32 pages • 1 hour read
Leo TolstoyA Confession
Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | Published in 1880A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 7-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary
Having exhausted the answers provided by the sciences to the question of life, Tolstoy states that he turned to the answers provided by life itself in the behavior of the people around him. Tolstoy identifies “four means of escaping the terrible situation in which we all find ourselves” (49).
The first way is through ignorance; some people simply have not understood the problem of the meaninglessness of life. Tolstoy has nothing to learn from them. The second means of escape is epicureanism, enjoying life to the maximum despite realizing its hopelessness. This is a common escape for people of Tolstoy’s class, but he laments the “moral stupidity” (50) and lack of imagination that blinds these people to the fact that such pleasures will eventually end along with life itself. The third solution is suicide, which he believes to be “the most worthy means of escape” (51) but which he is unable to perform. Finally, there is the path of weakness: dragging out life in the knowledge of its meaningless just “waiting for something to happen” (51). Tolstoy had been living this way for years.
Tolstoy harbored some doubts about the meaninglessness of life because reason, which concludes that life is meaningless, is itself the fruit of life. How can reason deny life from which it arises? From ancient times, generations of people have instilled life with meanings, and Tolstoy is a mere student and beneficiary of the accumulated wisdom and achievements of these ancients. Who is Tolstoy to declare that all of this is meaningless? Despite his hunch that he made a mistake in the thought process that brought him to this point, Tolstoy “looked and looked and could not find where the mistake could be” (54).
Chapter 8 Summary
Tolstoy begins to express doubt about the reasoning that led him to the conclusion that life is meaningless. Some mysterious force encouraged him to focus on other things. The author’s intellectual pride had blinded him to the need to find meaning not from the answers provided by his peers “but among the millions of people, living and dead, who created life and took upon themselves the burden of their lives as well as our own” (56-57).
The author’s four escapes did not apply to the masses, who had access to a kind of knowledge previously dismissed by Tolstoy: faith, the nonrational knowledge through which most people find the meaning of life. Tolstoy concludes this chapter with the dilemma that to come to terms with the meaning of life, he would have to abandon reason, which he believed was the thing underpinning all meaning.
Chapters 7-8 Analysis
The seventh chapter brings the bleakness of Tolstoy’s situation into full view. He states that he believed suicide is the most reasonable course of action for any intelligent person, but he was too “weak” to go through with it. He counted himself among those pathetic intellectuals who “[continue] to drag out a life that is evil and meaningless, knowing beforehand that nothing can come out of it” (51). He wanted a way out of this position; he saw evidence of an ultimate intelligence existing in the universe, but he was unable to spot the error in his reasoning that would allow him to exit his cycle of doom.
Tolstoy took an enlightened view regarding the different conditions of the rich and the poor. Referring to the short-sightedness of those who take the “epicurean” escape from the meaningless of life, he declares that their moral stupidity allowed them “to forget that all the advantages of their position are accidental, that not everyone can have a thousand women and palaces, as Solomon did,” and to forget “that for every palace there are a thousand men who built it by the sweat of their brows” (50).
At the end of the eighth chapter, Tolstoy says that he found a glimmer of hope in the possibilities of faith and the wisdom of the ancients. Tolstoy’s experience with the strange “force” that lifted him out of the abyss hints at the author’s willingness to explore faith. By this point, the reader has seen enough of Tolstoy’s bleak suffering to understand that he has nothing to lose by experimenting with faith.
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