by mholubowski on 10/17/23, 3:05 PM with 6 comments
Recently, I found and read Tolstoy’s A Confession. It immediately struck me as the most important thing I’ve ever read. Feels like it should be state mandated reading, has me absolutely frozen and inspecting my own life.
Has anyone else read it? I suppose at some level the purpose of my post here is to search for some additional validation to the tune of: “yes indeed, you have in fact stumbled upon a life changing 80 pages, as I also did some time ago”.
- your boi
by cableshaft on 10/17/23, 3:19 PM
If I remember correctly, it was about Tolstoy's struggle to find meaning in his life, even after having a wife, several kids, and finding lots of success with his writing and a large house. He experiments with and discusses quite a few philosophies in a fairly frank manner before circling back around to Christianity, and does his best to make a case for it based on logic and comparing with his past experiences.
But even for people who aren't religious (I'm not really that religious myself) and don't want to be, I think they'll still relate to his struggle to find meaning and find some useful and thought provoking ideas in there.
I do agree that more (most?) people should read it. I even gifted a copy of it to a good friend at the time.
Other books where I had a similar experience from reading them include Siddhartha by Herman Hesse, The Conquest of Happiness by Bertrand Russell, and The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch.
In particular Siddhartha had a lot of similarities to A Confession, in subject matter and structure, although it's told as a third person narrative and not as a personal account.
What were some of the takeaways you got from reading it?
by ZeroGravitas on 10/17/23, 4:37 PM
https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/leo-tolstoy/a-confession/a...
Their blurb:
> Leo Tolstoy wrote this short meditation on sadness and the meaning of life when he was middle aged. He had already completed his masterworks, Anna Karenina and War and Peace, reared fourteen children, and gained fame and acclaim in Russia as a man of letters. But despite having attained that success, he still found himself unhappy and always returning to the disturbing idea that all achievement is meaningless.
> A Confession is his attempt to put these thoughts in words as he teetered on the brink of suicide. It forms the first in a four-volume series that included A Criticism of Dogmatic Theology, The Gospel in Brief, and What I Believe (also known as My Religion or My Faith).
by SubGenius on 10/17/23, 4:35 PM
To be honest, I've felt this way about many books - as though I'd read them at a point in life when their message exactly resonated with me.
Sometimes it's happens that a book I read a long time ago didn't have much impact, but a reread at a later date has me feeling the same way as you.
There are some books I keep rereading, just to experience that feeling again, although it's not quite the same. I suppose our exact life situation at the moment of reading decides the life-changing impact of a book.
Being a big Tolstoy fan, I'm expecting the book to be life-changing anyway.
by besnn00 on 10/17/23, 9:26 PM
by kyting on 10/18/23, 12:50 AM