A Confession

: I feared life, desired to escape from it, yet still hoped something of it.

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.

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.

All hu­man­ity lives and de­vel­ops on the basis of spir­itual prin­ciples and ideals which guide it. Those ideals are ex­pressed in re­li­gions, in sci­ences, in arts, in forms of gov­ern­ment. Those ideals be­come more and more el­ev­ated, and hu­man­ity ad­vances to its highest wel­fare. I am part of hu­man­ity, and there­fore my vo­ca­tion is to for­ward the re­cog­ni­tion and the real­iz­a­tion of the ideals of hu­man­ity.

Today or to­mor­row sick­ness and death will come (they had come already) to those I love or to me; noth­ing will re­main but stench and worms.

As long as I did not know why, I could do noth­ing and could not live.

Then these mo­ments of per­plex­ity began to re­cur of­tener and of­tener, and al­ways in the same form. They were al­ways ex­pressed by the ques­tions: What is it for? What does it lead to?

In some of its de­vel­op­ments pro­gress has pro­ceeded wrongly, and with prim­it­ive peas­ant chil­dren one must deal in a spirit of per­fect free­dom, let­ting them choose what path of pro­gress they please.”

then I only dimly sus­pec­ted this, and like all lun­at­ics, simply called all men lun­at­ics ex­cept my­self.

Moreover, hav­ing be­gun to doubt the truth of the au­thors’ creed it­self, I also began to ob­serve its priests more at­tent­ively, and I be­came con­vinced that al­most all the priests of that re­li­gion, the writers, were im­moral, and for the most part men of bad, worth­less char­ac­ter, much in­ferior to those whom I had met in my former dis­sip­ated and mil­it­ary life; but they were self-con­fid­ent and self-sat­is­fied as only those can be who are quite holy or