I was baptized and brought up in the Orthodox Christian faith.
I was taught it in childhood and throughout my boyhood and youth.
But when I abandoned the second course of the university at the age
of eighteen I no longer believed any of the things I had been
taught.
Judging by certain memories, I never seriously believed them,
but had merely relied on what I was taught and on what was
professed by the grown-up people around me, and that reliance was
very unstable.
I remember that before I was eleven a grammar school pupil,
Vladimir Milyutin (long since dead), visited us one Sunday and
announced as the latest novelty a discovery made at his school.
This discovery was that there is no God and that all we are taught
about Him i... (From: Flag.Blackened.net.)
Some day I will narrate the touching and instructive history
of my life during those ten years of my youth. I think very many
people have had a like experience. With all my soul I wished to be
good, but I was young, passionate and alone, completely alone when
I sought goodness. Every time I tried to express my most sincere
desire, which was to be morally good, I met with contempt and
ridicule, but as soon as I yielded to low passions I was praised
and encouraged.
Ambition, love of power, covetousness, lasciviousness, pride,
anger, and revenge - were all respected.
Yielding to those passions I became like the grown-up folk and
felt that they approved of me. The kind aunt with whom I lived,
herself the purest of beings, always tol... (From: Flag.Blackened.net.)
So I lived, abandoning myself to this insanity for another six
years, till my marriage. During that time I went abroad. Life in
Europe and my acquaintance with leading and learned Europeans
[Footnote: Russians generally make a distinction between Europeans
and Russians. - A.M.] confirmed me yet more in the faith of
striving after perfection in which I believed, for I found the same
faith among them. That faith took with me the common form it
assumes with the majority of educated people of our day. It was
expressed by the word "progress". It then appeared to me that this
word meant something. I did not as yet understand that, being
tormented (like every vital man) by the question how it is best for
me to live, in my answer, "Live ... (From: Flag.Blackened.net.)
My life came to a standstill. I could breathe, eat, drink,
and sleep, and I could not help doing these things; but there was
no life, for there were no wishes the fulfillment of which I could
consider reasonable. If I desired anything, I knew in advance that
whether I satisfied my desire or not, nothing would come of it.
Had a fairy come and offered to fulfill my desires I should not have
know what to ask. If in moments of intoxication I felt something
which, though not a wish, was a habit left by former wishes, in
sober moments I knew this to be a delusion and that there was
really nothing to wish for. I could not even wish to know the
truth, for I guessed of what it consisted. The truth was that life
is meaningless. I had as i... (From: Flag.Blackened.net.)
"But perhaps I have overlooked something, or misunderstood
something?" said to myself several times. "It cannot be that this
condition of despair is natural to man!" And I sought for an
explanation of these problems in all the branches of knowledge
acquired by men. I sought painfully and long, not from idle
curiosity or listlessly, but painfully and persistently day and
night - sought as a perishing man seeks for safety - and I found
nothing.
I sought in all the sciences, but far from finding what I
wanted, became convinced that all who like myself had sought in
knowledge for the meaning of life had found nothing. And not only
had they found nothing, but they had plainly acknowledged that the
very thing which made me despair - n... (From: Flag.Blackened.net.)
In my search for answers to life's questions I experienced
just what is felt by a man lost in a forest.
He reaches a glade, climbs a tree, and clearly sees the
limitless distance, but sees that his home is not and cannot be
there; then he goes into the dark wood and sees the darkness, but
there also his home is not.
So I wandered n that wood of human knowledge, amid the gleams
of mathematical and experimental science which showed me clear
horizons but in a direction where there could be no home, and also
amid the darkness of the abstract sciences where I was immersed in
deeper gloom the further I went, and where I finally convinced
myself that there was, and could be, no exit.
Yielding myself to the bright side of knowledge, I u... (From: Flag.Blackened.net.)
Not finding an explanation in science I began to seek for it
in life, hoping to find it among the people around me. And I began
to observe how the people around me - people like myself - lived,
and what their attitude was to this question which had brought me
to despair.
And this is what I found among people who were in the same
position as myself as regards education and manner of life.
I found that for people of my circle there were four ways out
of the terrible position in which we are all placed.
The first was that of ignorance. It consists in not knowing,
not understanding, that life is an evil and an absurdity. People
of this sort - chiefly women, or very young or very dull people -
have not yet understood that question of... (From: Flag.Blackened.net.)
All these doubts, which I am now able to express more or less
systematically, I could not then have expressed. I then only felt
that however logically inevitable were my conclusions concerning
the vanity of life, confirmed as they were by the greatest
thinkers, there was something not right about them. Whether it was
in the reasoning itself or in the statement of the question I did
not know - I only felt that the conclusion was rationally
convincing, but that that was insufficient. All these conclusions
could not so convince me as to make me do what followed from my
reasoning, that is to say, kill myself. And I should have told an
untruth had I, without killing myself, said that reason had brought
me to the point I had reached. R... (From: Flag.Blackened.net.)
