A CONFESSION

                      A Confession



               by Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy






                            I



 I was baptized and brought up in the Orthodox Christian faith. 

I was taught it in childhood and throughout my boyhood and youth.

But when I abandoned the second course of the university at the age

of eighteen I no longer believed any of the things I had been

taught.

 Judging by certain memories, I never seriously believed them,

but had merely relied on what I was taught and on what was

professed by the grown-up people around me, and that reliance was

very unstable.

 I remember that before I was eleven a grammar school pupil,

Vladimir Milyutin (long since dead), visited us one Sunday and

announced as the latest novelty a discovery made at his school.

This discovery was that there is no God and that all we are taught

about Him is a mere invention (this was in 1838). I remember how

interested my elder brothers were in this information. They called

me to their council and we all, I remember, became very animated,

and accepted it as something very interesting and quite possible.

 I remember also that when my elder brother, Dmitriy, who was

then at the university, suddenly, in the passionate way natural to

him, devoted himself to religion and began to attend all the Church

services, to fast and to lead a pure and moral life, we all -- even

our elders -- unceasingly held him up to ridicule and for some

unknown reason called him "Noah". I remember that Musin-Pushkin,

the then Curator of Kazan University, when inviting us to dance at

his home, ironically persuaded my brother (who was declining the

invitation) by the argument that even David danced before the Ark.

I sympathized with these jokes made by my elders, and drew from

them the conclusion that though it is necessary to learn the

catechism and go to church, one must not take such things too

seriously. I remember also that I read Voltaire when I was very

young, and that his raillery, far from shocking me, amused me very

much.

 My lapse from faith occurred as is usual among people on our

level of education. In most cases, I think, it happens thus: a

man lives like everybody else, on the basis of principles not

merely having nothing in common with religious doctrine, but

generally opposed to it; religious doctrine does not play a part in

life, in intercourse with others it is never encountered, and in a

man's own life he never has to reckon with it. Religious doctrine

is professed far away from life and independently of it. If it is

encountered, it is only as an external phenomenon disconnected from

life.

 Then as now, it was and is quite impossible to judge by a

man's life and conduct whether he is a believer or not. If there

be a difference between a man who publicly professes orthodoxy and

one who denies it, the difference is not in favor of the former.

Then as now, the public profession and confession of orthodoxy was

chiefly met with among people who were dull and cruel and who

considered themselves very important. Ability, honesty,

reliability, good-nature and moral conduct, were often met with

among unbelievers.

 The schools teach the catechism and send the pupils to church,

and government officials must produce certificates of having

received communion. But a man of our circle who has finished his

education and is not in the government service may even now (and

formerly it was still easier for him to do so) live for ten or

twenty years without once remembering that he is living among

Christians and is himself reckoned a member of the orthodox

Christian Church.

 So that, now as formerly, religious doctrine, accepted on

trust and supported by external pressure, thaws away gradually

under the influence of knowledge and experience of life which

conflict with it, and a man very often lives on, imagining that he

still holds intact the religious doctrine imparted to him in

childhood whereas in fact not a trace of it remains.

 S., a clever and truthful man, once told me the story of how

he ceased to believe. On a hunting expedition, when he was already

twenty-six, he once, at the place where they put up for the night,

knelt down in the evening to pray -- a habit retained from

childhood. His elder brother, who was at the hunt with him, was

lying on some hay and watching him. When S. had finished and was

settling down for the night, his brother said to him: "So you

still do that?"

 They said nothing more to one another.  But from that day S.

ceased to say his prayers or go to church. And now he has not

prayed, received communion, or gone to church, for thirty years.

And this not because he knows his brother's convictions and has

joined him in them, nor because he has decided anything in his own

soul, but simply because the word spoken by his brother was like

the push of a finger on a wall that was ready to fall by its own

weight. The word only showed that where he thought there was

faith, in reality there had long been an empty space, and that

therefore the utterance of words and the making of signs of the

cross and genuflections while praying were quite senseless actions.

Becoming conscious of their senselessness he could not continue

them.

 So it has been and is, I think, with the great majority of

people. I am speaking of people of our educational level who are

sincere with themselves, and not of those who make the profession

of faith a means of attaining worldly aims. (Such people are the

most fundamental infidels, for if faith is for them a means of

attaining any worldly aims, then certainly it is not faith.) these

people of our education are so placed that the light of knowledge

and life has caused an artificial erection to melt away, and they

have either already noticed this and swept its place clear, or they

have not yet noticed it.

 The religious doctrine taught me from childhood disappeared in

me as in others, but with this difference, that as from the age of

fifteen I began to read philosophical works, my rejection of the

doctrine became a conscious one at a very early age. From the time

I was sixteen I ceased to say my prayers and ceased to go to church

or to fast of my own volition. I did not believe what had been

taught me in childhood but I believed in something. What it was I

believed in I could not at all have said. I believed in a God, or

rather I did not deny God -- but I could not have said what sort of

God. Neither did I deny Christ and his teaching, but what his

teaching consisted in I again could not have said.

 Looking back on that time, I now see clearly that my faith --

my only real faith -- that which apart from my animal instincts

gave impulse to my life -- was a belief in perfecting myself. But

in what this perfecting consisted and what its object was, I could

not have said. I tried to perfect myself mentally -- I studied

everything I could, anything life threw in my way; I tried to

perfect my will, I drew up rules I tried to follow; I perfected

myself physically, cultivating my strength and agility by all sorts

of exercises, and accustoming myself to endurance and patience by

all kinds of privations. And all this I considered to be the

pursuit of perfection. the beginning of it all was of course moral

perfection, but that was soon replaced by perfection in general:

by the desire to be better not in my own eyes or those of God but

in the eyes of other people. And very soon this effort again

changed into a desire to be stronger than others: to be more

famous, more important and richer than others.

                           II



 Some day I will narrate the touching and instructive history

of my life during those ten years of my youth. I think very many

people have had a like experience. With all my soul I wished to be

good, but I was young, passionate and alone, completely alone when

I sought goodness. Every time I tried to express my most sincere

desire, which was to be morally good, I met with contempt and

ridicule, but as soon as I yielded to low passions I was praised

and encouraged.

 Ambition, love of power, covetousness, lasciviousness, pride,

anger, and revenge -- were all respected.

 Yielding to those passions I became like the grown-up folk and

felt that they approved of me. The kind aunt with whom I lived,

herself the purest of beings, always told me that there was nothing

she so desired for me as that I should have relations with a

married woman: 'Rien ne forme un juene homme, comme une liaison

avec une femme comme il faut'. [Footnote: Nothing so forms a

young man as an intimacy with a woman of good breeding.] Another

happiness she desired for me was that I should become an aide-de-

camp, and if possible aide-de-camp to the Emperor. But the

greatest happiness of all would be that I should marry a very rich

girl and so become possessed of as many serfs as possible.

 I cannot think of those years without horror, loathing and

heartache. I killed men in war and challenged men to duels in

order to kill them. I lost at cards, consumed the labor of the

peasants, sentenced them to punishments, lived loosely, and

deceived people. Lying, robbery, adultery of all kinds,

drunkenness, violence, murder -- there was no crime I did not

commit, and in spite of that people praised my conduct and my

contemporaries considered and consider me to be a comparatively

moral man.

 So I lived for ten years.

 During that time I began to write from vanity, covetousness,

and pride. In my writings I did the same as in my life. to get

fame and money, for the sake of which I wrote, it was necessary to

hide the good and to display the evil. and I did so. How often in

my writings I contrived to hide under the guise of indifference, or

even of banter, those strivings of mine towards goodness which gave

meaning to my life! And I succeeded in this and was praised.

 At twenty-six years of age [Footnote: He was in fact 27 at the

time.] I returned to Petersburg after the war, and met the writers.

They received me as one of themselves and flattered me. And before

I had time to look round I had adopted the views on life of the set

of authors I had come among, and these views completely obliterated

all my former strivings to improve -- they furnished a theory which

justified the dissoluteness of my life.

 The view of life of these people, my comrades in authorship,

consisted in this: that life in general goes on developing, and in

this development we -- men of thought -- have the chief part; and

among men of thought it is we -- artists and poets -- who have the

greatest influence. Our vocation is to teach mankind. And lest

the simple question should suggest itself: What do I know, and what

can I teach? it was explained in this theory that this need not be

known, and that the artist and poet teach unconsciously. I was

considered an admirable artist and poet, and therefore it was very

natural for me to adopt this theory. I, artist and poet, wrote and

taught without myself knowing what. For this I was paid money; I

had excellent food, lodging, women, and society; and I had fame,

which showed that what I taught was very good.

 this faith in the meaning of poetry and in the development of

life was a religion, and I was one of its priests. To be its

priest was very pleasant and profitable. And I lived a

considerable time in this faith without doubting its validity. But

in the second and still more in the third year of this life I began

to doubt the infallibility of this religion and to examine it. My

first cause of doubt was that I began to notice that the priests of

this religion were not all in accord among themselves. Some said:

We are the best and most useful teachers; we teach what is needed,

but the others teach wrongly. Others said: No! we are the real

teachers, and you teach wrongly. and they disputed, quarrelled,

abused, cheated, and tricked one another. There were also many

among us who did not care who was right and who was wrong, but were

simply bent on attaining their covetous aims by means of this

activity of ours. All this obliged me to doubt the validity of our

creed.

 Moreover, having begun to doubt the truth of the authors'

creed itself, I also began to observe its priests more attentively,

and I became convinced that almost all the priests of that

religion, the writers, were immoral, and for the most part men of

bad, worthless character, much inferior to those whom I had met in

my former dissipated and military life; but they were self-

confident and self-satisfied as only those can be who are quite

holy or who do not know what holiness is. These people revolted

me, I became revolting to myself, and I realized that that faith

was a fraud.

 But strange to say, though I understood this fraud and

renounced it, yet I did not renounce the rank these people gave me:

the rank of artist, poet, and teacher. I naively imagined that I

was a poet and artist and could teach everybody without myself

knowing what I was teaching, and I acted accordingly.

 From my intimacy with these men I acquired a new vice:

abnormally developed pride and an insane assurance that it was my

vocation to teach men, without knowing what.

 To remember that time, and my own state of mind and that of

those men (though there are thousands like them today), is sad and

terrible and ludicrous, and arouses exactly the feeling one

experiences in a lunatic asylum.

 We were all then convinced that it was necessary for us to

speak, write, and print as quickly as possible and as much as

possible, and that it was all wanted for the good of humanity. And

thousands of us, contradicting and abusing one another, all printed

and wrote -- teaching others. And without noticing that we knew

nothing, and that to the simplest of life's questions: What is good

and what is evil? we did not know how to reply, we all talked at

the same time, not listening to one another, sometimes seconding

and praising one another in order to be seconded and praised in

turn, sometimes getting angry with one another -- just as in a

lunatic asylum.

 Thousands of workmen laboured to the extreme limit of their

strength day and night, setting the type and printing millions of

words which the post carried all over Russia, and we still went on

teaching and could in no way find time to teach enough, and were

always angry that sufficient attention was not paid us.

 It was terribly strange, but is now quite comprehensible.  Our

real innermost concern was to get as much money and praise as

possible. To gain that end we could do nothing except write books

and papers. So we did that. But in order to do such useless work

and to feel assured that we were very important people we required

a theory justifying our activity. And so among us this theory was

devised: "All that exists is reasonable. All that exists

develops. And it all develops by means of Culture. And Culture is

measured by the circulation of books and newspapers. And we are

paid money and are respected because we write books and newspapers,

and therefore we are the most useful and the best of men." This

theory would have been all very well if we had been unanimous, but

as every thought expressed by one of us was always met by a

diametrically opposite thought expressed by another, we ought to

have been driven to reflection. But we ignored this; people paid

us money and those on our side praised us, so each of us considered

himself justified.

 It is now clear to me that this was just as in a lunatic

asylum; but then I only dimly suspected this, and like all

lunatics, simply called all men lunatics except myself.

                           III



 So I lived, abandoning myself to this insanity for another six

years, till my marriage. During that time I went abroad. Life in

Europe and my acquaintance with leading and learned Europeans

[Footnote: Russians generally make a distinction between Europeans

and Russians. -- A.M.] confirmed me yet more in the faith of

striving after perfection in which I believed, for I found the same

faith among them. That faith took with me the common form it

assumes with the majority of educated people of our day. It was

expressed by the word "progress". It then appeared to me that this

word meant something. I did not as yet understand that, being

tormented (like every vital man) by the question how it is best for

me to live, in my answer, "Live in conformity with progress", I was

like a man in a boat who when carried along by wind and waves

should reply to what for him is the chief and only question.

"whither to steer", by saying, "We are being carried somewhere".

 I did not then notice this.  Only occasionally -- not by

reason but by instinct -- I revolted against this superstition so

common in our day, by which people hide from themselves their lack

of understanding of life....So, for instance, during my stay in

Paris, the sight of an execution revealed to me the instability of

my superstitious belief in progress. When I saw the head part from

the body and how they thumped separately into the box, I

understood, not with my mind but with my whole being, that no

theory of the reasonableness of our present progress could justify

this deed; and that though everybody from the creation of the world

had held it to be necessary, on whatever theory, I knew it to be

unnecessary and bad; and therefore the arbiter of what is good and

evil is not what people say and do, nor is it progress, but it is

my heart and I. Another instance of a realization that the

superstitious belief in progress is insufficient as a guide to

life, was my brother's death. Wise, good, serious, he fell ill

while still a young man, suffered for more than a year, and died

painfully, not understanding why he had lived and still less why he

had to die. No theories could give me, or him, any reply to these

questions during his slow and painful dying. But these were only

rare instances of doubt, and I actually continued to live

professing a faith only in progress. "Everything evolves and I

evolve with it: and why it is that I evolve with all things will

be known some day." So I ought to have formulated my faith at that

time.

