| Tolstoy Confession |  | Author: Leo Tolstoy
Creator: David Patterson
Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc
Category: Book
List Price: $5.95
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Seller: powells_books
Rating:  15 reviews
Sales Rank: 890035
Media: Paperback
Pages: 95
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 7 x 5 x 0.3
ISBN: 0393301923
Dewey Decimal Number: 201
EAN: 9780393301922
ASIN: 0393301923
Publication Date: December 1984
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Amazon.com Review
Confession is Leo Tolstoy's memoir of midlife spiritual crisis. In 1879, having written War and Peace and Anna Karenina, the 51 year-old Tolstoy began to believe that his life was meaningless. Confession is his account of the limited satisfactions he derived from his aesthetic and intellectual triumphs, and of his first yearnings for real faith. This book marks the turning point in his career as a writer: after 1880 he would write almost exclusively about religious life, especially devotion among the peasantry (in works such as The Death of Ivan Ilych and Resurrection). Near the end of Confession, Tolstoy describes the desolation he felt upon deciding that he could not solve his crisis of faith by taking refuge in the church. "I have no doubt that there is truth in the doctrine," he writes, "but there can also be no doubt that it harbors a lie; and I must find the truth and the lie so I can tell them apart." Confession does not find the full Truth, but it offers an inspiring example of a man rejecting the lies that cling to unthinking orthodoxy. Its final, exhilarating, heart-rending account of a spiritually awakening dream ranks with the best of Christian mystical writing. --Michael Joseph Gross
Product Description
Reissued in new trade paperback format and design. In 1879 the fifty-one-year-old author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina came to believe that he had accomplished nothing and that his life was meaningless.
Marking a shift in his career from the aesthetic to the religious, Tolstoy's Confession relates this spiritual crisis, posing the question: Is there any meaning in my life that will not be destroyed by my death? It is a timeless account of an individual's struggle for faith and meaning.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 15
 Tolstoy Review April 1, 2007
Tennery B. Hicks (Michigan, USA)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is a fascinating look at a man's journey to religious enlightenment. He is lost and he struggles to make sense of life and religion, asking the age old question, "Why are we here?"
 Insightful September 16, 2005
Martin Arumemi-ikhide
0 out of 6 found this review helpful
Good insight into the mind of a talented thinker. Unfortunately he dwindles of toward the end, but definitely worth reading.
Confession July 20, 2005
M. Piatkowski (Tx)
3 out of 6 found this review helpful
Tolstoy really hit on the fact that people work their whole lives in pursuit of something that will make them truly happy. "The more I get the happier I'll be". It doesn't work like that. Even at his best he was miserable, suicidal. The answer is God. Plain and simple. He is the only thing that Tolstoy discovered would lead him to a more peaceful,satisfying life. This was a great book.
'The meaning of life is within us ' December 5, 2004
Shalom Freedman (Jerusalem,Israel)
5 out of 6 found this review helpful
The starting point of this work always fascinated me. Here is a great genius of mankind, recognized throughout the world as an immortal creator of Literature. He is the father of a large family and has a wife he has loved and who has loved him. He has great wealth .In other words here is a person who seems to have almost everything most human beings strive for in their lives and do not attain in any way close to the level at which he has attained them. And yet it all turns meaningless to him, and he in despair asks the question of whether there is anything to truly live for, what can give life true meaning. For he too senses that Death will take him and all his worlds, and their meaning away.
His answer comes from within his own personal Christian faith. It is not a formal church faith but rather has to do with the message of God he hears in his heart, the message of love for all of mankind. Meaning is to be found according to Tolstoy in living in a spiritual way in which stress is placed in goodness with others and sharing with them whatever one has to give.
The meaning of life is living according to this voice of God he hears within.
This is the answer Tolstoy gave, but the evidence of his life suggests it did not satisfy him. For his questionings and doubts persisted throughout his lifetime, and his life did not end in some great gesture of affirmation and love but rather in his running from the once- beloved wife, who for years had embittered his life, as he hers.
This work cannot of course compare to Tolstoy's great novels in scope or even in human interest. It is a look at a great man's ' soul' at one stage of his life but in giving that life omits many of the great skills Tolstoy made use of in other writing.
As spiritual guide it has never seemed to me to provide the kind of answers to life meaning I have been looking for.
Yet I understand how it may be of much help and consolation to all those who have suffered crises similar to that of Tolstoy.
Candid and insightful reflections. May 16, 2004
david fairback (addison, tx United States)
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
Tolstoy's honesty at his own selfish motives and his dissapointment with the true value of his accompleshments is wonderfully refreshing. His writing is so personal and open that I don't think anyone can walk away from this unmoved. I was dissapointed that he rejects the concept of a personal active God in the conclusion of his search.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 15
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