Does God Exist? A Clinical Study of the Religious Attitudes Expressed in Tolstoy's "Confession"

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Late in 1879 Lev Tolstoy set to work on something that would be quite un like anything he had ever written before. The personal spiritual concerns of the author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina could occasionally be glimpsed in characters like Pierre Bezukhov, Andrei Bolkonsky, Anna Karen ina, or Konstantin Levin. But now that famous author of novels was writing about himself directly, without the cover of fictional personae. Confession [Is poved'] is just what its title suggests?a spiritual disclosure, an acknowledge ment of past sinfulness, and an attempt at an act of contrition. Only in this case Tolstoy is not speaking privately to a priest, but is telling the whole world his sins?and much else as well. He is writing in the well-established mode of autobiography which had been initiated by Saint Augustine's Con fessiones [c. 400], and continued by the idol of his younger days Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Confessions [1782].1 The fact that Tolstoy is confessing publicly invites the reader to scrutinize Tolstoy the man. In addition, however, the fact that Tolstoy the man describes his personal sufferings at a very intimate level and in such great detail invites the application of psychological methodology. Quite frankly, the author of Confession is mentally disturbed. I am going to argue that Tolstoy's Confes sion can be studied as a clinical case. This means that Tolstoy can be diag nosed with the tools currently available to those who deal with mental disor ders. Tolstoy's narcissism, masochism, severe depression, manic-depressive mood swings, hypomanic episodes, mixed episodes, and other psychopath ologies will be called by their proper names. When this is done, it will no longer be possible to view the religious attitudes expressed in the work inde pendently of psychopathology. Indeed, I will show that the very question of whether God exists or not in Tolstoy's mind is determined by a specific type of mood disorder.