 On returning from abroad I settled in the country and chanced

to occupy myself with peasant schools. This work was particularly

to my taste because in it I had not to face the falsity which had

become obvious to me and stared me in the face when I tried to

teach people by literary means. Here also I acted in the name of

progress, but I already regarded progress itself critically. I

said to myself: "In some of its developments progress has

proceeded wrongly, and with primitive peasant children one must

deal in a spirit of perfect freedom, letting them choose what path

of progress they please." In reality I was ever revolving round

one and the same insoluble problem, which was: How to teach

without knowing what to teach. In the higher spheres of literary

activity I had realized that one could not teach without knowing

what, for I saw that people all taught differently, and by

quarrelling among themselves only succeeded in hiding their

ignorance from one another. But here, with peasant children, I

thought to evade this difficulty by letting them learn what they

liked. It amuses me now when I remember how I shuffled in trying

to satisfy my desire to teach, while in the depth of my soul I knew

very well that I could not teach anything needful for I did not

know what was needful. After spending a year at school work I went

abroad a second time to discover how to teach others while myself

knowing nothing.

 And it seemed to me that I had learnt this aborad, and in the

year of the peasants' emancipation (1861) I returned to Russia

armed with all this wisdom, and having become an Arbiter [Footnote:

To keep peace between peasants and owners.--A.M.] I began to teach,

both the uneducated peasants in schools and the educated classes

through a magazine I published. Things appeared to be going well,

but I felt I was not quite sound mentally and that matters could

not long continue in that way. And I should perhaps then have come

to the state of despair I reached fifteen years later had there not

been one side of life still unexplored by me which promised me

happiness: that was my marriage.

 For a year I busied myself with arbitration work, the schools,

and the magazine; and I became so worn out -- as a result

especially of my mental confusion -- and so hard was my struggle as

Arbiter, so obscure the results of my activity in the schools, so

repulsive my shuffling in the magazine (which always amounted to

one and the same thing: a desire to teach everybody and to hide

the fact that I did not know what to teach), that I fell ill,

mentally rather than physically, threw up everything, and went away

to the Bashkirs in the steppes, to breathe fresh air, drink kumys

[Footnote: A fermented drink prepared from mare's milk.--A. M.],

and live a merely animal life.

 Returning from there I married.  The new conditions of happy

family life completely diverted me from all search for the general

meaning of life. My whole life was centred at that time in my

family, wife and children, and therefore in care to increase our

means of livelihood. My striving after self-perfection, for which

I had already substituted a striving for perfection in general,

i.e. progress, was now again replaced by the effort simply to

secure the best possible conditions for myself and my family.

 So another fifteen years passed.

 In spite of the fact that I now regarded authorship as of no

importance -- the temptation of immense monetary rewards and

applause for my insignificant work -- and I devoted myself to it as

a means of improving my material position and of stifling in my

soul all questions as to the meaning of my own life or life in

general.

 I wrote:  teaching what was for me the only truth, namely,

that one should live so as to have the best for oneself and one's

family.

 So I lived; but five years ago something very strange began to

happen to me. At first I experienced moments of perplexity and

arrest of life, and though I did not know what to do or how to

live; and I felt lost and became dejected. But this passed and I

went on living as before. Then these moments of perplexity began

to recur oftener and oftener, and always in the same form. They

were always expressed by the questions: What is it for? What does

it lead to?

 At first it seemed to me that these were aimless and

irrelevant questions. I thought that it was all well known, and

that if I should ever wish to deal with the solution it would not

cost me much effort; just at present I had no time for it, but when

I wanted to I should be able to find the answer. The questions

however began to repeat themselves frequently, and to demand

replies more and more insistently; and like drops of ink always

falling on one place they ran together into one black blot.

 Then occurred what happens to everyone sickening with a mortal

internal disease. At first trivial signs of indisposition appear

to which the sick man pays no attention; then these signs reappear

more and more often and merge into one uninterrupted period of

suffering. The suffering increases, and before the sick man can

look round, what he took for a mere indisposition has already

become more important to him than anything else in the world -- it

is death!

 That is what happened to me.  I understood that it was no

casual indisposition but something very important, and that if

these questions constantly repeated themselves they would have to

be answered. And I tried to answer them. The questions seemed

such stupid, simple, childish ones; but as soon as I touched them

and tried to solve them I at once became convinced, first, that

they are not childish and stupid but the most important and

profound of life's questions; and secondly that, occupying myself

with my Samara estate, the education of my son, or the writing of

a book, I had to know why I was doing it. As long as I did not

know why, I could do nothing and could not live. Amid the thoughts

of estate management which greatly occupied me at that time, the

question would suddenly occur: "Well, you will have 6,000

desyatinas [Footnote: The desyatina is about 2.75 acres.--A.M.] of

land in Samara Government and 300 horses, and what then?" ... And

I was quite disconcerted and did not know what to think. Or when

considering plans for the education of my children, I would say to

myself: "What for?" Or when considering how the peasants might

become prosperous, I would suddenly say to myself: "But what does

it matter to me?" Or when thinking of the fame my works would

bring me, I would say to myself, "Very well; you will be more

famous than Gogol or Pushkin or Shakespeare or Moliere, or than all

the writers in the world -- and what of it?" And I could find no

reply at all. The questions would not wait, they had to be

answered at once, and if I did not answer them it was impossible to

live. But there was no answer.

 I felt that what I had been standing on had collapsed and that

I had nothing left under my feet. What I had lived on no longer

existed, and there was nothing left.

                           IV



 My life came to a standstill.  I could breathe, eat, drink,

and sleep, and I could not help doing these things; but there was

no life, for there were no wishes the fulfillment of which I could

consider reasonable. If I desired anything, I knew in advance that

whether I satisfied my desire or not, nothing would come of it.

Had a fairy come and offered to fulfil my desires I should not have

know what to ask. If in moments of intoxication I felt something

which, though not a wish, was a habit left by former wishes, in

sober moments I knew this to be a delusion and that there was

really nothing to wish for. I could not even wish to know the

truth, for I guessed of what it consisted. The truth was that life

is meaningless. I had as it were lived, lived, and walked, walked,

till I had come to a precipice and saw clearly that there was

nothing ahead of me but destruction. It was impossible to stop,

impossible to go back, and impossible to close my eyes or avoid

seeing that there was nothing ahead but suffering and real death --

complete annihilation.

 It had come to this, that I, a healthy, fortunate man, felt I

could no longer live: some irresistible power impelled me to rid

myself one way or other of life. I cannot say I wished to kill

myself. The power which drew me away from life was stronger,

fuller, and more widespread than any mere wish. It was a force

similar to the former striving to live, only in a contrary

direction. All my strength drew me away from life. The thought of

self-destruction now came to me as naturally as thoughts of how to

improve my life had come formerly. and it was seductive that I had

to be cunning with myself lest I should carry it out too hastily.

I did not wish to hurry, because I wanted to use all efforts to

disentangle the matter. "If I cannot unravel matters, there will

always be time." and it was then that I, a man favoured by

fortune, hid a cord from myself lest I should hang myself from the

crosspiece of the partition in my room where I undressed alone

every evening, and I ceased to go out shooting with a gun lest I

should be tempted by so easy a way of ending my life. I did not

myself know what I wanted: I feared life, desired to escape from

it, yet still hoped something of it.

 And all this befell me at a time when all around me I had what

is considered complete good fortune. I was not yet fifty; I had a

good wife who lived me and whom I loved, good children, and a large

estate which without much effort on my part improved and increased.

I was respected by my relations and acquaintances more than at any

previous time. I was praised by others and without much self-

deception could consider that my name was famous. And far from

being insane or mentally diseased, I enjoyed on the contrary a

strength of mind and body such as I have seldom met with among men

of my kind; physically I could keep up with the peasants at mowing,

and mentally I could work for eight and ten hours at a stretch

without experiencing any ill results from such exertion. And in

this situation I came to this -- that I could not live, and,

fearing death, had to employ cunning with myself to avoid taking my

own life.

 My mental condition presented itself to me in this way:  my

life is a stupid and spiteful joke someone has played on me.

Though I did not acknowledge a "someone" who created me, yet such

a presentation -- that someone had played an evil and stupid joke

on my by placing me in the world -- was the form of expression that

suggested itself most naturally to me.

 Involuntarily it appeared to me that there, somewhere, was

someone who amused himself by watching how I lived for thirty or

forty years: learning, developing, maturing in body and mind, and

how, having with matured mental powers reached the summit of life

from which it all lay before me, I stood on that summit -- like an

arch-fool -- seeing clearly that there is nothing in life, and that

there has been and will be nothing. And he was amused. ...

 But whether that "someone" laughing at me existed or not, I

was none the better off. I could give no reasonable meaning to any

single action or to my whole life. I was only surprised that I

could have avoided understanding this from the very beginning -- it

has been so long known to all. Today or tomorrow sickness and

death will come (they had come already) to those I love or to me;

nothing will remain but stench and worms. Sooner or later my

affairs, whatever they may be, will be forgotten, and I shall not

exist. Then why go on making any effort? ... How can man fail to

see this? And how go on living? That is what is surprising! One

can only live while one is intoxicated with life; as soon as one is

sober it is impossible not to see that it is all a mere fraud and

a stupid fraud! That is precisely what it is: there is nothing

either amusing or witty about it, it is simply cruel and stupid.

 There is an Eastern fable, told long ago, of a traveller

overtaken on a plain by an enraged beast. Escaping from the beast

he gets into a dry well, but sees at the bottom of the well a

dragon that has opened its jaws to swallow him. And the

unfortunate man, not daring to climb out lest he should be

destroyed by the enraged beast, and not daring to leap to the

bottom of the well lest he should be eaten by the dragon, seizes s

twig growing in a crack in the well and clings to it. His hands

are growing weaker and he feels he will soon have to resign himself

to the destruction that awaits him above or below, but still he

clings on. Then he sees that two mice, a black one and a white

one, go regularly round and round the stem of the twig to which he

is clinging and gnaw at it. And soon the twig itself will snap and

he will fall into the dragon's jaws. The traveller sees this and

knows that he will inevitably perish; but while still hanging he

looks around, sees some drops of honey on the leaves of the twig,

reaches them with his tongue and licks them. So I too clung to the

twig of life, knowing that the dragon of death was inevitably

awaiting me, ready to tear me to pieces; and I could not understand

why I had fallen into such torment. I tried to lick the honey

which formerly consoled me, but the honey no longer gave me

pleasure, and the white and black mice of day and night gnawed at

the branch by which I hung. I saw the dragon clearly and the honey

no longer tasted sweet. I only saw the unescapable dragon and the

mice, and I could not tear my gaze from them. and this is not a

fable but the real unanswerable truth intelligible to all.

 The deception of the joys of life which formerly allayed my

terror of the dragon now no longer deceived me. No matter how

often I may be told, "You cannot understand the meaning of life so

do not think about it, but live," I can no longer do it: I have

already done it too long. I cannot now help seeing day and night

going round and bringing me to death. That is all I see, for that

alone is true. All else is false.

 The two drops of honey which diverted my eyes from the cruel

truth longer than the rest: my love of family, and of writing --

art as I called it -- were no longer sweet to me.

 "Family"...said I to myself.  But my family -- wife and

children -- are also human. They are placed just as I am: they

must either live in a lie or see the terrible truth. Why should

they live? Why should I love them, guard them, bring them up, or

watch them? That they may come to the despair that I feel, or else

be stupid? Loving them, I cannot hide the truth from them: each

step in knowledge leads them to the truth. And the truth is death.

 "Art, poetry?"...Under the influence of success and the praise

of men, I had long assured myself that this was a thing one could

do though death was drawing near -- death which destroys all

things, including my work and its remembrance; but soon I saw that

that too was a fraud. It was plain to me that art is an adornment

of life, an allurement to life. But life had lost its attraction

for me, so how could I attract others? As long as I was not living

my own life but was borne on the waves of some other life -- as

long as I believed that life had a meaning, though one I could not

express -- the reflection of life in poetry and art of all kinds

afforded me pleasure: it was pleasant to look at life in the

mirror of art. But when I began to seek the meaning of life and

felt the necessity of living my own life, that mirror became for me

unnecessary, superfluous, ridiculous, or painful. I could no

longer soothe myself with what I now saw in the mirror, namely,

that my position was stupid and desperate. It was all very well to

enjoy the sight when in the depth of my soul I believed that my

life had a meaning. Then the play of lights -- comic, tragic,

touching, beautiful, and terrible -- in life amused me. No

sweetness of honey could be sweet to me when I saw the dragon and

saw the mice gnawing away my support.

 Nor was that all.  Had I simply understood that life had no

meaning I could have borne it quietly, knowing that that was my

lot. But I could not satisfy myself with that. Had I been like a

man living in a wood from which he knows there is no exit, I could

have lived; but I was like one lost in a wood who, horrified at

having lost his way, rushes about wishing to find the road. He

knows that each step he takes confuses him more and more, but still

he cannot help rushing about.

 It was indeed terrible.  And to rid myself of the terror I

wished to kill myself. I experienced terror at what awaited me --

knew that that terror was even worse than the position I was in,

but still I could not patiently await the end. However convincing

the argument might be that in any case some vessel in my heart

would give way, or something would burst and all would be over, I

could not patiently await that end. The horror of darkness was too

great, and I wished to free myself from it as quickly as possible

by noose or bullet. that was the feeling which drew me most

strongly towards suicide.

                            V



 "But perhaps I have overlooked something, or misunderstood

something?" said to myself several times. "It cannot be that this

condition of despair is natural to man!" And I sought for an

explanation of these problems in all the branches of knowledge

acquired by men. I sought painfully and long, not from idle

curiosity or listlessly, but painfully and persistently day and

night -- sought as a perishing man seeks for safety -- and I found

nothing.

