At the end of the 1870s Count Leo Tolstoy seemed to have everything. He was in the prime of his life and in excellent health. He was the owner of a hereditary title and a large, profitable estate. He was happily married with a growing brood of children. War and Peace and Anna Karenina had made him one of the most celebrated novelists in Europe. Yet he was profoundly unhappy. He detested his great novels almost as soon as he had finished them. He felt uneasy about his title and his wealth. He felt that his life had no value and no meaning and if this was the case, what was the point of bringing children into the world? The result of all this dissatisfaction was three years of intense, harrowing soul-searching which he describes in A Confession . He scoured the works of contemporary philosophers, scientists and religious thinkers trying to understand the meaning and purpose of life. Nothing helped him. The only conclusion he could reach was that life was pointless and abs
'Contemplating the teeming life of the shore, we have an uneasy sense of the communication of some universal truth that lies just beyond our grasp.' - Rachel Carson