My confession; and, The spirit of Christ's teaching

Contents

MY CONFESSION.

CHAPTER PAGK

ism at college — Demetry Tolstoi's mysticism — How one ceases to believe — Orthodoxy not a security for virtue — History of S. — Faith in perfection 1

II

At some future time I may relate the story of my life, and dwell in detail on the pathetic and instructive incidents of my youth. Many others must have passed through the same as I did. I honestly desired to make myself a good and virtuous man ; but I was young, I had passions, and I stood alone, altogether alone, in my search after virtue. Every time I tried y to express the longings of my heart for a truly virtuous life, I was met with contempt and derisive laughter, but directly I gave way to the lowest of my passions, I was praised and encouraged. I found ambition, love of power, love of gain, lechery, pride, anger, vengeance, held in high esteem. I gave way to these passions, and becoming like unto my elders, I felt that the place which I filled in the world satisfied those around me. My kind-hearted aunt, a really good woman, used to say to me, that there was one thing above all others which 9 she wished for me — an intrigue with a married woman: "Rien ne forme un jeune homme, corarae une liaison avec une femme comrae il faut." Another of her wishes for my happiness was that I should become an adjutant, and, if possible, to the Emperor ; the greatest happiness of all for me she thought would be that I should find a wealthy bride, who would bring me as her dowry an enormous number of slaves.

I cannot now recall those years without a painful feeling of horror and loathing.

I put men to death in war, I fought duels to slay others, I lost at cards, wasted my substance wrung from the sweat of peasants, punished the latter cruelly, rioted with loose women, and deceived men. Lying, robbery, adultery of all kinds, drunkenness, violence, and murder, all committed by me, not one crime omitted, and yet I was not the less considered by my equals a comparatively moral man. Such was my life during ten years.

During that time I began to write, out of vanity, love of gain, and pride. I followed as a writer the same path which I had chosen as a man. In order to obtain the fame and the money for which I wrote, I was obliged to hide what was good and bow down before what was evil. How often while writing have I cudgelled my brains to conceal under the mask of indifference or pleasantry those yearnings for something better which formed the real problem of my life ! I succeeded ill my object, and was praised. At twenty-six years of age, on the close of the war, I came to St. Petersburg and made the acquaintance of the authors of the day.

I met with a hearty reception and much flattery.

Before I had time to look around, the prejudices and views of life common to the writers of the class with which I associated became my own, and completely put an end to all my former struggles after a better life. These views, under the influence of the dissipation into which I plunged, issued in a theory of life which justified it. The view of life taken by these my fellow-writers was that life is a development, and the principal part in that development is played by ourselves, the thinkers, while among the thinkers the chief influence is again due to ourselves, the poets. Our vocation is to teach mankind.

In order to avoid answering the very natural question, "What do I know, and what can I teach ? " the theory in question is made to contain the formula that such is not required to be known, but that the thinker and the poet teach unconsciously. I was myself considered a marvellous litterateur and poet, and I therefore very naturally adopted this theory. Meanwhile, thinker and poet though I was, I wrote and taught I knew not what. For doing this I received large sums of money ; I kept a splendid table, had an excellent lodging, associated with loose women, and received my friends handsomely ; moreover, I had fame. It would seem, then, that what I taught must have been good; the faith in poetry and the development of life was a true faith, and I was one of its high priests, a post of great importance, and of profit. I long remained in this belief, and never once doubted its truth.

In the second, however, and especially in the third year of this way of life, I began to doubt the infallibility of the doctrine, and to examine it more closely. The first doubtful fact which attracted my attention was that the apostles of this belief did not agree among themselves. Some proclaimed that they alone were good and useful teachers, and all others worthless ; while those opposed to them said the same of themselves. They disputed, quarrelled, abused, deceived, and cheated one another.

Moreover, there were many among us who, quite indifferent to right or wrong, only cared for their own private interests. All this forced on me doubts as to the truth of our belief. Again, when I doubted this faith in the influence of literary men, I began to examine more closely into the character and conduct of its chief professors, and I convinced myself that these writers were men who led immoral lives, most of them worthless and insignificant individuals, and far beneath the moral level of those with whom I had associated during my former dissipated and military career; these men, however, had none the less an amount of self-confidence only to be expected in those who

J are conscious of being saints, or in those for whom holiness is an empty name.

