A Confession is a short work on questions of religion

Religion

Religion is a collection of cultural systems, belief systems, and worldviews that establishes symbols that relate humanity to spirituality and, sometimes, to moral values. Many religions have narratives, symbols, traditions and sacred histories that are intended to give meaning to life or to...

 by Leo Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy

Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist...

. It was first distributed in Russia

Russia

Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...

 in 1882.

Consisting of autobiographical notes on the development of the author's belief, A Confession shows the process of searching for answers to the profound questions: "What will come of my life?" and "What is the meaning of life?", without answers to which life to him is impossible.

Tolstoy shows different attempts to find answers on the examples of science, philosophy, eastern wisdom and the opinions of his fellow novelists. Not having found an acceptable solution in any of these, Tolstoy recognizes the deep religious convictions of ordinary people as containing the key to true answers. However he also finds "a great deal of superstition

Superstition

Superstition is a belief in supernatural causality: that one event leads to the cause of another without any process in the physical world linking the two events....

 mixed with the Christian

Christian

A Christian is a person who adheres to Christianity, an Abrahamic, monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as recorded in the Canonical gospels and the letters of the New Testament...

truths" and rejects some positions and customs of the Christian church.

ISBN 0-393-30192-3