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The Movement of Faith as Revealed in Tolstoi's Confession

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2011

David Patterson
David Patterson
Affiliation:
University of OregonEugene, OR 97403
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Extract

Tolstoi's Confession is the story of the spiritual crisis which its author experienced during the late 1870s, when the man who had written War and Peace and Anna Karenina came to believe that he had accomplished nothing in life, that his life was meaningless. Although there are parallels between the torments of Levin in Anna Karenina and Tolstoi's own conflicts in the Confession, the latter piece was written in 1879, two years after the publication of the former, and represents a more developed reflection on “the problem of life.” As I shall argue in this article, the resolution of the crisis related in Tolstoi's Confession comes in a movement of faith which emerges as the fourth aspect of a four-dimensional change or metamorphosis within the individual. The four-dimensions of the metamorphosis may be described as (1) the encounter with death, (2) the onset of despair, (3) the struggle for possibility, and (4) the movement of faith. Let us now see how an analysis of the movement of faith as revealed in Tolstoi's Confession may be rendered in these terms.

Type
Research Article
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 71 , Issue 3-4 , October 1978 , pp. 227 - 243
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1978

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References

1 Tolstoi, L. N., Ispoved' (Confession) in Sobranie sochinenii (Collected Works) XVI (Moscow, 1964) 94Google Scholar. All further references to this work will be followed by the letter “I” and page number.

2 Troyat, Henri, Tolstoi (Paris: Fayard, 1965) 390Google Scholar.

3 Tolstoi, Smert Ivana Il'icha (The Death of Ivan Il'ich) SS XII. 106.

4 Ibid., 98.

5 Tolstoi, Anna Karenina, SS IX. 409.

6 See Plato, Phaedo, trans. Tredennick, Hugh in The Collected Dialogues (ed. Hamilton, Edith and Cairns, Huntington; Princeton: Princeton University, 1969) 44–52Google Scholar.

7 Kierkegaard, Søren, Repetition (trans. Walter Lowrie; Princeton: Princeton University, 1941) 34Google Scholar.

8 Ibid., 4.

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10 Ibid., 307.

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