I grew disgusted with mankind and with myself, and I understood that this belief which I had accepted was a delusion. The strangest tiling in all this was that, though I soon saw the falseness of this belief and renounced it, I did not renounce the position I had gained by it ; I still called myself a thinker, a poet, and a teacher. I was simple enough to imagine that I, the poet and thinker, was able to teach other men without knowing myself what it was that I attempted to teach. I had only gained a new vice by my companionship with these men ; it had developed pride in me to a morbid extreme, and my self-confidence in teaching what I did not know amounted almost to insanity. When I now think over that time, and remember my own state of mind and that of these men (a state of mind common enough among thousands still), it seems to me pitiful, terrible, and ridiculous ; it excites the feelings which overcome us as we pass through a madhouse. We were all then convinced that it behooved us to speak, to write, and to print as fast as we could, as much as we could, and that on this depended the welfare of the human race. Hundreds of us wrote, printed, and taught, and all the while confuted and abused each other. Quite unconscious that we ourselves knew nothing, that to the simplest of all problems in life — what is right, and what is wrong — we had no answer, we all went on talking together without one to listen, at times abetting and praising one another on condition that we were abetted and praised in turn, and again turning upon each other in wrath — in short, we reproduced the scenes in a madhouse. Hundreds of exhausted laborers worked day and night, putting up the type and printing millions of pages to be spread by the post all over Russia, and still we continued to teach, unable to teach enough, angrily complaining the while that we were not listened to. A strange state of things indeed, but now it is clear enough. The real motive that inspired all our reasoning was the desire for money and praise, to obtain which we knew of no other means than writing books and newspapers. In order, however, while thus uselessly employed, to hold fast to the conviction that we were

16 MY COXFESSIOK.

really of importance to society, it was necessary to justify our occupation to ourselves by another theory, and the following was the one we adopted: Whatever is, is-right; everything that is, is due to development, and the latter again to civilization ; the measure of civilization is the figure to which the publication of books and newspapers reaches ; we are paid and honored for the books and newspapers which we write, and we are therefore the most useful and best of all citizens.

This reasoning might have been conclusive, had we all been agreed ; but, as for every opinion expressed by one of us there instantly appeared from another, one diametrically opposite, we had to hesitate before accepting it. But this we passed over ; we received money, and were praised by those who agreed with us, consequently we were in the right. It is now clear to me that between ourselves and the inhabitants of a madhouse there was no difference : at the time I only vaguely suspected this, and, like all madmen, thought all were mad except myself.

III

I lived in this senseless manner another six years, up to the time of my marriage. During the interval I had been abroad. My life in ^/ Europe, and my acquaintance with many eminent and learned foreigners, confirmed my belief in the doctrine of general perfectibility, as I found the same theory prevailed among them. This belief took the form which is common among most cultivated men of the day. It may be summed up in the word " progress." It then appeared to me this word had a real meaning. I did not understand that, tormented like other men by the question, " How was I to better my life ? " when I answered that I must live for progress, I was only repeating the answer of a man carried away in a boat by the waves and the wind, who to the one important question for him, " Where are we to steer?" should answer, saying, "We are being carried somewhere."

This I then did not see ; it was only at rare 17 intervals that my feelings, and not my reason, were roused against the common superstition of our age, which leads men to ignore their own ignorance of life. j Thus, during my stay in Paris, the sight of a

public execution revealed to me the weakness of my superstitious belief in progress. When I saw the head divided from the body, and heard the sound with which they fell separately into the box, I understood, not with ray reason, but with my whole being, that no theory of the wisdom of all established things, nor of progress, could justify such an act ; and that if all the men in the world from the day of creation, by whatever theory, had found this thing necessary, it was not so ; it was a bad thing, and that therefore I must judge of what was right and necessary, not by what men said and did, not by progress, but what I felt to be true in my heart.