 I sought in all the sciences, but far from finding what I

wanted, became convinced that all who like myself had sought in

knowledge for the meaning of life had found nothing. And not only

had they found nothing, but they had plainly acknowledged that the

very thing which made me despair -- namely the senselessness of

life -- is the one indubitable thing man can know.

 I sought everywhere; and thanks to a life spent in learning,

and thanks also to my relations with the scholarly world, I had

access to scientists and scholars in all branches of knowledge, and

they readily showed me all their knowledge, not only in books but

also in conversation, so that I had at my disposal all that science

has to say on this question of life.

 I was long unable to believe that it gives no other reply to

life's questions than that which it actually does give. It long

seemed to me, when I saw the important and serious air with which

science announces its conclusions which have nothing in common with

the real questions of human life, that there was something I had

not understood. I long was timid before science, and it seemed to

me that the lack of conformity between the answers and my questions

arose not by the fault of science but from my ignorance, but the

matter was for me not a game or an amusement but one of life and

death, and I was involuntarily brought to the conviction that my

questions were the only legitimate ones, forming the basis of all

knowledge, and that I with my questions was not to blame, but

science if it pretends to reply to those questions.

 My question -- that which at the age of fifty brought me to

the verge of suicide -- was the simplest of questions, lying in the

soul of every man from the foolish child to the wisest elder: it

was a question without an answer to which one cannot live, as I had

found by experience. It was: "What will come of what I am doing

today or shall do tomorrow? What will come of my whole life?"

 Differently expressed, the question is:  "Why should I live,

why wish for anything, or do anything?" It can also be expressed

thus: "Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death

awaiting me does not destroy?"

 To this one question, variously expressed, I sought an answer

in science. And I found that in relation to that question all

human knowledge is divided as it were into tow opposite hemispheres

at the ends of which are two poles: the one a negative and the

other a positive; but that neither at the one nor the other pole is

there an answer to life's questions.

 The one series of sciences seems not to recognize the

question, but replies clearly and exactly to its own independent

questions: that is the series of experimental sciences, and at the

extreme end of it stands mathematics. The other series of sciences

recognizes the question, but does not answer it; that is the series

of abstract sciences, and at the extreme end of it stands

metaphysics.

 From early youth I had been interested in the abstract

sciences, but later the mathematical and natural sciences attracted

me, and until I put my question definitely to myself, until that

question had itself grown up within me urgently demanding a

decision, I contented myself with those counterfeit answers which

science gives.

 Now in the experimental sphere I said to myself: "Everything

develops and differentiates itself, moving towards complexity and

perfection, and there are laws directing this movement. You are a

part of the whole. Having learnt as far as possible the whole, and

having learnt the law of evolution, you will understand also your

place in the whole and will know yourself." Ashamed as I am to

confess it, there wa a time when I seemed satisfied with that. It

was just the time when I was myself becoming more complex and was

developing. My muscles were growing and strengthening, my memory

was being enriched, my capacity to think and understand was

increasing, I was growing and developing; and feeling this growth

in myself it was natural for me to think that such was the

universal law in which I should find the solution of the question

of my life. But a time came when the growth within me ceased. I

felt that I was not developing, but fading, my muscles were

weakening, my teeth falling out, and I saw that the law not only

did not explain anything to me, but that there never had been or

could be such a law, and that I had taken for a law what I had

found in myself at a certain period of my life. I regarded the

definition of that law more strictly, and it became clear to me

that there could be no law of endless development; it became clear

that to say, "in infinite space and time everything develops,

becomes more perfect and more complex, is differentiated", is to

say nothing at all. These are all words with no meaning, for in

the infinite there is neither complex nor simple, neither forward

nor backward, nor better or worse.

 Above all, my personal question, "What am I with my desires?"

remained quite unanswered. And I understood that those sciences

are very interesting and attractive, but that they are exact and

clear in inverse proportion to their applicability to the question

of life: the less their applicability to the question of life, the

more exact and clear they are, while the more they try to reply to

the question of life, the more obscure and unattractive they

become. If one turns to the division of sciences which attempt to

reply to the questions of life -- to physiology, psychology,

biology, sociology -- one encounters an appalling poverty of

thought, the greatest obscurity, a quite unjustifiable pretension

to solve irrelevant question, and a continual contradiction of each

authority by others and even by himself. If one turns to the

branches of science which are not concerned with the solution of

the questions of life, but which reply to their own special

scientific questions, one is enraptured by the power of man's mind,

but one knows in advance that they give no reply to life's

questions. Those sciences simply ignore life's questions. They

say: "To the question of what you are and why you live we have no

reply, and are not occupied with that; but if you want to know the

laws of light, of chemical combinations, the laws of development of

organisms, if you want to know the laws of bodies and their form,

and the relation of numbers and quantities, if you want to know the

laws of your mind, to all that we have clear, exact and

unquestionable replies."

 In general the relation of the experimental sciences to life's

question may be expressed thus: Question: "Why do I live?"

Answer: "In infinite space, in infinite time, infinitely small

particles change their forms in infinite complexity, and when you

have under stood the laws of those mutations of form you will

understand why you live on the earth."

 Then in the sphere of abstract science I said to myself:  "All

humanity lives and develops on the basis of spiritual principles

and ideals which guide it. Those ideals are expressed in

religions, in sciences, in arts, in forms of government. Those

ideals become more and more elevated, and humanity advances to its

highest welfare. I am part of humanity, and therefore my vocation

is to forward the recognition and the realization of the ideals of

humanity." And at the time of my weak-mindedness I was satisfied

with that; but as soon as the question of life presented itself

clearly to me, those theories immediately crumbled away. Not to

speak of the unscrupulous obscurity with which those sciences

announce conclusions formed on the study of a small part of mankind

as general conclusions; not to speak of the mutual contradictions

of different adherents of this view as to what are the ideals of

humanity; the strangeness, not to say stupidity, of the theory

consists in the fact that in order to reply to the question facing

each man: "What am I?" or "Why do I live?" or "What must I do?"

one has first to decide the question: "What is the life of the

whole?" (which is to him unknown and of which he is acquainted with

one tiny part in one minute period of time. To understand what he

is, one man must first understand all this mysterious humanity,

consisting of people such as himself who do not understand one

another.

 I have to confess that there was a time when I believed this. 

It was the time when I had my own favourite ideals justifying my

own caprices, and I was trying to devise a theory which would allow

one to consider my caprices as the law of humanity. But as soon as

the question of life arose in my soul in full clearness that reply

at once few to dust. And I understood that as in the experimental

sciences there are real sciences, and semi-sciences which try to

give answers to questions beyond their competence, so in this

sphere there is a whole series of most diffused sciences which try

to reply to irrelevant questions. Semi-sciences of that kind, the

juridical and the social-historical, endeavour to solve the

questions of a man's life by pretending to decide each in its own

way, the question of the life of all humanity.

 But as in the sphere of man's experimental knowledge one who

sincerely inquires how he is to live cannot be satisfied with the

reply -- "Study in endless space the mutations, infinite in time

and in complexity, of innumerable atoms, and then you will

understand your life" -- so also a sincere man cannot be satisfied

with the reply: "Study the whole life of humanity of which we

cannot know either the beginning or the end, of which we do not

even know a small part, and then you will understand your own

life." And like the experimental semi-sciences, so these other

semi-sciences are the more filled with obscurities, inexactitudes,

stupidities, and contradictions, the further they diverge from the

real problems. The problem of experimental science is the sequence

of cause and effect in material phenomena. It is only necessary

for experimental science to introduce the question of a final cause

for it to become nonsensical. The problem of abstract science is

the recognition of the primordial essence of life. It is only

necessary to introduce the investigation of consequential phenomena

(such as social and historical phenomena) and it also becomes

nonsensical.

 Experimental science only then gives positive knowledge and

displays the greatness of the human mind when it does not introduce

into its investigations the question of an ultimate cause. And, on

the contrary, abstract science is only then science and displays

the greatness of the human mind when it puts quite aside questions

relating to the consequential causes of phenomena and regards man

solely in relation to an ultimate cause. Such in this realm of

science -- forming the pole of the sphere -- is metaphysics or

philosophy. That science states the question clearly: "What am I,

and what is the universe? And why do I exist, and why does the

universe exist?" And since it has existed it has always replied in

the same way. Whether the philosopher calls the essence of life

existing within me, and in all that exists, by the name of "idea",

or "substance", or "spirit", or "will", he says one and the same

thing: that this essence exists and that I am of that same

essence; but why it is he does not know, and does not say, if he is

an exact thinker. I ask: "Why should this essence exist? What

results from the fact that it is and will be?" ... And philosophy

not merely does not reply, but is itself only asking that question.

And if it is real philosophy all its labour lies merely in trying

to put that question clearly. And if it keeps firmly to its task

it cannot reply to the question otherwise than thus: "What am I,

and what is the universe?" "All and nothing"; and to the question

"Why?" by "I do not know".

 So that however I may turn these replies of philosophy, I can

never obtain anything like an answer -- and not because, as in the

clear experimental sphere, the reply does not relate to my

question, but because here, though all the mental work is directed

just to my question, there is no answer, but instead of an answer

one gets the same question, only in a complex form.

                           VI



 In my search for answers to life's questions I experienced

just what is felt by a man lost in a forest.

 He reaches a glade, climbs a tree, and clearly sees the

limitless distance, but sees that his home is not and cannot be

there; then he goes into the dark wood and sees the darkness, but

there also his home is not.

 So I wandered n that wood of human knowledge, amid the gleams

of mathematical and experimental science which showed me clear

horizons but in a direction where there could be no home, and also

amid the darkness of the abstract sciences where I was immersed in

deeper gloom the further I went, and where I finally convinced

myself that there was, and could be, no exit.

 Yielding myself to the bright side of knowledge, I understood

that I was only diverting my gaze from the question. However

alluringly clear those horizons which opened out before me might

be, however alluring it might be to immerse oneself in the

limitless expanse of those sciences, I already understood that the

clearer they were the less they met my need and the less they

applied to my question.

 "I know," said I to myself, "what science so persistently

tries to discover, and along that road there is no reply to the

question as to the meaning of my life." In the abstract sphere I

understood that notwithstanding the fact, or just because of the

fact, that the direct aim of science is to reply to my question,

there is no reply but that which I have myself already given:

"What is the meaning of my life?" "There is none." Or: "What

will come of my life?" "Nothing." Or: "Why does everything exist

that exists, and why do I exist?" "Because it exists."

 Inquiring for one region of human knowledge, I received an

innumerable quantity of exact replies concerning matters about

which I had not asked: about the chemical constituents of the

stars, about the movement of the sun towards the constellation

Hercules, about the origin of species and of man, about the forms

of infinitely minute imponderable particles of ether; but in this

sphere of knowledge the only answer to my question, "What is the

meaning of my life?" was: "You are what you call your 'life'; you

are a transitory, casual cohesion of particles. The mutual

interactions and changes of these particles produce in you what you

call your "life". That cohesion will last some time; afterwards

the interaction of these particles will cease and what you call

"life" will cease, and so will all your questions. You are an

accidentally united little lump of something. that little lump

ferments. The little lump calls that fermenting its 'life'. The

lump will disintegrate and there will be an end of the fermenting

and of all the questions." So answers the clear side of science

and cannot answer otherwise if it strictly follows its principles.

 From such a reply one sees that the reply does not answer the

question. I want to know the meaning of my life, but that it is a

fragment of the infinite, far from giving it a meaning destroys its

every possible meaning. The obscure compromises which that side of

experimental exact science makes with abstract science when it says

that the meaning of life consists in development and in cooperation

with development, owing to their inexactness and obscurity cannot

be considered as replies.

 The other side of science -- the abstract side -- when it

holds strictly to its principles, replying directly to the

question, always replies, and in all ages has replied, in one and

the same way: "The world is something infinite and

incomprehensible part of that incomprehensible 'all'." Again I

exclude all those compromises between abstract and experimental

sciences which supply the whole ballast of the semi-sciences called

juridical, political, and historical. In those semi-sciences the

conception of development and progress is again wrongly introduced,

only with this difference, that there it was the development of

everything while here it is the development of the life of mankind.

The error is there as before: development and progress in infinity

can have no aim or direction, and, as far as my question is

concerned, no answer is given.

 In truly abstract science, namely in genuine philosophy -- not

in that which Schopenhauer calls "professorial philosophy" which

serves only to classify all existing phenomena in new philosophic

categories and to call them by new names -- where the philosopher

does not lose sight of the essential question, the reply is always

one and the same -- the reply given by Socrates, Schopenhauer,

Solomon, and buddha.

 "We approach truth only inasmuch as we depart from life", said

Socrates when preparing for death. "For what do we, who love

truth, strive after in life? To free ourselves from the body, and

from all the evil that is caused by the life of the body! If so,

then how can we fail to be glad when death comes to us?

 "The wise man seeks death all his life and therefore death is

not terrible to him."

 And Schopenhauer says:

 "Having recognized the inmost essence of the world as *will*,

and all its phenomena -- from the unconscious working of the

obscure forces of Nature up to the completely conscious action of

man -- as only the objectivity of that will, we shall in no way

avoid the conclusion that together with the voluntary renunciation

and self-destruction of the will all those phenomena also

disappear, that constant striving and effort without aim or rest on

all the stages of objectivity in which and through which the world

exists; the diversity of successive forms will disappear, and

together with the form all the manifestations of will, with its

most universal forms, space and time, and finally its most

fundamental form -- subject and object. Without will there is no

concept and no world. Before us, certainly, nothing remains. But

what resists this transition into annihilation, our nature, is only

that same wish to live -- Wille zum Leben -- which forms

ourselves as well as our world. That we are so afraid of

annihilation or, what is the same thing, that we so wish to live,

merely means that we are ourselves nothing else but this desire to

live, and know nothing but it. And so what remains after the

complete annihilation of the will, for us who are so full of the

will, is, of course, nothing; but on the other hand, for those in

whom the will has turned and renounced itself, this so real world

of ours with all its suns and milky way is nothing."