A contradiction arose from which there were two exits. Either
that which I called reason was not so rational as I supposed, or
that which seemed to me irrational was not so irrational as I
supposed. And I began to verify the line of argument of my
rational knowledge.
Verifying the line of argument of rational knowledge I found
it quite correct. The conclusion that life is nothing was
inevitable; but I noticed a mistake. The mistake lay in this, that
my reasoning was not in accord with the question I had put. The
question was: "Why should I live, that is to say, what real,
permanent result will come out of my illusory transitory life -
what meaning has my finite existence in this infinite world?" And
to reply to that question I h... (From: Flag.Blackened.net.)
I understood this, but it made matters no better for me. I
was now ready to accept any faith if only it did not demand of me
a direct denial of reason - which would be a falsehood. And I
studied Buddhism and Mohammedanism from books, and most of all I
studied Christianity both from books and from the people around me.
Naturally I first of all turned to the orthodox of my circle,
to people who were learned: to Church theologians, monks, to
theologians of the newest shade, and even to Evangelicals who
profess salvation by belief in the Redemption. And I seized on
these believers and questioned them as to their beliefs and their
understanding of the meaning of life.
But though I made all possible concessions, and avoided all
disput... (From: Flag.Blackened.net.)
And remembering how those very beliefs had repelled me and had
seemed meaningless when professed by people whose lives conflicted
with them, and how these same beliefs attracted me and seemed
reasonable when I saw that people lived in accord with them, I
understood why I had then rejected those beliefs and found them
meaningless, yet now accepted them and found them full of meaning.
I understood that I had erred, and why I erred. I had erred not so
much because I thought incorrectly as because I lived badly. I
understood that it was not an error in my thought that had hid
truth from me as much as my life itself in the exceptional
conditions of epicurean gratification of desires in which I passed
it. I understood that my question... (From: Flag.Blackened.net.)
The consciousness of the error in reasonable knowledge helped
me to free myself from the temptation of idle ratiocination. the
conviction that knowledge of truth can only be found by living led
me to doubt the rightness of my life; but I was saved only by the
fact that I was able to tear myself from my exclusiveness and to
see the real life of the plain working people, and to understand
that it alone is real life. I understood that if I wish to
understand life and its meaning, I must not live the life of a
parasite, but must live a real life, and - taking the meaning
given to live by real humanity and merging myself in that life -
verify it.
During that time this is what happened to me. During that
whole year, when I was asking ... (From: Flag.Blackened.net.)
I turned from the life of our circle, acknowledging that ours
is not life but a simulation of life - that the conditions of
superfluity in which we live deprive us of the possibility of
understanding life, and that in order to understand life I must
understand not an exceptional life such as our who are parasites on
life, but the life of the simple laboring folk - those who make
life - and the meaning which they attribute to it. The simplest
laboring people around me were the Russian people, and I turned to
them and to the meaning of life which they give. That meaning, if
one can put it into words, was as follows: Every man has come into
this world by the will of God. And God has so made man that every
man can destroy his soul or... (From: Flag.Blackened.net.)
In was then so necessary for me to believe in order to live
that I unconsciously concealed from myself the contradictions and
obscurities of theology. but this reading of meanings into the
rites had its limits. If the chief words in the prayer for the
Emperor became more and more clear to me, if I found some
explanation for the words "and remembering our Sovereign Most-Holy
Mother of God and all the Saints, ourselves and one another, we
give our whole life to Christ our God", if I explained to myself
the frequent repetition of prayers for the Czar and his relations
by the fact that they are more exposed to temptations than other
people and therefore are more in need of being prayed for - the
prayers about subduing our enemies and... (From: Flag.Blackened.net.)
How often I envied the peasants their illiteracy and lack of
learning! Those statements in the creeds which to me were evident
absurdities, for them contained nothing false; they could accept
them and could believe in the truth - the truth I believed in.
Only to me, unhappy man, was it clear that with truth falsehood was
interwoven by finest threads, and that I could not accept it in
that form.
So I lived for about three years. At first, when I was only
slightly associated with truth as a catechumen and was only
scenting out what seemed to me clearest, these encounters struck me
less. When I did not understand anything, I said, "It is my fault,
I am sinful"; but the more I became imbued with the truths I was
learning, the more ... (From: Flag.Blackened.net.)
And I ceased to doubt, and became fully convinced that not all
was true in the religion I had joined. Formerly I should have said
that it was all false, but I could not say so now. The whole of
the people possessed a knowledge of the truth, for otherwise they
could not have lived. Moreover, that knowledge was accessible to
me, for I had felt it and had lived by it. But I no longer doubted
that there was also falsehood in it. And all that had previously
repelled me now presented itself vividly before me. And though I
saw that among the peasants there was a smaller admixture of the
lies that repelled me than among the representatives of the
Church, I still saw that in the people's belief also falsehood was
mingled with the truth.
... (From: Flag.Blackened.net.)
