SOURCE: "The Religious Crisis: A Confession," in Tolstoy, Paul Elek Ltd., 1977, pp. 124-36.

In the following essay, Cain contends that a biographical reading of Tolstoy's Confession is key to understanding him as a historical figure.

During the years in which he was working on the later books of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy entered on what was to prove the most profound, the most sustained and the most agonising spiritual crisis of his life. The questions which tormented him were not new: they were the problems of how and why he should live which had troubled him throughout his adult life, and which directly or indirectly had entered into everything he had written up to this point. It was in these years of the late 1870s, though, that the problems intensified for him in such a way that they demanded some more definite answer than he had been able to...