A Confession

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.