Another instance of the insufficiency of this superstition of progress as a rule for life was the death of my brother. He fell ill while still young, suffered much during a whole year, and died in great pain. He was a man of good

MY CONFESSIOy. 19

abilities, of a kind heart, and of a serious temper, but he died without understanding why he had lived, or what his death meant for him. No theories could give an answer to these questions, either to him or to me, during the whole period of his long and painful lingering. Then occasions for doubt, however, were few and far between ; on the whole, I continued to live in the profession of the faith of progress. "Everything develops, and I myself develop as well ; and why this is so will one day be apparent," was the formula I was obliged to adopt.

On my return from abroad I settled in the country, and occupied myself with the organization of schools for the peasantry. This occupation was especially grateful to me, because it was free from the spirit of falseness so evident to me in the career of a literary teacher.

Here again I acted in the name of progress but this time I brought a spirit of 'critical inquiry to the system on which the progress rested. I said to myself that progress was often attempted in an irrational manner, and

•that it was necessary to leave a primitive people and the children of peasants perfectly free to choose the way of progress which they thought best. In reality I was still bent on the solution of the same impossible problem, how to teach without knowing what I had to teach. In the highest sphere of literature I had understood that it was impossible to do this because I had seen that each taught differently, and that the teachers quarrelled among themselves, and scarcely succeeded in concealing their ignorance. Having now to deal with peasants' children, I thought that I could get over this difficulty by allowing the children to learn what they liked. It seems now absurd when I remember the expedients by which I carried out this whim of mine to teach, though I knew in my heart that I could teach nothing useful, because I myself did not know what was necessary.

After a year spent in this employment with the schools, I again went abroad, for the purpose of finding out how I was to teach under these conditions.

I believed that I had found a solution abroad, and, armed with that conviction, I returned to Russia, the same year in which the peasants were freed from serfdom ; and, accepting the office of a country magistrate or arbitrator, I began to teach the uneducated people in the schools, and the educated classes in the journals which I published. Things seemed to be going on well, but I felt that my mind was not in a normal state and that a change was near. I might then, perhaps, have come to that state of absolute despair to which I was brought fifteen years later, if it had not been for a new experience in life which promised me safety — the home life of a family man. For a year I occupied myself with my duties as arbitrator, with the schools, and my newspaper, and got so involved that I was harassed to death ; my arbitration was one continual struggle, what to do in the schools became less and less clear, and my newspaper shuffling more and more repugnant to me, always the same thing — trying to teach without knowing how or what — so that I fell ill, more with a mental than physical sickness, gave up everything, and started for the steppes to breathe a fresher air, to drink mare's milk, and live a mere animal life.

Soon after my return I married. The new circumstances of a happy family life by whicli I was now surrounded completely led my mind away from the search after the meaning of life as a whole. My life was concentrated in my family, my wife, and children, and consequently in the care for increasing the means of supporting them. The effort to effect my own individual perfection, already replaced by the striving after general progress, was again changed into an effort to secure the particular happiness of my family. In this way fifteen years passed. Notwithstanding that during these fifteen years I looked upon the craft of authorship as a very trifling thing, I continued all the time to write. I had experienced the seductions of authorship, the temptations of an enormous pecuniary reward and of great applause for valueless work, and gave myself up to it as a means of improving my material position, and of stifling all the feelings which led me to question my own life and that of society for the meaning in them. In my writings I taught what for me was the only truth, that the object of life should be our own happiness and that of our family.

By this rule I lived; but five years ago, a strange state of mind-torpor began at times to grow upon me. I had moments of perplexity, of a stoppage, as it were, of life, as if I did not know how I was to live, what I was to do. I began to wander, and was a victim to low spirits. This, however, passed, and I continued to live as before. Later, these periods of perplexity grew more and more frequent, and invariably took the same form. During their continuance the same questions always presented themselves to me : " Why ? " and " What after ? "

At first it seemed to me that these were empty and unmeaning questions, that all they asked about was well known, and that whenever I wished to find answers to them I could do so without much trouble — then I had no time for it. But these questions presented themselves to my mind with ever-increasing frequency, demanding an answer with still greater and greater persistence, grouping themselves into one dark and ominous spot. It was with me as iii every case of a hidden, mortal disease — at first the symptoms, as to its position, are slight, and are disregarded by the patient, while later they are repeated more and more frequently, till they end in a period of uninterrupted suffering. The sufferings increase, and the patient, before he has time to seek a remedy, is confronted with the fact that what he took for a mere indisposition has become more important to him than anything else on earth, that he is face to face with death.

