ABSTRACT
In the late 1870s Tolstoy underwent a profound spiritual crisis which made him question the way he had hitherto lived and reject his literary works to date as merely satisfying a vain craving for renown. Tolstoy describes this crisis and the suffering it engendered in his Confession. In the most general terms Tolstoy after about 1880 urges people to abandon evil ways and live better lives. Arguably the most ominous developments in the 1880s, from the point of view of the tsarist government, were taking place outside Russia itself. In international anarchist circles Peter Kropotkin, a member of the Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky circles in the early 1870s had become prominent as a result of years of agitation in Switzerland and France before settling in England in 1886. In opposition to Charles Darwin, Kropotkin posited mutual aid, not competition and a struggle for survival, as a crucial factor in the natural evolutionary process, and argued for a corresponding social model.
