ABSTRACT
Late in 1879 Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy set to work on something that would be quite unlike anything he had ever published before. Expressions of guilt and self-reproach are a hallmark of Tolstoy's religious writings. The divine model never disappeared permanently, despite the periods of apparent agnosticism or even atheism during Tolstoy's lifetime. Evidence of a belief in God turns up sporadically in the young Tolstoy, and later in the mature novelist before his spiritual crisis of the late 1870s. Tolstoy cannot find his God without first alluding to parental loss, and this allusion matches his own childhood experience. An important component of the interaction Tolstoy has with this God may be characterized as prayer. Whenever Tolstoy's faith in God was discarded and became completely lost to his consciousness, other models for perfecting himself had to be found. A beneficial effect of Tolstoy's depression is that he is no longer stifling questions about the meaning of life.