This is exactly what happened mentally to myself. I became aware that this was not a mere passing phase of mental ill-health, that the symptoms were of the utmost importance, and that if these questions continued to recur, I must find an answer to them. I tried to answer them. The questions seemed so foolish, so simple, so childish; but no sooner had I begun my attempt to decide them than I was convinced that they were neither childish nor silly, but were concerned with the deepest problems of life, and again that I was, think of them as I would, utterly unable to find an answer to them.

Before occupying myself with my estate, with the education of my son, with the writing of books, I was bound to know why I did these things. Till I know the reasons for my own acts, I can do nothing, I cannot live. While thinking of the details of the management of my household and estate, which in these days occupied much of my time, the following question came into my head : " Well, I have now six ^thousand ' desatins ' in the govt rumen t of Samara, and three hundred horses — what then ? " I was quite disconcerted, and knew not what to think. Another time, dwelling on the thought of how I should educate my children, I asked myself, " Why t " Again, when considering by what means the well-being of the people might best be promoted, I suddenly exclaimed, " But what concern have I with it?" When I thought of the fame which my works had gained me, I used to say to myself, " Well, what if I should be more famous than Gogol, Poushkin, Shakespeare, Moliere — than all the writers of the world — well, and what then ? " I could find no reply. Such questions demand an answer, and an immediate one ; without one it is impossible to live, but answer there was none.

IV

My life had come to a sudden stop. I was able to breathe, to eat, to drink, to sleep. I could not, indeed, help doing so ; but there was no real life in me. I had not a single wish to strive for the fulfilment of what I could feel to be reasonable. If I wished for anything, I knew beforehand that, were I to satisfy the wish, nothing would come of it, I should still be dissatisfied. Had a fairy appeared and offered me all I desired, I should not have known what to say. If I seemed to have, at a given moment of excitement, not a wish, but a mood resulting from the tendencies of former wishes, at a calmer moment I knew that it was a delusion, that I really wished for nothing. I could not even wish to know the truth, because I guessed what the truth was.

The truth lay in this, that life had no meaning for me. Every day of life, every step in it, brought me nearer the edge of a precipice, 26 whence I saw clearly the final ruin before me. To stop, to go back, were alike impossible ; nor could I shut my eyes so as not to see the suffering that alone awaited me, the death of all in me, even to annihilation. Thus I, a healthy and a happy man, was brought to feel that I could live no longer, that an irresistible force was dragging me down into the grave. I do not mean that I had an intention of committing suicide. The force that drew me away from life was stronger, fuller, and concerned with far wider consequences than any mere wish ; it was a force like that of my previous attachment to life, only in a contrary direction. The idea of suicide came as naturally to me as formerly that of bettering my life. It had so much attraction for me that I was compelled to practise a species of self-deception, in order to avoid carrying it out too hastily. I was unwilling to act hastily, only because I had determined first to clear away the confusion of my thoughts, and, that once done, I could always kill myself. I was happy, yet I hid away a cord, to avoid being tempted to hang myself by it to one of the pegs between the cupboards of my study, where I undressed alone every evening, and ceased carrying a gun because it offered too easy a way of getting rid of life. I knew not what I wanted; I was afraid of life; I shrank from it, and yet there was something I hoped for from it.

Such was the condition I had come to, at a time when all the circumstances of my life were pre-eminently happy ones, and when I had not reached my fiftieth year. I had a good, a loving, and a well-beloved wife, good children, a fine estate, which, without much trouble on my part, continually increased my income ; I was more than ever respected by my friends and acquaintances; I was praised by strangers, and could lay claim to having made my name famous without much self-deception. Moreover, my mind was neither deranged nor weakened ; on the contrary, I enjoyed a mental and physical strength which I have seldom found in men of my class and pursuits : I could keep up with a peasant in mowing, and could continue mental labor for ten hours at a stretch, without any evil consequences.

