I’ve read a lot of books in my life, including others by Tolstoy and his contemporaries - and entirely different types of books such as Harry Potter and Javascript, The Good Parts.
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
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?