people or those who do not even know what holiness is can be satisfied. People disgusted me, and I disgusted myself, and I realized that this faith was a deception.

But the strange thing is that although I soon understood all this lie of faith and renounced it, I did not renounce the rank given to me by these people - the rank of artist, poet, teacher. I naively imagined that I was a poet, an artist, and could teach everyone, without knowing what I was teaching. That's what I did.

From getting close to these people, I learned a new vice - a painfully developed pride and a crazy confidence that I was called to teach people, without knowing what.

Now, remembering this time, my mood then and the mood of those people (there are, however, thousands of them now), I feel sorry, scared, and funny - exactly the same feeling arises that you experience in a madhouse.

We were all convinced then that we needed to talk and talk, write, print - as quickly as possible, as much as possible, that all this was needed for the good of humanity. And thousands of us, denying, scolding one another, all printed, wrote, teaching others. And, not noticing that we know nothing, that to the simplest question of life: what is good, what is bad, we do not know what to answer, we all, without listening to each other, all spoke at once, sometimes indulging each other and praising each other so that they would indulge me and praise me, sometimes getting irritated and shouting at each other, just like in a madhouse.

Thousands of workers worked day and night with all their strength, typed, printed millions of words, and the post office carried them all over Russia, and we still taught more and more, taught and taught, and never had time to teach everything, and everyone was angry that there were not enough of us listening.

It's terribly strange, but now I understand. Our real, sincere reasoning was that we want to receive as much money and praise as possible. To achieve this goal, we did not know how to do anything other than write books and newspapers. That's what we did. But in order for us to do such a useless task and have the confidence that we are very important people, we also needed reasoning that would justify our activities. And so we came up with the following: everything that exists is reasonable. Everything that exists, everything develops. Everything develops through enlightenment. Enlightenment is measured by the distribution of books and newspapers. And we are paid money and respected for writing books and newspapers, and therefore we are the most useful and good people. This reasoning would be very good if we all agreed; but since for every thought expressed by one, there was always a diametrically opposite thought expressed by another, this should have forced us to change our minds. But we didn't notice this. We were paid money, and the people of our party praised us - therefore, we, each of us, considered ourselves right.

Now it’s clear to me that there was no difference from the madhouse; At that time I only vaguely suspected this, and then only, like all crazy people, I called everyone crazy except myself.

So I lived, indulging in this madness for another six years, until my marriage. At this time I went abroad. Life in Europe and my rapprochement with advanced and learned European people confirmed me even more in the faith of improvement in general that I lived by, because I found the same faith among them. This faith took in me the usual form that it has among most educated people of our time. This faith was expressed by the word “progress”. Then it seemed to me that this word expressed something. I did not yet understand that, tormented, like every living person, by questions about how best to live, I, answering: to live in accordance with progress, am saying exactly the same thing that a man would say, carried in a boat on the waves and in the wind, to the main and only question for him: “Where to stay?” - if he, without answering the question, says: “We are being carried somewhere.”

I didn't notice it then. Only occasionally, not reason, but feeling rebelled against this common superstition in our time, with which people shield themselves from their lack of understanding of life. Thus, when I was in Paris, the sight of the death penalty exposed to me the instability of my superstition of progress. When I saw how the head was separated from the body and both were knocking separately in the box, I realized - not with my mind, but with my whole being - that no theories of the rationality of existing things and progress could justify this act and that if all the people in the world, according to whatever theories, since the creation of the world, they have found that this is necessary - I know that this is not necessary, that it is bad, and that therefore the judge of what is good and necessary is not what people say and do, and not progress, but me with my heart. Another case of consciousness of the insufficiency of the superstition of progress for life was the death of my brother. An intelligent, kind, serious man, he fell ill young, suffered for more than a year and died painfully, not understanding why he lived, and even less understanding why he was dying. No theories could answer these questions either for me or for him during his slow and painful dying.

But these were only rare cases of doubt; in essence, I continued to live, professing only faith in progress. “Everything is developing, and I am developing; “But why am I developing along with everyone else, that will be seen.” This is how I should have formulated my faith then.

Returning from abroad, I settled in the village and attended peasant schools. This activity was especially to my heart, because it did not contain the obvious lies that had already hurt my eyes in the work of literary teaching. Here I also acted in the name of progress, but I was already critical of progress itself. I told myself that progress in some of my phenomena was carried out incorrectly and that we must treat primitive people, peasant children, completely freely, inviting them to choose the path of progress that they want.

In essence, I kept hovering around the same insoluble problem, which was to teach without knowing what. In the highest spheres of literary activity it was clear to me that it was impossible to teach without knowing what to teach, because I saw that everyone taught different things and by arguing among themselves they only hid their ignorance from themselves; here, with peasant children, I thought that this difficulty could be circumvented by allowing the children to learn what they wanted. Now it’s funny for me to remember how I hesitated in order to fulfill my lust - to teach, although I knew very well in the depths of my soul that I could not teach anything that was needed, because I myself did not know what was needed. After a year spent in school, I went abroad another time to find out how to do this so that, without knowing anything myself, I could teach others.

And it seemed to me that I had learned this abroad, and, armed with all this wisdom, I returned to Russia in the year of the liberation of the peasants and, taking the place of a mediator, began to teach both the uneducated people in schools and educated people in the magazine that I began to publish . Things seemed to be going well, but I felt that I was not entirely mentally healthy and this could not last long. And then, perhaps, I would have come to the despair to which I came at fifty years old, if I had not had one more side of life, which I had not yet experienced and which promised me salvation: it was family life.