 "Vanity of vanities", says Solomon -- "vanity of vanities --

all is vanity. What profit hath a man of all his labor which he

taketh under the sun? One generation passeth away, and another

generation commeth: but the earth abideth for ever....The thing

that hath been, is that which shall be; and that which is done is

that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.

Is there anything whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath

been already of old time, which was before us. there is no

remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any

remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come

after. I the Preacher was King over Israel in Jerusalem. And I

gave my heart to seek and search out by wisdom concerning all that

is done under heaven: this sore travail hath God given to the sons

of man to be exercised therewith. I have seen all the works that

are done under the sun; and behold, all is vanity and vexation of

spirit....I communed with my own heart, saying, Lo, I am come to

great estate, and have gotten more wisdom than all they that have

been before me over Jerusalem: yea, my heart hath great experience

of wisdom and knowledge. And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and

to know madness and folly: I perceived that this also is vexation

of spirit. For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that

increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.

 "I said in my heart, Go to now, I will prove thee with mirth,

therefore enjoy pleasure: and behold this also is vanity. I said of

laughter, It is mad: and of mirth, What doeth it? I sought in my

heart how to cheer my flesh with wine, and while my heart was

guided by wisdom, to lay hold on folly, till I might see what it

was good for the sons of men that they should do under heaven the

number of the days of their life. I made me great works; I builded

me houses; I planted me vineyards; I made me gardens and orchards,

and I planted trees in them of all kinds of fruits: I made me pools

of water, to water therefrom the forest where trees were reared: I

got me servants and maidens, and had servants born in my house;

also I had great possessions of herds and flocks above all that

were before me in Jerusalem: I gathered me also silver and gold and

the peculiar treasure from kings and from the provinces: I got me

men singers and women singers; and the delights of the sons of men,

as musical instruments and all that of all sorts. So I was great,

and increased more than all that were before me in Jerusalem: also

my wisdom remained with me. And whatever mine eyes desired I kept

not from them. I withheld not my heart from any joy....Then I

looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and on the

labour that I had laboured to do: and, behold, all was vanity and

vexation of spirit, and there was no profit from them under the

sun. And I turned myself to behold wisdom, and madness, and

folly.... But I perceived that one even happeneth to them all.

Then said I in my heart, As it happeneth to the fool, so it

happeneth even to me, and why was I then more wise? then I said in

my heart, that this also is vanity. For there is no remembrance of

the wise more than of the fool for ever; seeing that which now is

in the days to come shall all be forgotten. And how dieth the wise

man? as the fool. Therefore I hated life; because the work that is

wrought under the sun is grievous unto me: for all is vanity and

vexation of spirit. Yea, I hated all my labour which I had taken

under the sun: seeing that I must leave it unto the man that shall

be after me.... For what hath man of all his labour, and of the

vexation of his heart, wherein he hath laboured under the sun? For

all his days are sorrows, and his travail grief; yea, even in the

night his heart taketh no rest. this is also vanity. Man is not

blessed with security that he should eat and drink and cheer his

soul from his own labour.... All things come alike to all: there is

one event to the righteous and to the wicked; to the good and to

the evil; to the clean and to the unclean; to him that sacrificeth

and to him that sacrificeth not; as is the good, so is the sinner;

and he that sweareth, as he that feareth an oath. This is an evil

in all that is done under the sun, that there is one event unto

all; yea, also the heart of the sons of men is full of evil, and

madness is in their heart while they live, and after that they go

to the dead. For him that is among the living there is hope: for

a living dog is better than a dead lion. For the living know that

they shall die: but the dead know not any thing, neither have they

any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten. also their

love, and their hatred, and their envy, is now perished; neither

have they any more a portion for ever in any thing that is done

under the sun."

 So said Solomon, or whoever wrote those words.  [Footnote:

tolstoy's version differs slightly in a few places from our own

Authorized or Revised version. I have followed his text, for in a

letter to Fet, quoted on p. 18, vol. ii, of my "Life of Tolstoy,"

he says that "The Authorized English version [of Ecclesiastes] is

bad." -- A.M.]

 And this is what the Indian wisdom tells:

 Sakya Muni, a young, happy prince, from whom the existence of

sickness, old age, and death had been hidden, went out to drive and

saw a terrible old man, toothless and slobbering. the prince, from

whom till then old age had been concealed, was amazed, and asked

his driver what it was, and how that man had come to such a

wretched and disgusting condition, and when he learnt that this was

the common fate of all men, that the same thing inevitably awaited

him -- the young prince -- he could not continue his drive, but

gave orders to go home, that he might consider this fact. So he

shut himself up alone and considered it. and he probably devised

some consolation for himself, for he subsequently again went out to

drive, feeling merry and happy. But this time he saw a sick man.

He saw an emaciated, livid, trembling man with dim eyes. The

prince, from whom sickness had been concealed, stopped and asked

what this was. And when he learnt that this was sickness, to which

all men are liable, and that he himself -- a healthy and happy

prince -- might himself fall ill tomorrow, he again was in no mood

to enjoy himself but gave orders to drive home, and again sought

some solace, and probably found it, for he drove out a third time

for pleasure. But this third time he saw another new sight: he saw

men carrying something. 'What is that?' 'A dead man.' 'What does

dead mean?' asked the prince. He was told that to become dead

means to become like that man. The prince approached the corpse,

uncovered it, and looked at it. 'What will happen to him now?'

asked the prince. He was told that the corpse would be buried in

the ground. 'Why?' 'Because he will certainly not return to life,

and will only produce a stench and worms.' 'And is that the fate

of all men? Will the same thing happen to me? Will they bury me,

and shall I cause a stench and be eaten by worms?' 'Yes.' 'Home!

I shall not drive out for pleasure, and never will so drive out

again!'

 And Sakya Muni could find no consolation in life, and decided

that life is the greatest of evils; and he devoted all the strength

of his soul to free himself from it, and to free others; and to do

this so that, even after death, life shall not be renewed any more

but be completely destroyed at its very roots. So speaks all the

wisdom of India.

 These are the direct replies that human wisdom gives when it

replies to life's question.

 "The life of the body is an evil and a lie.  Therefore the

destruction of the life of the body is a blessing, and we should

desire it," says Socrates.

 "Life is that which should not be -- an evil; and the passage

into Nothingness is the only good in life," says Schopenhauer.

 "All that is in the world -- folly and wisdom and riches and

poverty and mirth and grief -- is vanity and emptiness. Man dies

and nothing is left of him. And that is stupid," says Solomon.

 "To life in the consciousness of the inevitability of

suffering, of becoming enfeebled, of old age and of death, is

impossible -- we must free ourselves from life, from all possible

life," says Buddha.

 And what these strong minds said has been said and thought and

felt by millions upon millions of people like them. And I have

thought it and felt it.

 So my wandering among the sciences, far from freeing me from

my despair, only strengthened it. One kind of knowledge did not

reply to life's question, the other kind replied directly

confirming my despair, indicating not that the result at which I

had arrived was the fruit of error or of a diseased state of my

mind, but on the contrary that I had thought correctly, and that my

thoughts coincided with the conclusions of the most powerful of

human minds.

 It is no good deceiving oneself. It is all -- vanity!  Happy

is he who has not been born: death is better than life, and one

must free oneself from life.

                           VII



 Not finding an explanation in science I began to seek for it

in life, hoping to find it among the people around me. And I began

to observe how the people around me -- people like myself -- lived,

and what their attitude was to this question which had brought me

to despair.

 And this is what I found among people who were in the same

position as myself as regards education and manner of life.

 I found that for people of my circle there were four ways out

of the terrible position in which we are all placed.

 The first was that of ignorance. It consists in not knowing,

not understanding, that life is an evil and an absurdity. People

of this sort -- chiefly women, or very young or very dull people --

have not yet understood that question of life which presented

itself to Schopenhauer, Solomon, and Buddha. They see neither the

dragon that awaits them nor the mice gnawing the shrub by which

they are hanging, and they lick the drops of honey. but they lick

those drops of honey only for a while: something will turn their

attention to the dragon and the mice, and there will be an end to

their licking. From them I had nothing to learn -- one cannot

cease to know what one does know.

 The second way out is epicureanism.  It consists, while

knowing the hopelessness of life, in making use meanwhile of the

advantages one has, disregarding the dragon and the mice, and

licking the honey in the best way, especially if there is much of

it within reach. Solomon expresses this way out thus: "Then I

commended mirth, because a man hath no better thing under the sun,

than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry: and that this should

accompany him in his labour the days of his life, which God giveth

him under the sun.

 "Therefore eat thy bread with joy and drink thy wine with a

merry heart.... Live joyfully with the wife whom thou lovest all

the days of the life of thy vanity...for this is thy portion in

life and in thy labours which thou takest under the sun....

Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might, for there

is not work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave,

whither thou goest."

 That is the way in which the majority of people of our circle

make life possible for themselves. Their circumstances furnish

them with more of welfare than of hardship, and their moral

dullness makes it possible for them to forget that the advantage of

their position is accidental, and that not everyone can have a

thousand wives and palaces like Solomon, that for everyone who has

a thousand wives there are a thousand without a wife, and that for

each palace there are a thousand people who have to build it in the

sweat of their brows; and that the accident that has today made me

a Solomon may tomorrow make me a Solomon's slave. The dullness of

these people's imagination enables them to forget the things that

gave Buddha no peace -- the inevitability of sickness, old age, and

death, which today or tomorrow will destroy all these pleasures.

 So think and feel the majority of people of our day and our

manner of life. The fact that some of these people declare the

dullness of their thoughts and imaginations to be a philosophy,

which they call Positive, does not remove them, in my opinion, from

the ranks of those who, to avoid seeing the question, lick the

honey. I could not imitate these people; not having their dullness

of imagination I could not artificially produce it in myself. I

could not tear my eyes from the mice and the dragon, as no vital

man can after he has once seen them.

 The third escape is that of strength and energy.  It consists

in destroying life, when one has understood that it is an evil and

an absurdity. A few exceptionally strong and consistent people act

so. Having understood the stupidity of the joke that has been

played on them, and having understood that it is better to be dead

than to be alive, and that it is best of all not to exist, they act

accordingly and promptly end this stupid joke, since there are

means: a rope round one's neck, water, a knife to stick into one's

heart, or the trains on the railways; and the number of those of

our circle who act in this way becomes greater and greater, and for

the most part they act so at the best time of their life, when the

strength of their mind is in full bloom and few habits degrading to

the mind have as yet been acquired.

 I saw that this was the worthiest way of escape and I wished

to adopt it.

 The fourth way out is that of weakness.  It consists in seeing

the truth of the situation and yet clinging to life, knowing in

advance that nothing can come of it. People of this kind know that

death is better than life, but not having the strength to act

rationally -- to end the deception quickly and kill themselves --

they seem to wait for something. This is the escape of weakness,

for if I know what is best and it is within my power, why not yield

to what is best? ... I found myself in that category.

 So people of my class evade the terrible contradiction in four

ways. Strain my attention as I would, I saw no way except those

four. One way was not to understand that life is senseless,

vanity, and an evil, and that it is better not to live. I could

not help knowing this, and when I once knew it could not shut my

eyes to it. the second way was to use life such as it is without

thinking of the future. And I could not do that. I, like Sakya

Muni, could not ride out hunting when I knew that old age,

suffering, and death exist. My imagination was too vivid. Nor

could I rejoice in the momentary accidents that for an instant

threw pleasure to my lot. The third way, having under stood that

life is evil and stupid, was to end it by killing oneself. I

understood that, but somehow still did not kill myself. The fourth

way was to live like Solomon and Schopenhauer -- knowing that life

is a stupid joke played upon us, and still to go on living, washing

oneself, dressing, dining, talking, and even writing books. This

was to me repulsive and tormenting, but I remained in that

position.

 I see now that if I did not kill myself it was due to some dim

consciousness of the invalidity of my thoughts. However convincing

and indubitable appeared to me the sequence of my thoughts and of

those of the wise that have brought us to the admission of the

senselessness of life, there remained in me a vague doubt of the

justice of my conclusion.

 It was like this:  I, my reason, have acknowledged that life

is senseless. If there is nothing higher than reason (and there is

not: nothing can prove that there is), then reason is the creator

of life for me. If reason did not exist there would be for me no

life. How can reason deny life when it is the creator of life? Or

to put it the other way: were there no life, my reason would not

exist; therefore reason is life's son. Life is all. Reason is its

fruit yet reason rejects life itself! I felt that there was

something wrong here.

 Life is a senseless evil, that is certain, said I to myself. 

Yet I have lived and am still living, and all mankind lived and

lives. How is that? Why does it live, when it is possible not to

live? Is it that only I and Schopenhauer are wise enough to

understand the senselessness and evil of life?

 The reasoning showing the vanity of life is not so difficult,

and has long been familiar to the very simplest folk; yet they have

lived and still live. How is it they all live and never think of

doubting the reasonableness of life?

 My knowledge, confirmed by the wisdom of the sages, has shown

me that everything on earth -- organic and inorganic -- is all most

cleverly arranged -- only my own position is stupid. and those

fools -- the enormous masses of people -- know nothing about how

everything organic and inorganic in the world is arranged; but they

live, and it seems to them that their life is very wisely arranged!

...

 And it struck me:  "But what if there is something I do not

yet know? Ignorance behaves just in that way. Ignorance always

says just what I am saying. When it does not know something, it

says that what it does not know is stupid. Indeed, it appears that

there is a whole humanity that lived and lives as if it understood

the meaning of its life, for without understanding it could not

live; but I say that all this life is senseless and that I cannot

live.