The mental state in which I then was seemed

MY CONFESStOtf. 29

to me summed *up in the following : my life was a foolish and wicked joke played upon me by I knew not whom. Notwithstanding my rejection of the idea of a Creator, that of a being who thus wickedly and foolishly made a joke of me seemed to me the most natural of all conclusions, and the one that threw the most light upon my darkness. I instinctively reasoned that this being, wherever he might be, was one who was even then diverting himself at my expense, as he watched me, after from thirty to forty years of a life of study and development, of meirial and bodily growth, with all my powers matured and having reached the point at which life as a whole should be best understood, standing like a fool with but one thing clear to me, that there was nothing in life, that there never was anything, and never will be. "To him I must seem ridiculous. . . . But was there, or was there not, such a being?" Neither way could I feel it helped me. I could not attribute reasonable motive to any single act, much less to my whole life. I was only astonished that this had uot occurred to me before, from premises

30 MY confe'ssiox.

which had so long been known. Illness and death would come (indeed they had come), if not to-day, then to-morrow, to those whom I loved, to myself, and nothing would remain but stench and worms. All my acts, whatever I did, would sooner or later be forgotten, and I myself be nowhere. Why, then, busy one's self with anything ? How could men see this, and live ? It is possible to live only as long as life intoxicates us ; as soon as we are sober again we see that it is all a delusion, and a stupid one ! In this, indeed, there is nothing either ludicrous or amusing; it is only cruel and absurd.

There is an old Eastern fable about a traveller in the steppes who is attacked by a furious wild beast. To save himself the traveller gets into a dried-up well ; but at the bottom of it, he sees a dragon with its jaws wide-open to devour him. The unhappy man dares not get out for fear of the wild beast, and dares not descend for fear of the dragon, so he catches hold of the branch of a wild plant growing in a crevice of the well. His arms grow tired, and he feels that he must soon perish, death awaiting him on either side, but he still holds on ; and then he sees two mice, one black and one white, gnawing through the trunk of the wild plant, as they gradually and evenly make their way round it. The plant must soon give way, break off, and he will fall into the jaws of the dragon. The traveller sees this, and knows that he must inevitably perish ; but, while still hanging, he looks around him, and, finding some drops of honey on the leaves of the wild plant, he stretches out his tongue and licks them.

Thus do I cling to the branch of life, knowing that the dragon of death inevitably awaits me, ready to tear me to pieces, and I cannot understand why such tortures have fallen to my lot. I also strive to suck the honey which once comforted me, but it palls on my palate, while the white mouse and the black, day and night, gnaw through the branch to which I cling. I see the dragon too plainly, and the honey is no longer sweet. I see the dragon, from whom there is no escape, and the mice, and I cannot turn my eyes away from them. It is no fable, but a living, undeniable truth, to be understood of all men. The former delusion of happiness in life which hid from me the horror of the dragon, no longer deceives me. However I may reason with myself that I cannot understand the meaning of life, that I must live without thinking, I cannot again begin to do so, because I have done so too long already. I cannot now help seeing that eacli day and each night, as it passes, brings me nearer to death. I can see but this, because this alone is true — all the rest is a lie. The two drops of honey, which more than anything else drew me away from the cruel truth, my love for my family and for my writings, to which latter I gave the name of art, no longer taste sweet to me. " My family," thought I; "but a family, a wife and children, are also human beings, and subject to the same conditions as myself; they must either be living in a lie, or they must see the terrible truth. Why should they live? Why should I love, care for, bring up, and watch over them ? To bring them to the despair which fills myself, or to make dolts of them? As I love them, I cannot conceal from them the truth — every step they take in knowledge leads them to it, and that truth is death."

But art, then; but poetry? Under the influence of success and flattered by praise, I had long persuaded myself that these were things worth working for, notwithstanding the approach of death, the great destroyer, to annihilate my writings, and the memory of them ; but now I soon saw that this was only another delusion, I saw clearly that art is only the ornament and charm of life. Life having lost its charm for me, how could I make others see a charm in it? While I was not living my own life, but one that was external to me, as long as I believed that life had a meaning, though I could not say what it was, life was reflected for me in the poetry and art which I loved, it was pleasant to me to look into the mirror of art ; but when I tried to discover the meaning of life, when I felt the necessity of living myself, the mirror became either unnecessary or painful. I could no longer take comfort from what I saw in the mirror — that my position was a stupid and desperate one.