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Leo Tolstoy
Confession

With all my heart I wanted to be good, but I was young, and I was alone – very much alone – in wanting to be good. Any time I tried to talk about my sincere desire to be the best person I could be, others laughed at me. But when I would do what was wrong, others encouraged me and said only good things about me. Pride, greed, adultery, anger, hate – these were all encouraged, not only by my friends, but by older people.

By giving in to these wrong spirits, I became like the older people around me, and I could feel that they were happy with me. I remember a kind aunt that I lived with. She herself was a clean-living person; but she told me that she believed I should have sex with a married woman, because it would make a man of me. Another happiness that she wanted for me was that I should become a leader in the army. And her greatest happiness would come from seeing me marry a very rich girl and having as many servants as I liked.

I cannot think of those years without feeling very sad. I killed men in war, and in gun fights over arguments. I lost much money at cards, lived off the hard work of the poor, and punished them when they did not do what I wanted. Lying, killing, robbing, and adultery – I did it all. But nothing I did stopped my friends from thinking that I was a very good person.

I lived like this for ten years.

And it was at this time that I started writing. I did it for the money, and for people to think well of me. But with my writing, as with my life, I learned that I must hide the good and show what is bad if I wanted people to buy my books. If I wanted to say something serious, I was forced to hide it, by making people think that I myself did not have a strong feeling one way or the other. I was very good at doing this, and people loved me for it.

When I was twenty-six or twenty-seven, I returned from the war, to Petersburg. That is where I started meeting other writers. They welcomed me as one of them, and they said nice things about me. I quickly took on their beliefs about life, and this is where I lost all touch with my early plan to be good. The writers had a teaching that made it right for us to be as selfish as we wanted.

The teaching that my writer friends had was this: Life gets slowly better and better, and we educated people are the most important ones in making this happen. Of the educated people, we writers and those who work with art have the greatest effect. It is our job to teach the whole world. If any of us should ask ourselves, "What do I know, and what can I teach?" and should find that we do not know the answers to life, that is not a problem. The teaching has an answer for that. The answer is that we do not need to know; we will be teaching best when we do not know what it is that we teach.

Because people believed that I was a great writer, it was very easy for me to believe this teaching. Just by writing, I received money. With this, I could have the best food, the best places to sleep, all the women I wanted, and important friends. It is not important that I had nothing to say; my wealth showed that I must be saying what needed to be said!

This faith was a religion for myself and my friends, and I was a priest in this religion. But by the third year of this life, I started to question it. I could see that we priests ourselves did not agree on much of anything. The priests were always fighting with one another. And there were some that had no interest at all in what was right or wrong, but only in making money. I could see that my writer friends were even worse than my soldier friends when it came to how they lived their lives. For the most part, they were very bad people who had the kind of over-confident spirit that only comes when a person is either very good or when a person does not know what being good is all about. Clearly, they were from the second group. I became sick of these men, and I became sick of myself. I could see that the religion of the writers was a lie.

But even after seeing the lie behind it, I did not stop writing. I still believed that I could teach the world without, myself, knowing what I was teaching. I had, by then, far too much pride, and it showed in my writing.

When I think of that time, it makes me feel like I was in a hospital for crazy people. We all believed that what we had to say was important, and that we should talk, write, and print as quickly as we could and as much as we could, and that it was all for the good of the world. Thousands of us disagreed with each other, but we never saw that as a problem. And we never saw that not one of us had the answer to the easiest question in life: What is good and what is bad? We all talked at the same time, not listening to one another. At times we would say something good about another in return for the other saying something good about us, and at times we would become very angry with one another. We were always angry that the world was not taking us seriously enough. How very much like a hospital full of crazy people we were!

It is all very clear to me now, but it was not then. I can see now that all we wanted was to make money and to have people think well of us. Because all we knew to do was to write books and papers, that is what we did. Because our work was of no great use, we were forced to make a teaching between ourselves that said we were the most important people in the world. And because people gave us money for our writing, that was enough to make us confident that our teaching was right.

I can see now how crazy we all were, but because it was not so clear then, like all crazy people, I told myself that the others were crazy, but I was not.

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