 "Nothing prevents our denying life by suicide.  well then,

kill yourself, and you won't discuss. If life displeases you, kill

yourself! You live, and cannot understand the meaning of life --

then finish it, and do not fool about in life, saying and writing

that you do not understand it. You have come into good company

where people are contented and know what they are doing; if you

find it dull and repulsive -- go away!"

 Indeed, what are we who are convinced of the necessity of

suicide yet do not decide to commit it, but the weakest, most

inconsistent, and to put it plainly, the stupidest of men, fussing

about with our own stupidity as a fool fusses about with a painted

hussy? For our wisdom, however indubitable it may be, has not

given us the knowledge of the meaning of our life. But all mankind

who sustain life -- millions of them -- do not doubt the meaning of

life.

 Indeed, from the most distant time of which I know anything,

when life began, people have lived knowing the argument about the

vanity of life which has shown me its senselessness, and yet they

lived attributing some meaning to it.

 From the time when any life began among men they had that

meaning of life, and they led that life which has descended to me.

All that is in me and around me, all, corporeal and incorporeal, is

the fruit of their knowledge of life. Those very instruments of

thought with which I consider this life and condemn it were all

devised not be me but by them. I myself was born, taught, and

brought up thanks to them. They dug out the iron, taught us to cut

down the forests, tamed the cows and horses, taught us to sow corn

and to live together, organized our life, and taught me to think

and speak. And I, their product, fed, supplied with drink, taught

by them, thinking with their thoughts and words, have argued that

they are an absurdity! "There is something wrong," said I to

myself. "I have blundered somewhere." But it was a long time

before I could find out where the mistake was.

                          VIII



 All these doubts, which I am now able to express more or less

systematically, I could not then have expressed. I then only felt

that however logically inevitable were my conclusions concerning

the vanity of life, confirmed as they were by the greatest

thinkers, there was something not right about them. Whether it was

in the reasoning itself or in the statement of the question I did

not know -- I only felt that the conclusion was rationally

convincing, but that that was insufficient. All these conclusions

could not so convince me as to make me do what followed from my

reasoning, that is to say, kill myself. And I should have told an

untruth had I, without killing myself, said that reason had brought

me to the point I had reached. Reason worked, but something else

was also working which I can only call a consciousness of life. A

force was working which compelled me to turn my attention to this

and not to that; and it was this force which extricated me from my

desperate situation and turned my mind in quite another direction.

This force compelled me to turn my attention to the fact that I and

a few hundred similar people are not the whole of mankind, and that

I did not yet know the life of mankind.

 Looking at the narrow circle of my equals, I saw only people

who had not understood the question, or who had understood it and

drowned it in life's intoxication, or had understood it and ended

their lives, or had understood it and yet from weakness were living

out their desperate life. And I saw no others. It seemed to me

that that narrow circle of rich, learned, and leisured people to

which I belonged formed the whole of humanity, and that those

milliards of others who have lived and are living were cattle of

some sort -- not real people.

 Strange, incredibly incomprehensible as it now seems to me

that I could, while reasoning about life, overlook the whole life

of mankind that surrounded me on all sides; that I could to such a

degree blunder so absurdly as to think that my life, and Solomon's

and Schopenhauer's, is the real, normal life, and that the life of

the milliards is a circumstance undeserving of attention -- strange

as this now is to me, I see that so it was. In the delusion of my

pride of intellect it seemed to me so indubitable that I and

Solomon and Schopenhauer had stated the question so truly and

exactly that nothing else was possible -- so indubitable did it

seem that all those milliards consisted of men who had not yet

arrived at an apprehension of all the profundity of the question --

that I sought for the meaning of my life without it once occurring

to me to ask: "But what meaning is and has been given to their

lives by all the milliards of common folk who live and have lived

in the world?"

 I long lived in this state of lunacy, which, in fact if not in

words, is particularly characteristic of us very liberal and

learned people. But thanks either to the strange physical

affection I have for the real labouring people, which compelled me

to understand them and to see that they are not so stupid as we

suppose, or thanks to the sincerity of my conviction that I could

know nothing beyond the fact that the best I could do was to hang

myself, at any rate I instinctively felt that if I wished to live

and understand the meaning of life, I must seek this meaning not

among those who have lost it and wish to kill themselves, but among

those milliards of the past and the present who make life and who

support the burden of their own lives and of ours also. And I

considered the enormous masses of those simple, unlearned, and poor

people who have lived and are living and I saw something quite

different. I saw that, with rare exceptions, all those milliards

who have lived and are living do not fit into my divisions, and

that I could not class them as not understanding the question, for

they themselves state it and reply to it with extraordinary

clearness. Nor could I consider them epicureans, for their life

consists more of privations and sufferings than of enjoyments.

Still less could I consider them as irrationally dragging on a

meaningless existence, for every act of their life, as well as

death itself, is explained by them. To kill themselves they

consider the greatest evil. It appeared that all mankind had a

knowledge, unacknowledged and despised by me, of the meaning of

life. It appeared that reasonable knowledge does not give the

meaning of life, but excludes life: while the meaning attributed to

life by milliards of people, by all humanity, rests on some

despised pseudo-knowledge.

 Rational knowledge presented by the learned and wise, denies

the meaning of life, but the enormous masses of men, the whole of

mankind receive that meaning in irrational knowledge. And that

irrational knowledge is faith, that very thing which I could not

but reject. It is God, One in Three; the creation in six days; the

devils and angels, and all the rest that I cannot accept as long as

I retain my reason.

 My position was terrible.  I knew I could find nothing along

the path of reasonable knowledge except a denial of life; and there

-- in faith -- was nothing but a denial of reason, which was yet

more impossible for me than a denial of life. From rational

knowledge it appeared that life is an evil, people know this and it

is in their power to end life; yet they lived and still live, and

I myself live, though I have long known that life is senseless and

an evil. By faith it appears that in order to understand the

meaning of life I must renounce my reason, the very thing for which

alone a meaning is required.

                           IX



 A contradiction arose from which there were two exits.  Either

that which I called reason was not so rational as I supposed, or

that which seemed to me irrational was not so irrational as I

supposed. And I began to verify the line of argument of my

rational knowledge.

 Verifying the line of argument of rational knowledge I found

it quite correct. The conclusion that life is nothing was

inevitable; but I noticed a mistake. The mistake lay in this, that

my reasoning was not in accord with the question I had put. The

question was: "Why should I live, that is to say, what real,

permanent result will come out of my illusory transitory life --

what meaning has my finite existence in this infinite world?" And

to reply to that question I had studied life.

 The solution of all the possible questions of life could

evidently not satisfy me, for my question, simple as it at first

appeared, included a demand for an explanation of the finite in

terms of the infinite, and vice versa.

 I asked: "What is the meaning of my life, beyond time, cause,

and space?" And I replied to quite another question: "What is the

meaning of my life within time, cause, and space?" With the

result that, after long efforts of thought, the answer I reached

was: "None."

 In my reasonings I constantly compared (nor could I do

otherwise) the finite with the finite, and the infinite with the

infinite; but for that reason I reached the inevitable result:

force is force, matter is matter, will is will, the infinite is the

infinite, nothing is nothing -- and that was all that could result.

 It was something like what happens in mathematics, when

thinking to solve an equation, we find we are working on an

identity. the line of reasoning is correct, but results in the

answer that a equals a, or x equals x, or o equals o. the same

thing happened with my reasoning in relation to the question of the

meaning of my life. The replies given by all science to that

question only result in -- identity.

 And really, strictly scientific knowledge -- that knowledge

which begins, as Descartes's did, with complete doubt about

everything -- rejects all knowledge admitted on faith and builds

everything afresh on the laws of reason and experience, and cannot

give any other reply to the question of life than that which I

obtained: an indefinite reply. Only at first had it seemed to me

that knowledge had given a positive reply -- the reply of

Schopenhauer: that life has no meaning and is an evil. But on

examining the matter I understood that the reply is not positive,

it was only my feeling that so expressed it. Strictly expressed,

as it is by the Brahmins and by Solomon and Schopenhauer, the reply

is merely indefinite, or an identity: o equals o, life is nothing.

So that philosophic knowledge denies nothing, but only replies that

the question cannot be solved by it -- that for it the solution

remains indefinite.

 Having understood this, I understood that it was not possible

to seek in rational knowledge for a reply to my question, and that

the reply given by rational knowledge is a mere indication that a

reply can only be obtained by a different statement of the question

and only when the relation of the finite to the infinite is

included in the question. And I understood that, however

irrational and distorted might be the replies given by faith, they

have this advantage, that they introduce into every answer a

relation between the finite and the infinite, without which there

can be no solution.

 In whatever way I stated the question, that relation appeared

in the answer. How am I to live? -- According to the law of God.

What real result will come of my life? -- Eternal torment or

eternal bliss. What meaning has life that death does not destroy?

-- Union with the eternal God: heaven.

 So that besides rational knowledge, which had seemed to me the

only knowledge, I was inevitably brought to acknowledge that all

live humanity has another irrational knowledge -- faith which makes

it possible to live. Faith still remained to me as irrational as

it was before, but I could not but admit that it alone gives

mankind a reply to the questions of life, and that consequently it

makes life possible. Reasonable knowledge had brought me to

acknowledge that life is senseless -- my life had come to a halt

and I wished to destroy myself. Looking around on the whole of

mankind I saw that people live and declare that they know the

meaning of life. I looked at myself -- I had lived as long as I

knew a meaning of life and had made life possible.

 Looking again at people of other lands, at my contemporaries

and at their predecessors, I saw the same thing. Where there is

life, there since man began faith has made life possible for him,

and the chief outline of that faith is everywhere and always

identical.

 Whatever the faith may be, and whatever answers it may give,

and to whomsoever it gives them, every such answer gives to the

finite existence of man an infinite meaning, a meaning not

destroyed by sufferings, deprivations, or death. This means that

only in faith can we find for life a meaning and a possibility.

What, then, is this faith? And I understood that faith is not

merely "the evidence of things not seen", etc., and is not a

revelation (that defines only one of the indications of faith, is

not the relation of man to God (one has first to define faith and

then God, and not define faith through God); it not only agreement

with what has been told one (as faith is most usually supposed to

be), but faith is a knowledge of the meaning of human life in

consequence of which man does not destroy himself but lives. Faith

is the strength of life. If a man lives he believes in something.

If he did not believe that one must live for something, he would

not live. If he does not see and recognize the illusory nature of

the finite, he believes in the finite; if he understands the

illusory nature of the finite, he must believe in the infinite.

Without faith he cannot live.

 And I recalled the whole course of my mental labour and was

horrified. It was now clear to me that for man to be able to live

he must either not see the infinite, or have such an explanation of

the meaning of life as will connect the finite with the infinite.

Such an explanation I had had; but as long as I believed in the

finite I did not need the explanation, and I began to verify it by

reason. And in the light of reason the whole of my former

explanation flew to atoms. But a time came when I ceased to

believe in the finite. And then I began to build up on rational

foundations, out of what I knew, an explanation which would give a

meaning to life; but nothing could I build. Together with the best

human intellects I reached the result that o equals o, and was much

astonished at that conclusion, though nothing else could have

resulted.

 What was I doing when I sought an answer in the experimental

sciences? I wished to know why I live, and for this purpose

studied all that is outside me. Evidently I might learn much, but

nothing of what I needed.

 What was I doing when I sought an answer in philosophical

knowledge? I was studying the thoughts of those who had found

themselves in the same position as I, lacking a reply to the

question "why do I live?" Evidently I could learn nothing but what

I knew myself, namely that nothing can be known.

 What am I? -- A part of the infinite.  In those few words lies

the whole problem.

 Is it possible that humanity has only put that question to

itself since yesterday? And can no one before me have set himself

that question -- a question so simple, and one that springs to the

tongue of every wise child?

 Surely that question has been asked since man began; and

naturally for the solution of that question since man began it has

been equally insufficient to compare the finite with the finite and

the infinite with the infinite, and since man began the relation of

the finite to the infinite has been sought out and expressed.

 All these conceptions in which the finite has been adjusted to

the infinite and a meaning found for life -- the conception of God,

of will, of goodness -- we submit to logical examination. And all

those conceptions fail to stand reason's criticism.

 Were it not so terrible it would be ludicrous with what pride

and self-satisfaction we, like children, pull the watch to pieces,

take out the spring, make a toy of it, and are then surprised that

the watch does not go.

 A solution of the contradiction between the finite and the

infinite, and such a reply to the question of life as will make it

possible to live, is necessary and precious. And that is the only

solution which we find everywhere, always, and among all peoples:

a solution descending from times in which we lose sight of the life

of man, a solution so difficult that we can compose nothing like it

-- and this solution we light-heartedly destroy in order again to

set the same question, which is natural to everyone and to which we

have no answer.

 The conception of an infinite god, the divinity of the soul,

the connexion of human affairs with God, the unity and existence of

the soul, man's conception of moral goodness and evil -- are

conceptions formulated in the hidden infinity of human thought,

they are those conceptions without which neither life nor I should

exist; yet rejecting all that labour of the whole of humanity, I

wished to remake it afresh myself and in my own manner.

 I did not then think like that, but the germs of these

thoughts were already in me. I understood, in the first place,

that my position with Schopenhauer and Solomon, notwithstanding our

wisdom, was stupid: we see that life is an evil and yet continue

to live. That is evidently stupid, for if life is senseless and I

am so fond of what is reasonable, it should be destroyed, and then

there would be no one to challenge it. Secondly, I understood that

all one's reasonings turned in a vicious circle like a wheel out of

gear with its pinion. However much and however well we may reason

we cannot obtain a reply to the question; and o will always equal

o, and therefore our path is probably erroneous. Thirdly, I began

to understand that in the replies given by faith is stored up the

deepest human wisdom and that I had no right to deny them on the

ground of reason, and that those answers are the only ones which

reply to life's question.