Over the course of a year, I was involved in mediation, schools and the magazine, and I was so exhausted, especially because I was confused, the struggle for mediation became so difficult for me, my activity in the schools manifested itself so vaguely, my influence in the magazine, which consisted all in one thing, became so disgusting to me and the same thing - in the desire to teach everyone and hide the fact that I don’t know what to teach, that I was sick more spiritually than physically - I left everything and went to the steppe to the Bashkirs - to breathe the air, drink kumiss and live an animal life.

When I returned from there, I got married. The new conditions of a happy family life have completely distracted me from any search for the general meaning of life. During this time, my whole life was focused on my family, my wife, my children, and therefore on concerns about increasing my means of living. The desire for improvement, which had previously been replaced by the desire for improvement in general, for progress, was now replaced directly by the desire to ensure that my family and I were as good as possible.

So another fifteen years passed.

Despite the fact that I considered writing a trifle, during these fifteen years I still continued to write. I had already tasted the temptation of writing, the temptation of huge monetary rewards and applause for insignificant work, and indulged in it as a means to improve my financial situation and drown out in my soul any questions about the meaning of my life and the general one.

I wrote, teaching what was the only truth for me: that one must live in such a way that it would be as good as possible for oneself and one’s family.

This is how I lived, but five years ago something very strange began to happen to me: moments of bewilderment, a halt in life, began to come over me, as if I did not know how to live, what to do, and I became lost and fell into despondency. But it passed, and I continued to live as before. Then these moments of bewilderment began to repeat more and more often and all in the same form. These stops in life were always expressed by the same questions: Why? Well, what then?

At first it seemed to me that this was so - aimless, inappropriate questions. It seemed to me that all this was known and that if I ever wanted to solve them, it would not cost me any work - that now only I had no time to do this, and when I wanted to, then I would find the answers. But questions began to be repeated more and more often, answers were required more and more urgently, and like dots, all falling into one place, these unanswered questions rallied into one black spot.

What happened is what happens to every person who suffers from a fatal internal disease. At first, insignificant signs of malaise appear, to which the patient does not pay attention, then these signs are repeated more and more often and merge into one inseparable suffering. The suffering grows, and the patient does not have time to look back before he realizes that what he took for an illness is what is most significant to him in the world, that this is death.

The same thing happened to me. I realized that this was not a random ailment, but something very important, and that if all the same questions were repeated, then they needed to be answered. And I tried to answer. The questions seemed so stupid, simple, childish questions. But as soon as I touched them and tried to resolve them, I was immediately convinced, firstly, that these were not childish and stupid questions, but the most important and profound questions in life, and, secondly, that I I cannot and cannot, no matter how much I think, resolve them. Before I start working on my Samara estate, raising my son, or writing a book, I need to know why I’m going to do this. Until I know why, I can’t do anything. Among my thoughts about the farm, which occupied me very much at that time, the question suddenly occurred to me: “Well, okay, you will have 6,000 dessiatines in the Samara province, 300 heads of horses, and then?..” And I was completely taken aback and didn’t knew what to think next. Or, as I began to think about how I would raise my children, I would say to myself, “Why?” Or, talking about how people can achieve prosperity, I suddenly said to myself: “What does it matter to me?” Or, thinking about the fame that my writings would gain for me, I said to myself: “Well, okay, you will be more famous than Gogol, Pushkin, Shakespeare, Moliere, all the writers in the world - so what!”

And I couldn’t answer anything or anything.

Leo Tolstoy writes that he lost his childhood faith after his older brother came and said that there is no God. And a little later, he stopped going to prayer after the story of a certain S., an “intelligent man,” about his renunciation of faith. Leo chose the path of nihilism and self-improvement, striving to become physically stronger, smarter, and richer not before God, but before other people.

Then Tolstoy writes about his passions and crimes (duels, cards, fornication, lies, etc.), about the ideals of his society, that all sins were encouraged and they were proud of them. Then he writes how he began to believe in poetry, like a priest he taught others, without knowing what. The questions “Why?”, suffering and despondency forced the writer to search for the meaning of life. Life seemed meaningless and a cruel joke to him, but there was also a fear of death.

1879 was a turning point for Tolstoy. After an autumn trip to the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra and the Trinity-Sergius Lavra, the writer was completely transformed. He realized that faith would save him, even if it was the way he understood it - simple, popular. For him it was spiritual healing.

“Confession” teaches how to find your purpose, the purpose of life, and answers to questions. The trial and error method, already tested by the author, can help the reader avoid making them.

Picture or drawing Confession

I

Judging by some memories, I never seriously believed, but only had confidence in what I was taught and in what the great ones confessed to me; but this trust was very shaky.

My falling away from the faith happened in me just as it happened and is happening now in people of our educational background. It seems to me that in most cases it happens like this: people live the way everyone else lives, and they all live on the basis of principles that not only have nothing in common with religious doctrine, but for the most part are opposite to it; religious doctrine is not involved in life, and you never have to deal with it in relationships with other people, and you never have to deal with it yourself in your own life; This creed is professed somewhere out there, far from life and independent of it. If you encounter it, then only as an external phenomenon, not related to life.

From a person’s life, from his deeds, both now and then, there is no way to know whether he is a believer or not. If there is a difference between those who clearly profess Orthodoxy and those who deny it, it is not in favor of the former. Both now and then, the obvious recognition and confession of Orthodoxy was mostly found among stupid, cruel and immoral people who considered themselves very important. Intelligence, honesty, straightforwardness, good nature and morality were mostly found in people who recognized themselves as non-believers.

II

I lived like this for ten years.

Philosophical problems in Tolstoy's confession. Tolstoy Lev Nikolaevich

Picture or drawing Confession

Other retellings for the reader's diary

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