The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Confession by Leo Tolstoy

Author:Leo Tolstoy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Liveright

II

ONE DAY I’LL TELL THE STORY OF MY LIFE—BOTH A touching and an instructive one for those ten years of my youth. I think that many, many people have experienced the same. I wanted to be good with all my soul, but I was young, I had passions, and I was alone, completely alone, when I was seeking good. Every time I tried to show what made up my innermost desires, to show that I wanted to be morally good, I met with scorn and mockery; but as soon as I abandoned myself to vile passions, I was praised and encouraged. Ambition, love of power, avarice, lust, pride, anger, revenge—all these had respect. Giving myself over to these passions, I became like a grown man and I felt that people were pleased with me. My kind aunt, the purest of beings, with whom I lived, always used to tell me that there was nothing she wished for me more than that I should have a liaison with a married woman: “Rien ne forme un jeune homme comme une liaison avec une femme comme il faut”;5 there was another happiness she wanted for me—to be an aide-de-camp, and best of all to the emperor; and the supreme happiness, that I should marry a very rich girl and as the result of this marriage have as many serfs as possible.

I cannot remember these years without horror, revulsion, and pain in my heart. I killed people in war, I challenged people to duels in order to kill them, I lost at cards, I consumed the labor of peasants, I punished them, I fornicated, I deceived. Lies, theft, adultery of every kind, drunkenness, violence, murder. . . . There was no crime I did not commit, and for all this my contemporaries praised me and thought me a relatively moral man, as they still do.

I lived like that for about ten years.

At this time I began to write, out of vanity, greed, and pride. In my writing I did the same as in life. To have the fame and the money for which I was writing I had to conceal the good and display the bad. So I did. How many times under the pretense of indifference and even of slight mockery did I contrive to conceal my aspirations to good, which constituted the meaning of my life? And I achieved my aim: I was praised.

I came to Petersburg at the age of twenty-six after the war6 and met writers. They accepted me like one of their own and flattered me, and before I had time to look around I had adopted the writer’s professional views on life held by those whom I met, and these completely destroyed in me all my former attempts to become better. Faced with the dissoluteness of my life, these views provided a theory that justified it.

The view of life held by these people, my comrades in writing, consisted of this: life in general moves on by development, and

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