                            X



 I understood this, but it made matters no better for me.  I

was now ready to accept any faith if only it did not demand of me

a direct denial of reason -- which would be a falsehood. And I

studied Buddhism and Mohammedanism from books, and most of all I

studied Christianity both from books and from the people around me.

 Naturally I first of all turned to the orthodox of my circle,

to people who were learned: to Church theologians, monks, to

theologians of the newest shade, and even to Evangelicals who

profess salvation by belief in the Redemption. And I seized on

these believers and questioned them as to their beliefs and their

understanding of the meaning of life.

 But though I made all possible concessions, and avoided all

disputes, I could not accept the faith of these people. I saw that

what they gave out as their faith did not explain the meaning of

life but obscured it, and that they themselves affirm their belief

not to answer that question of life which brought me to faith, but

for some other aims alien to me.

 I remember the painful feeling of fear of being thrown back

into my former state of despair, after the hope I often and often

experienced in my intercourse with these people.

 The more fully they explained to me their doctrines, the more

clearly did I perceive their error and realized that my hope of

finding in their belief an explanation of the meaning of life was

vain.

 It was not that in their doctrines they mixed many unnecessary

and unreasonable things with the Christian truths that had always

been near to me: that was not what repelled me. I was repelled by

the fact that these people's lives were like my own, with only this

difference -- that such a life did not correspond to the principles

they expounded in their teachings. I clearly felt that they

deceived themselves and that they, like myself found no other

meaning in life than to live while life lasts, taking all one's

hands can seize. I saw this because if they had had a meaning

which destroyed the fear of loss, suffering, and death, they would

not have feared these things. But they, these believers of our

circle, just like myself, living in sufficiency and superfluity,

tried to increase or preserve them, feared privations, suffering,

and death, and just like myself and all of us unbelievers, lived to

satisfy their desires, and lived just as badly, if not worse, than

the unbelievers.

 No arguments could convince me of the truth of their faith. 

Only deeds which showed that they saw a meaning in life making what

was so dreadful to me -- poverty, sickness, and death -- not

dreadful to them, could convince me. And such deeds I did not see

among the various believers in our circle. On the contrary, I saw

such deeds done [Footnote: this passage is noteworthy as being one

of the few references made by Tolstoy at this period to the

revolutionary or "Back-to-the-People" movement, in which many young

men and women were risking and sacrificing home, property, and life

itself from motives which had much in common with his own

perception that the upper layers of Society are parasitic and prey

on the vitals of the people who support them. -- A.M.] by people of

our circle who were the most unbelieving, but never by our so-

called believers.

 And I understood that the belief of these people was not the

faith I sought, and that their faith is not a real faith but an

epicurean consolation in life.

 I understood that that faith may perhaps serve, if not for a

consolation at least for some distraction for a repentant Solomon

on his death-bed, but it cannot serve for the great majority of

mankind, who are called on not to amuse themselves while consuming

the labour of others but to create life.

 For all humanity to be able to live, and continue to live

attributing a meaning to life, they, those milliards, must have a

different, a real, knowledge of faith. Indeed, it was not the fact

that we, with Solomon and Schopenhauer, did not kill ourselves that

convinced me of the existence of faith, but the fact that those

milliards of people have lived and are living, and have borne

Solomon and us on the current of their lives.

 And I began to draw near to the believers among the poor,

simple, unlettered folk: pilgrims, monks, sectarians, and peasants.

The faith of these common people was the same Christian faith as

was professed by the pseudo-believers of our circle. Among them,

too, I found a great deal of superstition mixed with the Christian

truths; but the difference was that the superstitions of the

believers of our circle were quite unnecessary to them and were not

in conformity with their lives, being merely a kind of epicurean

diversion; but the superstitions of the believers among the

labouring masses conformed so with their lives that it was

impossible to imagine them to oneself without those superstitions,

which were a necessary condition of their life. the whole life of

believers in our circle was a contradiction of their faith, but the

whole life of the working-folk believers was a confirmation of the

meaning of life which their faith gave them. And I began to look

well into the life and faith of these people, and the more I

considered it the more I became convinced that they have a real

faith which is a necessity to them and alone gives their life a

meaning and makes it possible for them to live. In contrast with

what I had seen in our circle -- where life without faith is

possible and where hardly one in a thousand acknowledges himself to

be a believer -- among them there is hardly one unbeliever in a

thousand. In contrast with what I had seen in our circle, where

the whole of life is passed in idleness, amusement, and

dissatisfaction, I saw that the whole life of these people was

passed in heavy labour, and that they were content with life. In

contradistinction to the way in which people of our circle oppose

fate and complain of it on account of deprivations and sufferings,

these people accepted illness and sorrow without any perplexity or

opposition, and with a quiet and firm conviction that all is good.

In contradistinction to us, who the wiser we are the less we

understand the meaning of life, and see some evil irony in the fact

that we suffer and die, these folk live and suffer, and they

approach death and suffering with tranquillity and in most cases

gladly. In contrast to the fact that a tranquil death, a death

without horror and despair, is a very rare exception in our circle,

a troubled, rebellious, and unhappy death is the rarest exception

among the people. and such people, lacking all that for us and for

Solomon is the only good of life and yet experiencing the greatest

happiness, are a great multitude. I looked more widely around me.

I considered the life of the enormous mass of the people in the

past and the present. And of such people, understanding the

meaning of life and able to live and to die, I saw not two or

three, or tens, but hundreds, thousands, and millions. and they

all -- endlessly different in their manners, minds, education, and

position, as they were -- all alike, in complete contrast to my

ignorance, knew the meaning of life and death, laboured quietly,

endured deprivations and sufferings, and lived and died seeing

therein not vanity but good.

 And I learnt to love these people.  The more I came to know

their life, the life of those who are living and of others who are

dead of whom I read and heard, the more I loved them and the easier

it became for me to live. So I went on for about two years, and a

change took place in me which had long been preparing and the

promise of which had always been in me. It came about that the

life of our circle, the rich and learned, not merely became

distasteful to me, but lost all meaning in my eyes. All our

actions, discussions, science and art, presented itself to me in a

new light. I understood that it is all merely self-indulgence, and

the to find a meaning in it is impossible; while the life of the

whole labouring people, the whole of mankind who produce life,

appeared to me in its true significance. I understood that that

is life itself, and that the meaning given to that life is true:

and I accepted it.

                           XI



 And remembering how those very beliefs had repelled me and had

seemed meaningless when professed by people whose lives conflicted

with them, and how these same beliefs attracted me and seemed

reasonable when I saw that people lived in accord with them, I

understood why I had then rejected those beliefs and found them

meaningless, yet now accepted them and found them full of meaning.

I understood that I had erred, and why I erred. I had erred not so

much because I thought incorrectly as because I lived badly. I

understood that it was not an error in my thought that had hid

truth from me as much as my life itself in the exceptional

conditions of epicurean gratification of desires in which I passed

it. I understood that my question as to what my life is, and the

answer -- and evil -- was quite correct. The only mistake was that

the answer referred only to my life, while I had referred it to

life in general. I asked myself what my life is, and got the

reply: An evil and an absurdity. and really my life -- a life of

indulgence of desires -- was senseless and evil, and therefore the

reply, "Life is evil and an absurdity", referred only to my life,

but not to human life in general. I understood the truth which I

afterwards found in the Gospels, "that men loved darkness rather

than the light, for their works were evil. For everyone that doeth

ill hateth the light, and cometh not to the light, lest his works

should be reproved." I perceived that to understand the meaning of

life it is necessary first that life should not be meaningless and

evil, then we can apply reason to explain it. I understood why I

had so long wandered round so evident a truth, and that if one is

to think and speak of the life of mankind, one must think and speak

of that life and not of the life of some of life's parasites. That

truth was always as true as that two and two are four, but I had

not acknowledged it, because on admitting two and two to be four I

had also to admit that I was bad; and to feel myself to be good was

for me more important and necessary than for two and two to be

four. I came to love good people, hated myself, and confessed the

truth. Now all became clear to me.

 What if an executioner passing his whole life in torturing

people and cutting off their heads, or a hopeless drunkard, or a

madman settled for life in a dark room which he has fouled and

imagines that he would perish if he left -- what if he asked

himself: "What is life?" Evidently he could not other reply to

that question than that life is the greatest evil, and the madman's

answer would be perfectly correct, but only as applied to himself.

What if I am such a madman? What if all we rich and leisured

people are such madmen? and I understood that we really are such

madmen. I at any rate was certainly such.

 And indeed a bird is so made that it must fly, collect food,

and build a nest, and when I see that a bird does this I have

pleasure in its joy. A goat, a hare, and a wolf are so made that

they must feed themselves, and must breed and feed their family,

and when they do so I feel firmly assured that they are happy and

that their life is a reasonable one. then what should a man do?

He too should produce his living as the animals do, but with this

difference, that he will perish if he does it alone; he must obtain

it not for himself but for all. And when he does that, I have a

firm assurance that he is happy and that his life is reasonable.

But what had I done during the whole thirty years of my responsible

life? Far from producing sustenance for all, I did not even

produce it for myself. I lived as a parasite, and on asking

myself, what is the use of my life? I got the reply: "No use." If

the meaning of human life lies in supporting it, how could I -- who

for thirty years had been engaged not on supporting life but on

destroying it in myself and in others -- how could I obtain any

other answer than that my life was senseless and an evil? ... It

was both senseless and evil.

 The life of the world endures by someone's will -- by the life

of the whole world and by our lives someone fulfills his purpose.

To hope to understand the meaning of that will one must first

perform it by doing what is wanted of us. But if I will not do

what is wanted of me, I shall never understand what is wanted of

me, and still less what is wanted of us all and of the whole world.

 If a naked, hungry beggar has been taken from the cross-roads,

brought into a building belonging to a beautiful establishment,

fed, supplied with drink, and obliged to move a handle up and down,

evidently, before discussing why he was taken, why he should move

the handle, and whether the whole establishment is reasonably

arranged -- the begger should first of all move the handle. If he

moves the handle he will understand that it works a pump, that the

pump draws water and that the water irrigates the garden beds; then

he will be taken from the pumping station to another place where he

will gather fruits and will enter into the joy of his master, and,

passing from lower to higher work, will understand more and more of

the arrangements of the establishment, and taking part in it will

never think of asking why he is there, and will certainly not

reproach the master.

 So those who do his will, the simple, unlearned working folk,

whom we regard as cattle, do not reproach the master; but we, the

wise, eat the master's food but do not do what the master wishes,

and instead of doing it sit in a circle and discuss: "Why should

that handle be moved? Isn't it stupid?" So we have decided. We

have decided that the master is stupid, or does not exist, and that

we are wise, only we feel that we are quite useless and that we

must somehow do away with ourselves.

                           XII



 The consciousness of the error in reasonable knowledge helped

me to free myself from the temptation of idle ratiocination. the

conviction that knowledge of truth can only be found by living led

me to doubt the rightness of my life; but I was saved only by the

fact that I was able to tear myself from my exclusiveness and to

see the real life of the plain working people, and to understand

that it alone is real life. I understood that if I wish to

understand life and its meaning, I must not live the life of a

parasite, but must live a real life, and -- taking the meaning

given to live by real humanity and merging myself in that life --

verify it.

 During that time this is what happened to me.  During that

whole year, when I was asking myself almost every moment whether I

should not end matters with a noose or a bullet -- all that time,

together with the course of thought and observation about which I

have spoken, my heart was oppressed with a painful feeling, which

I can only describe as a search for God.

 I say that that search for God was not reasoning, but a

feeling, because that search proceeded not from the course of my

thoughts -- it was even directly contrary to them -- but proceeded

from the heart. It was a feeling of fear, orphanage, isolation in

a strange land, and a hope of help from someone.

 Though I was quite convinced of the impossibility of proving

the existence of a Deity (Kant had shown, and I quite understood

him, that it could not be proved), I yet sought for god, hoped that

I should find Him, and from old habit addressed prayers to that

which I sought but had not found. I went over in my mind the

arguments of Kant and Schopenhauer showing the impossibility of

proving the existence of a God, and I began to verify those

arguments and to refute them. Cause, said I to myself, is not a

category of thought such as are Time and Space. If I exist, there

must be some cause for it, and a cause of causes. And that first

cause of all is what men have called "God". And I paused on that

thought, and tried with all my being to recognize the presence of

that cause. And as soon as I acknowledged that there is a force in

whose power I am, I at once felt that I could live. But I asked

myself: What is that cause, that force? How am I to think of it?

What are my relations to that which I call "God"? And only the

familiar replies occurred to me: "He is the Creator and

Preserver." This reply did not satisfy me, and I felt I was losing

within me what I needed for my life. I became terrified and began

to pray to Him whom I sought, that He should help me. But the more

I prayed the more apparent it became to me that He did not hear me,

and that there was no one to whom to address myself. And with

despair in my heart that there is no God at all, I said: "Lord,

have mercy, save me! Lord, teach me!" But no one had mercy on me,

and I felt that my life was coming to a standstill.

 But again and again, from various sides, I returned to the

same conclusion that I could not have come into the world without

any cause or reason or meaning; I could not be such a fledgling

fallen from its nest as I felt myself to be. Or, granting that I

be such, lying on my back crying in the high grass, even then I cry

because I know that a mother has borne me within her, has hatched

me, warmed me, fed me, and loved me. Where is she -- that mother?

If I have been deserted, who has deserted me? I cannot hide from

myself that someone bored me, loving me. Who was that someone?

Again "God"? He knows and sees my searching, my despair, and my

struggle."

 "He exists," said I to myself.  And I had only for an instant

to admit that, and at once life rose within me, and I felt the

possibility and joy of being. But again, from the admission of the

existence of a God I went on to seek my relation with Him; and

again I imagined that God -- our Creator in Three Persons who

sent His Son, the Saviour -- and again that God, detached from

the world and from me, melted like a block of ice, melted before my

eyes, and again nothing remained, and again the spring of life

dried up within me, and I despaired and felt that I had nothing to

do but to kill myself. And the worst of all was, that I felt I

could not do it.

