A Confession

At the conclusion of A Confession, Tolstoy hints at a never-published follow-up work that attempts to separate the truth from the falsehood in Orthodox doctrine and discover the limits of the human intellect when it comes to understanding faith. Based on what you’ve read in A Confession regarding Tolstoy’s spiritual evolution and his opinions about the Russian Orthodox Church, write this unpublished sequel as if you were Tolstoy (in a few pages).

A Confession is written in a first-person autobiographical format. What does this writing style achieve that only this style can achieve? How would the impact of the narrative change if this work was written as an academic essay or fictionalized as a novel? How might the impact of this work either improve or diminish if the genre changed?

Tolstoy makes class distinctions in terms of how people worship and who possesses the more authentic faith. He indicates that relatively affluent people like him have less grasp on the meaning of life than poor laborers. Is this a fair assessment? How does Tolstoy justify this position? What, if anything, does the author’s