SOURCE: "The Movement of Faith as Revealed in Tolstoi's Confession," in Harvard Theological Review, Vol. 74, Nos. 3-4, July-October, 1978, pp. 227-43.

In the following essay, Patterson presents an analysis of the steps through which Tolstoy moved in his religious conversion, as outlined in his Confession.

Tolstoi's Confession is the story of the spiritual crisis which its author experienced during the late 1870s, when the man who had written War and Peace and Anna Karenina came to believe that he had accomplished nothing in life, that his life was meaningless. Although there are parallels between the torments of Levin in Anna Karenina and Tolstoi's own conflicts in the Confession, the latter piece was written in 1879, two years after the publication of the former, and represents a more developed reflection on "the problem of life." As I shall argue in this article, the resolution of the crisis related in Tolstoi's Confession...