 Not twice or three times, but tens and hundreds of times, I

reached those conditions, first of joy and animation, and then of

despair and consciousness of the impossibility of living.

 I remember that it was in early spring: I was alone in the

wood listening to its sounds. I listened and thought ever of the

same thing, as I had constantly done during those last three years.

I was again seeking God.

 "Very well, there is no God," said I to myself; "there is no

one who is not my imagination but a reality like my whole life.

He does not exist, and no miracles can prove His existence, because

the miracles would be my imagination, besides being irrational.

 "But my *perception* of God, of Him whom I seek," I asked

myself, "where has that perception come from?" And again at this

thought the glad waves of life rose within me. All that was around

me came to life and received a meaning. But my joy did not last

long. My mind continued its work.

 "The conception of God is not God," said I to myself.  "The

conception is what takes place within me. The conception of God is

something I can evoke or can refrain from evoking in myself. That

is not what I seek. I seek that without which there can be no

life." And again all around me and within me began to die, and

again I wished to kill myself.

 But then I turned my gaze upon myself, on what went on within

me, and I remembered all those cessations of life and reanimations

that recurred within me hundreds of times. I remembered that I

only lived at those times when I believed in God. As it was

before, so it was now; I need only be aware of God to live; I need

only forget Him, or disbelieve Him, and I died.

 What is this animation and dying?  I do not live when I lose

belief in the existence of God. I should long ago have killed

myself had I not had a dim hope of finding Him. I live, really

live, only when I feel Him and seek Him. "What more do you seek?"

exclaimed a voice within me. "This is He. He is that without

which one cannot live. To know God and to live is one and the same

thing. God is life."

 "Live seeking God, and then you will not live without God." 

And more than ever before, all within me and around me lit up, and

the light did not again abandon me.

 And I was saved from suicide.  When and how this change

occurred I could not say. As imperceptibly and gradually the force

of life in me had been destroyed and I had reached the

impossibility of living, a cessation of life and the necessity of

suicide, so imperceptibly and gradually did that force of life

return to me. And strange to say the strength of life which

returned to me was not new, but quite old -- the same that had

borne me along in my earliest days.

 I quite returned to what belonged to my earliest childhood and

youth. I returned to the belief in that Will which produced me and

desires something of me. I returned to the belief that the chief

and only aim of my life is to be better, i.e. to live in accord

with that Will. and I returned to the belief that I can find the

expression of that Will in what humanity, in the distant past

hidden from, has produced for its guidance: that is to say, I

returned to a belief in God, in moral perfection, and in a

tradition transmitting the meaning of life. There was only this

difference, that then all this was accepted unconsciously, while

now I knew that without it I could not live.

 What happened to me was something like this:  I was put into

a boat (I do not remember when) and pushed off from an unknown

shore, shown the direction of the opposite shore, had oars put into

my unpractised hands, and was left alone. I rowed as best I could

and moved forward; but the further I advanced towards the middle of

the stream the more rapid grew the current bearing me away from my

goal and the more frequently did I encounter others, like myself,

borne away by the stream. There were a few rowers who continued to

row, there were others who had abandoned their oars; there were

large boats and immense vessels full of people. Some struggled

against the current, others yielded to it. And the further I went

the more, seeing the progress down the current of all those who

were adrift, I forgot the direction given me. In the very centre

of the stream, amid the crowd of boats and vessels which were being

borne down stream, I quite lost my direction and abandoned my oars.

Around me on all sides, with mirth and rejoicing, people with sails

and oars were borne down the stream, assuring me and each other

that no other direction was possible. And I believed them and

floated with them. And I was carried far; so far that I heard the

roar of the rapids in which I must be shattered, and I saw boats

shattered in them. And I recollected myself. I was long unable to

understand what had happened to me. I saw before me nothing but

destruction, towards which I was rushing and which I feared. I saw

no safety anywhere and did not know what to do; but, looking back,

I perceived innumerable boats which unceasingly and strenuously

pushed across the stream, and I remembered about the shore, the

oars, and the direction, and began to pull back upwards against the

stream and towards the whore.

 That shore was God; that direction was tradition; the oars

were the freedom given me to pull for the shore and unite with God.

And so the force of life was renewed in me and I again began to

live.

                          XIII



 I turned from the life of our circle, acknowledging that ours

is not life but a simulation of life -- that the conditions of

superfluity in which we live deprive us of the possibility of

understanding life, and that in order to understand life I must

understand not an exceptional life such as our who are parasites on

life, but the life of the simple labouring folk -- those who make

life -- and the meaning which they attribute to it. The simplest

labouring people around me were the Russian people, and I turned to

them and to the meaning of life which they give. That meaning, if

one can put it into words, was as follows: Every man has come into

this world by the will of God. And God has so made man that every

man can destroy his soul or save it. The aim of man in life is to

save his soul, and to save his soul he must live "godly" and to

live "godly" he must renounce all the pleasures of life, must

labour, humble himself, suffer, and be merciful. That meaning the

people obtain from the whole teaching of faith transmitted to them

by their pastors and by the traditions that live among the people.

This meaning was clear to me and near to my heart. But together

with this meaning of the popular faith of our non-sectarian folk,

among whom I live, much was inseparably bound up that revolted me

and seemed to me inexplicable: sacraments, Church services, fasts,

and the adoration of relics and icons. The people cannot separate

the one from the other, nor could I. And strange as much of what

entered into the faith of these people was to me, I accepted

everything, and attended the services, knelt morning and evening in

prayer, fasted, and prepared to receive the Eucharist: and at first

my reason did not resist anything. The very things that had

formerly seemed to me impossible did not now evoke in me any

opposition.

 My relations to faith before and after were quite different. 

Formerly life itself seemed to me full of meaning and faith

presented itself as the arbitrary assertion of propositions to me

quite unnecessary, unreasonable, and disconnected from life. I

then asked myself what meaning those propositions had and,

convinced that they had none, I rejected them. Now on the contrary

I knew firmly that my life otherwise has, and can have, no meaning,

and the articles of faith were far from presenting themselves to me

as unnecessary -- on the contrary I had been led by indubitable

experience to the conviction that only these propositions presented

by faith give life a meaning. formerly I looked on them as on some

quite unnecessary gibberish, but now, if I did not understand them,

I yet knew that they had a meaning, and I said to myself that I

must learn to understand them.

 I argued as follows, telling myself that the knowledge of

faith flows, like all humanity with its reason, from a mysterious

source. That source is God, the origin both of the human body and

the human reason. As my body has descended to me from God, so also

has my reason and my understanding of life, and consequently the

various stages of the development of that understanding of life

cannot be false. All that people sincerely believe in must be

true; it may be differently expressed but it cannot be a lie, and

therefore if it presents itself to me as a lie, that only means

that I have not understood it. Furthermore I said to myself, the

essence of every faith consists in its giving life a meaning which

death does not destroy. Naturally for a faith to be able to reply

to the questions of a king dying in luxury, of an old slave

tormented by overwork, of an unreasoning child, of a wise old man,

of a half-witted old woman, of a young and happy wife, of a youth

tormented by passions, of all people in the most varied conditions

of life and education -- if there is one reply to the one eternal

question of life: "Why do I live and what will result from my

life?" -- the reply, though one in its essence, must be endlessly

varied in its presentation; and the more it is one, the more true

and profound it is, the more strange and deformed must it naturally

appear in its attempted expression, conformably to the education

and position of each person. But this argument, justifying in my

eyes the queerness of much on the ritual side of religion, did not

suffice to allow me in the one great affair of life -- religion --

to do things which seemed to me questionable. With all my soul I

wished to be in a position to mingle with the people, fulfilling

the ritual side of their religion; but I could not do it. I felt

that I should lie to myself and mock at what was sacred to me, were

I to do so. At this point, however, our new Russian theological

writers came to my rescue.

 According to the explanation these theologians gave, the

fundamental dogma of our faith is the infallibility of the Church.

From the admission of that dogma follows inevitably the truth of

all that is professed by the Church. The Church as an assembly of

true believers united by love and therefore possessed of true

knowledge became the basis of my belief. I told myself that divine

truth cannot be accessible to a separate individual; it is revealed

only to the whole assembly of people united by love. To attain

truth one must not separate, and in order not to separate one must

love and must endure things one may not agree with.

 Truth reveals itself to love, and if you do not submit to the

rites of the Church you transgress against love; and by

transgressing against love you deprive yourself of the possibility

of recognizing the truth. I did not then see the sophistry

contained in this argument. I did not see that union in love may

give the greatest love, but certainly cannot give us divine truth

expressed in the definite words of the Nicene Creed. I also did

not perceive that love cannot make a certain expression of truth an

obligatory condition of union. I did not then see these mistakes

in the argument and thanks to it was able to accept and perform all

the rites of the Orthodox Church without understanding most of

them. I then tried with all strength of my soul to avoid all

arguments and contradictions, and tried to explain as reasonably as

possible the Church statements I encountered.

 When fulfilling the rites of the Church I humbled my reason

and submitted to the tradition possessed by all humanity. I united

myself with my forefathers: the father, mother, and grandparents I

loved. They and all my predecessors believed and lived, and they

produced me. I united myself also with the missions of the common

people whom I respected. Moveover, those actions had nothing bad

in themselves ("bad" I considered the indulgence of one's desires).

When rising early for Church services I knew I was doing well, if

only because I was sacrificing my bodily ease to humble my mental

pride, for the sake of union with my ancestors and contemporaries,

and for the sake of finding the meaning of life. It was the same

with my preparations to receive Communion, and with the daily

reading of prayers with genuflections, and also with the observance

of all the fasts. However insignificant these sacrifices might be

I made them for the sake of something good. I fasted, prepared for

Communion, and observed the fixed hours of prayer at home and in

church. During Church service I attended to every word, and gave

them a meaning whenever I could. In the Mass the most important

words for me were: "Let us love one another in conformity!" The

further words, "In unity we believe in the Father, the Son, and

Holy Ghost", I passed by, because I could not understand them.

                           XIV



 In was then so necessary for me to believe in order to live

that I unconsciously concealed from myself the contradictions and

obscurities of theology. but this reading of meanings into the

rites had its limits. If the chief words in the prayer for the

Emperor became more and more clear to me, if I found some

explanation for the words "and remembering our Sovereign Most-Holy

Mother of God and all the Saints, ourselves and one another, we

give our whole life to Christ our God", if I explained to myself

the frequent repetition of prayers for the Tsar and his relations

by the fact that they are more exposed to temptations than other

people and therefore are more in need of being prayed for -- the

prayers about subduing our enemies and evil under our feet (even if

one tried to say that sin was the enemy prayed against), these

and other prayers, such as the "cherubic song" and the whole

sacrament of oblation, or "the chosen Warriors", etc. -- quite two-

thirds of all the services -- either remained completely

incomprehensible or, when I forced an explanation into them, made

me feel that I was lying, thereby quite destroying my relation to

God and depriving me of all possibility of belief.

 I felt the same about the celebration of the chief holidays. 

To remember the Sabbath, that is to devote one day to God, was

something I could understand. But the chief holiday was in

commemoration of the Resurrection, the reality of which I could not

picture to myself or understand. And that name of "Resurrection"

was also given the weekly holiday. [Footnote: In Russia Sunday

was called Resurrection-day. -- A. M.] And on those days the

Sacrament of the Eucharist was administered, which was quite

unintelligible to me. The rest of the twelve great holidays,

except Christmas, commemorated miracles -- the things I tried not

to think about in order not to deny: the Ascension, Pentecost,

Epiphany, the Feast of the Intercession of the Holy Virgin, etc.

At the celebration of these holidays, feeling that importance was

being attributed to the very things that to me presented a negative

importance, I either devised tranquillizing explanations or shut my

eyes in order not to see what tempted me.

 Most of all this happened to me when taking part in the most

usual Sacraments, which are considered the most important: baptism

and communion. There I encountered not incomprehensible but fully

comprehensible doings: doings which seemed to me to lead into

temptation, and I was in a dilemma -- whether to lie or to reject

them.

 Never shall I forge the painful feeling I experienced the day

I received the Eucharist for the first time after many years. The

service, confession, and prayers were quite intelligible and

produced in me a glad consciousness that the meaning of life was

being revealed to me. The Communion itself I explained as an act

performed in remembrance of Christ, and indicating a purification

from sin and the full acceptance of Christ's teaching. If that

explanation was artificial I did not notice its artificiality: so

happy was I at humbling and abasing myself before the priest -- a

simple, timid country clergyman -- turning all the dirt out of my

soul and confessing my vices, so glad was I to merge in thought

with the humility of the fathers who wrote the prayers of the

office, so glad was I of union with all who have believed and now

believe, that I did not notice the artificiality of my explanation.

But when I approached the altar gates, and the priest made me say

that I believed that what I was about to swallow was truly flesh

and blood, I felt a pain in my heart: it was not merely a false

note, it was a cruel demand made by someone or other who evidently

had never known what faith is.

 I now permit myself to say that it was a cruel demand, but I

did not then think so: only it was indescribably painful to me. I

was no longer in the position in which I had been in youth when I

thought all in life was clear; I had indeed come to faith because,

apart from faith, I had found nothing, certainly nothing, except

destruction; therefore to throw away that faith was impossible and

I submitted. And I found in my soul a feeling which helped me to

endure it. This was the feeling of self-abasement and humility.

I humbled myself, swallowed that flesh and blood without any

blasphemous feelings and with a wish to believe. But the blow had

been struck and, knowing what awaited me, I could not go a second

time.

 I continued to fulfil the rites of the Church and still

believed that the doctrine I was following contained the truth,

when something happened to me which I now understand but which then

seemed strange.

