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 ...

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, b...

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 Europeans3 confirmed...

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...

“But perhaps I have overlooked something, or misunderstood something?” said I to myself several times. “It cannot be that this condition of despair is natural to man!” And I sought for an explanation ...

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 ho...

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...

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 van...

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. A...

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 Buddhi...

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 reasonab...

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 ...

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 l...

It 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 i...

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...

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 pe...

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...

“Nothing so forms a young man as an intimacy with a woman of good breeding.” ↩ Tolstoy makes a slip here: he was twenty-seven. ↩ Russians generally make a distinction between Europeans and Russians. ↩...