Ocean Vuong Recommends: Leo Tolstoy's 'A Confession'

A Confession and Other Religious Writings by Leo Tolstoy “A sobering and illuminating account of Tolstoy’s great disenchantment of his own career and literary achievements. I was lucky enough to come across this early in my writing life and was taken by Tolstoy’s warning of the devolvement of altruism and self-belief into delusion and pettiness which runs rampant in every epoch of artistic production. The whole essay is a beautiful and elegant reckoning, reminding us that even those who achieve the pinnacle of their work are capable of immense and debilitating doubt, not prior or during the creation of indelible works – but even after that work has been recognised and celebrated by the public.” – Ocean Vuong But strange to say, even though the utter falsehood of this creed was something I came quickly to understand and to reject, I did not discard the rank these people bestowed on me: that of artist, poet and teacher. I naively imagined that I was a poet and an artist. And this is what I did. Through my association with these men I acquired a new vice: an unhealthily developed pride, and an insane conviction that it was my vocation to teach people without knowing what I was teaching. Now, when I think about this period and about my state of mind and that of those around me (and incidentally there are thousands of them nowadays), I feel sad, terrible, ridiculous; it arouses in me precisely the same feelings as one might experience in a madhouse. At the time we were all convinced that we must talk and talk and write and publish as quickly as possible, and as much as possible, and that this was all necessary for the good of mankind. And thousands of us, contradicting and abusing one another, published and wrote with the aim of teaching others. Failing to notice that we knew nothing, that we did not know the answer to the most basic question of life – what is good and what is evil – we all spoke at the same time, never listening to one another. At times we indulged and praised each other in order to be indulged and praised in return, at other times we grew angry and shrieked at each other, just as if we were in a madhouse. Thousands of workers toiled day and night, assembling millions and millions of words, which were distributed by post over the whole of Russia; and we taught and taught, but never managed to impart all that we had to teach, and were always annoyed that we were given so little attention. Horribly strange, but now I understand it all. Our genuine, sincere concern was over how to gain as much money and fame as possible. And the only thing we knew how to do in order to achieve this aim was to write books and journals. This is what we did. But in order for us to pursue this utterly useless task and have the assurance that we were very important people we needed an argument that would justify what we were doing. And so we devised the following; everything that exists is rational and all that exists evolves. And it evolves through enlightenment. Enlightenment is measured through the distribution of books and journals. We are paid and respected for writing these books and papers, so we must be the most important and useful people. This theory would have been all very well had we been in agreement; but since any thought expressed by any one of us was always contradicted by the diametrically opposed views of another, we should have been forced to rethink. But we did not notice this; we were paid money and those who sided with us praised us, consequently every one of us believed himself to be in the right. It is now clear to me that there was no difference between our behaviour and that of people in a madhouse; but at the time I only dimly suspected this and, like all madmen, I thought everyone was mad except myself. Excerpt from A Confession and Other Religious Writings by Leo Tolstoy. The first attempt at its publication took place in 1882 (Russkaya Mysl, No 5), but Tolstoy’s work was removed virtually from the whole edition of the journal by Orthodox Church censorship. The text was later published in Geneva, in 1884, and in Russia as late as 1906 (Vsemirnyj Vestnik, No 1)