 I was listening to the conversation of an illiterate peasant,

a pilgrim, about God, faith, life, and salvation, when a knowledge

of faith revealed itself to me. I drew near to the people,

listening to their opinions of life and faith, and I understood the

truth more and more. So also was it when I read the Lives of Holy

men, which became my favourite books. Putting aside the miracles

and regarding them as fables illustrating thoughts, this reading

revealed to me life's meaning. There were the lives of Makarius

the Great, the story of Buddha, there were the words of St. John

Chrysostom, and there were the stories of the traveller in the

well, the monk who found some gold, and of Peter the publican.

There were stories of the martyrs, all announcing that death does

not exclude life, and there were the stories of ignorant, stupid

men, who knew nothing of the teaching of the Church but who yet

were saves.

 But as soon as I met learned believers or took up their books,

doubt of myself, dissatisfaction, and exasperated disputation were

roused within me, and I felt that the more I entered into the

meaning of these men's speech, the more I went astray from truth

and approached an abyss.

                           XV



 How often I envied the peasants their illiteracy and lack of

learning! Those statements in the creeds which to me were evident

absurdities, for them contained nothing false; they could accept

them and could believe in the truth -- the truth I believed in.

Only to me, unhappy man, was it clear that with truth falsehood was

interwoven by finest threads, and that I could not accept it in

that form.

 So I lived for about three years.  At first, when I was only

slightly associated with truth as a catechumen and was only

scenting out what seemed to me clearest, these encounters struck me

less. When I did not understand anything, I said, "It is my fault,

I am sinful"; but the more I became imbued with the truths I was

learning, the more they became the basis of my life, the more

oppressive and the more painful became these encounters and the

sharper became the line between what I do not understand because I

am not able to understand it, and what cannot be understood except

by lying to oneself.

 In spite of my doubts and sufferings I still clung to the

Orthodox Church. But questions of life arose which had to be

decided; and the decision of these questions by the Church --

contrary to the very bases of the belief by which I lived --

obliged me at last to renounce communion with Orthodoxy as

impossible. These questions were: first the relation of the

Orthodox Eastern Church to other Churches -- to the Catholics and

to the so-called sectarians. At that time, in consequence of my

interest in religion, I came into touch with believers of various

faiths: Catholics, protestants, Old-Believers, Molokans [Footnote:

A sect that rejects sacraments and ritual.], and others. And I

met among them many men of lofty morals who were truly religious.

I wished to be a brother to them. And what happened? That

teaching which promised to unite all in one faith and love -- that

very teaching, in the person of its best representatives, told me

that these men were all living a lie; that what gave them their

power of life was a temptation of the devil; and that we alone

possess the only possible truth. And I saw that all who do not

profess an identical faith with themselves are considered by the

Orthodox to be heretics, just as the Catholics and others consider

the Orthodox to be heretics. And i saw that the Orthodox (though

they try to hide this) regard with hostility all who do not express

their faith by the same external symbols and words as themselves;

and this is naturally so; first, because the assertion that you are

in falsehood and I am in truth, is the most cruel thing one man can

say to another; and secondly, because a man loving his children and

brothers cannot help being hostile to those who wish to pervert his

children and brothers to a false belief. And that hostility is

increased in proportion to one's greater knowledge of theology.

And to me who considered that truth lay in union by love, it became

self-evident that theology was itself destroying what it ought to

produce.

 This offence is so obvious to us educated people who have

lived in countries where various religions are professed and have

seen the contempt, self-assurance, and invincible contradiction

with which Catholics behave to the Orthodox Greeks and to the

Protestants, and the Orthodox to Catholics and Protestants, and the

Protestants to the two others, and the similar attitude of Old-

Believers, Pashkovites (Russian Evangelicals), Shakers, and all

religions -- that the very obviousness of the temptation at first

perplexes us. One says to oneself: it is impossible that it is so

simple and that people do not see that if two assertions are

mutually contradictory, then neither of them has the sole truth

which faith should possess. There is something else here, there

must be some explanation. I thought there was, and sought that

explanation and read all I could on the subject, and consulted all

whom I could. And no one gave me any explanation, except the one

which causes the Sumsky Hussars to consider the Sumsky Hussars the

best regiment in the world, and the Yellow Uhlans to consider that

the best regiment in the world is the Yellow Uhlans. The

ecclesiastics of all the different creeds, through their best

representatives, told me nothing but that they believed themselves

to have the truth and the others to be in error, and that all they

could do was to pray for them. I went to archimandrites, bishops,

elders, monks of the strictest orders, and asked them; but none of

them made any attempt to explain the matter to me except one man,

who explained it all and explained it so that I never asked any one

any more about it. I said that for every unbeliever turning to a

belief (and all our young generation are in a position to do so)

the question that presents itself first is, why is truth not in

Lutheranism nor in Catholicism, but in Orthodoxy? Educated in the

high school he cannot help knowing what the peasants do not know --

that the Protestants and Catholics equally affirm that their faith

is the only true one. Historical evidence, twisted by each

religion in its own favour, is insufficient. Is it not possible,

said I, to understand the teaching in a loftier way, so that from

its height the differences should disappear, as they do for one who

believes truly? Can we not go further along a path like the one we

are following with the Old-Believers? They emphasize the fact that

they have a differently shaped cross and different alleluias and a

different procession round the altar. We reply: You believe in

the Nicene Creed, in the seven sacraments, and so do we. Let us

hold to that, and in other matters do as you pease. We have united

with them by placing the essentials of faith above the

unessentials. Now with the Catholics can we not say: You believe

in so and so and in so and so, which are the chief things, and as

for the Filioque clause and the Pope -- do as you please. Can we

not say the same to the Protestants, uniting with them in what is

most important?

 My interlocutor agreed with my thoughts, but told me that such

conceptions would bring reproach o the spiritual authorities for

deserting the faith of our forefathers, and this would produce a

schism; and the vocation of the spiritual authorities is to

safeguard in all its purity the Greco-Russian Orthodox faith

inherited from our forefathers.

 And I understood it all.  I am seeking a faith, the power of

life; and they are seeking the best way to fulfil in the eyes of

men certain human obligations. and fulfilling these human affairs

they fulfil them in a human way. However much they may talk of

their pity for their erring brethren, and of addressing prayers for

them to the throne of the Almighty -- to carry out human purposes

violence is necessary, and it has always been applied and is and

will be applied. If of two religions each considers itself true

and the other false, then men desiring to attract others to the

truth will preach their own doctrine. And if a false teaching is

preached to the inexperienced sons of their Church -- which as the

truth -- then that Church cannot but burn the books and remove the

man who is misleading its sons. What is to be done with a

sectarian -- burning, in the opinion of the Orthodox, with the fire

of false doctrine -- who in the most important affair of life, in

faith, misleads the sons of the Church? What can be done with him

except to cut off his head or to incarcerate him? Under the Tsar

Alexis Mikhaylovich people were burned at the stake, that is to

say, the severest method of punishment of the time was applied, and

in our day also the severest method of punishment is applied --

detention in solitary confinement. [Footnote: At the time this

was written capital punishment was considered to be abolished in

Russia. -- A.M.]

 The second relation of the Church to a question of life was

with regard to war and executions.

 At that time Russia was at war.  And Russians, in the name of

Christian love, began to kill their fellow men. It was impossible

not to think about this, and not to see that killing is an evil

repugnant to the first principles of any faith. Yet prayers were

said in the churches for the success of our arms, and the teachers

of the Faith acknowledged killing to be an act resulting from the

Faith. And besides the murders during the war, I saw, during the

disturbances which followed the war, Church dignitaries and

teachers and monks of the lesser and stricter orders who approved

the killing of helpless, erring youths. And I took note of all

that is done by men who profess Christianity, and I was horrified.

                           XVI



 And I ceased to doubt, and became fully convinced that not all

was true in the religion I had joined. Formerly I should have said

that it was all false, but I could not say so now. The whole of

the people possessed a knowledge of the truth, for otherwise they

could not have lived. Moreover, that knowledge was accessible to

me, for I had felt it and had lived by it. But I no longer doubted

that there was also falsehood in it. And all that had previously

repelled me now presented itself vividly before me. And though I

saw that among the peasants there was a smaller admixture of the

lies that repelled me than among the representatives of the

Church, I still saw that in the people's belief also falsehood was

mingled with the truth.

 But where did the truth and where did the falsehood come from? 

Both the falsehood and the truth were contained in the so-called

holy tradition and in the Scriptures. Both the falsehood and the

truth had been handed down by what is called the Church.

 And whether I liked or not, I was brought to the study and

investigation of these writings and traditions -- which till now I

had been so afraid to investigate.

 And I turned to the examination of that same theology which I

had once rejected with such contempt as unnecessary. Formerly it

seemed to me a series of unnecessary absurdities, when on all sides

I was surrounded by manifestations of life which seemed to me clear

and full of sense; now I should have been glad to throw away what

would not enter a health head, but I had nowhere to turn to. On

this teaching religious doctrine rests, or at least with it the

only knowledge of the meaning of life that I have found is

inseparably connected. However wild it may seem too my firm old

mind, it was the only hope of salvation. It had to be carefully,

attentively examined in order to understand it, and not even to

understand it as I understand the propositions of science: I do

not seek that, nor can I seek it, knowing the special character of

religious knowledge. I shall not seek the explanation of

everything. I know that the explanation of everything, like the

commencement of everything, must be concealed in infinity. But I

wish to understand in a way which will bring me to what is

inevitably inexplicable. I wish to recognize anything that is

inexplicable as being so not because the demands of my reason are

wrong (they are right, and apart from them I can understand

nothing), but because I recognize the limits of my intellect. I

wish to understand in such a way that everything that is

inexplicable shall present itself to me as being necessarily

inexplicable, and not as being something I am under an arbitrary

obligation to believe.

 That there is truth in the teaching is to me indubitable, but

it is also certain that there is falsehood in it, and I must find

what is true and what is false, and must disentangle the one from

the other. I am setting to work upon this task. What of falsehood

I have found in the teaching and what I have found of truth, and to

what conclusions I came, will form the following parts of this

work, which if it be worth it and if anyone wants it, will probably

some day be printed somewhere.

 1879.



 The foregoing was written by me some three years ago, and will

be printed.

 Now a few days ago, when revising it and returning to the line

of thought and to the feelings I had when I was living through it

all, I had a dream. This dream expressed in condensed form all

that I had experienced and described, and I think therefore that,

for those who have understood me, a description of this dream will

refresh and elucidate and unify what has been set forth at such

length in the foregoing pages. The dream was this:

 I saw that I was lying on a bed.  I was neither comfortable

nor uncomfortable: I was lying on my back. But I began to consider

how, and on what, I was lying -- a question which had not till then

occurred to me. And observing my bed, I saw I was lying on plaited

string supports attached to its sides: my feet were resting on one

such support, by calves on another, and my legs felt uncomfortable.

I seemed to know that those supports were movable, and with a

movement of my foot I pushed away the furthest of them at my feet -

• it seemed to me that it would be more comfortable so. But I

pushed it away too far and wished to reach it again with my foot,

and that movement caused the next support under my calves to slip

away also, so that my legs hung in the air. I made a movement with

my whole body to adjust myself, fully convinced that I could do so

at once; but the movement caused the other supports under me to

slip and to become entangled, and I saw that matters were going

quite wrong: the whole of the lower part of my body slipped and

hung down, though my feet did not reach the ground. I was holding

on only by the upper part of my back, and not only did it become

uncomfortable but I was even frightened. And then only did I ask

myself about something that had not before occurred to me. I asked

myself: Where am I and what am I lying on? and I began to look

around and first of all to look down in the direction which my body

was hanging and whiter I felt I must soon fall. I looked down and

did not believe my eyes. I was not only at a height comparable to

the height of the highest towers or mountains, but at a height such

as I could never have imagined.

 I could not even make out whether I saw anything there below,

in that bottomless abyss over which I was hanging and whiter I was

being drawn. My heart contracted, and I experienced horror. To

look thither was terrible. If I looked thither I felt that I

should at once slip from the last support and perish. And I did

not look. But not to look was still worse, for I thought of what

would happen to me directly I fell from the last support. And I

felt that from fear I was losing my last supports, and that my back

was slowly slipping lower and lower. Another moment and I should

drop off. And then it occurred to me that this cannot e real. It

is a dream. Wake up! I try to arouse myself but cannot do so.

What am I to do? What am I to do? I ask myself, and look upwards.

Above, there is also an infinite space. I look into the immensity

of sky and try to forget about the immensity below, and I really do

forget it. The immensity below repels and frightens me; the

immensity above attracts and strengthens me. I am still supported

above the abyss by the last supports that have not yet slipped from

under me; I know that I am hanging, but I look only upwards and my

fear passes. As happens in dreams, a voice says: "Notice this,

this is it!" And I look more and more into the infinite above me

and feel that I am becoming calm. I remember all that has

happened, and remember how it all happened; how I moved my legs,

how I hung down, how frightened I was, and how I was saved from

fear by looking upwards. And I ask myself: Well, and now am I not

hanging just the same? And I do not so much look round as

experience with my whole body the point of support on which I am

held. I see that I no longer hang as if about to fall, but am

firmly held. I ask myself how I am held: I feel about, look round,

and see that under me, under the middle of my body, there is one

support, and that when I look upwards I lie on it in the position

of securest balance, and that it alone gave me support before. And

then, as happens in dreams, I imagined the mechanism by means of

which I was held; a very natural intelligible, and sure means,

though to one awake that mechanism has no sense. I was even

surprised in my dream that I had not understood it sooner. It

appeared that at my head there was a pillar, and the security of

that slender pillar was undoubted though there was nothing to

support it. From the pillar a loop hung very ingeniously and yet

simply, and if one lay with the middle of one's body in that loop

and looked up, there could be no question of falling. This was all

clear to me, and I was glad and tranquil. And it seemed as if

someone said to me: "See that you remember."

 And I awoke.

End