A Confession

Tolstoy continually contrasts himself and other people of his “class,” meaning the educated and relatively affluent Russians of his time, with working-class people, and finds the elite class to be leading inferior lives. The elites are “parasites” (69) who refuse to face discomfort, while common laborers endure their lot in life without complaint. Most importantly, elites wander through life aimlessly while poor workers live rich lives full of meaning. A pivot point in Tolstoy’s narrative comes when he decides to abandon his class and take on the life of a simple laborer to discover meaning.

In Chapter 7, Tolstoy compares the fable of the dragon to his existential crisis. In this fable, a man is hanging on a branch over a pit with a hungry dragon at the bottom. Two mice are slowly gnawing away at the branch. The man’s only solace is drops of honey on the leaves of the branch, which he enjoys while his life is in increasing peril. In terms of Tolstoy’s narrative, we can imagine that the dragon represents death; the branch is our life on Earth; the mice represent time passing; and the honey is everything in life that distracts us from our demise. Notably absent from this scenario is any sense of meaning.

Tolstoy’s A Confession both celebrates the rational mind and rebukes reason when it comes to apprehending the meaning of life. The author is deeply committed to rational thought and does an impressive job delineating the proper role of the sciences. He also exhausts all possible paths to meaning using his reason. However, he is equally committed to casting reason aside when he realizes that it blocks his path to a meaningful life. His ultimate quest at the end of the book is to determine where the limits of reason can be found and where the mysterious and inexplicable parts of life begin.