It remains to consider the reasons for Tolstoy's own verdict, and what were the consequences for his own writing. If Tolstoy was a fox who longed passionately to be a hedgehog – to refer back to Isaiah Berlin's distinction – he would of course in time come to reject everything that made him a fox, everything that is most literary and most artful in his novels – most fox-like in fact.

And this is indeed what happened. Before he had completed A Confession, inspired as it was by the horror of what he called the Arzamas experience, he had begun other investigations into religious belief, and what he now felt about it. The result was ‘A Criticism of Dogmatic Theology’, and the full-length book What I Believe, both of them fairly unreadable for most people today. The very simplicity and forcefulness of these works seems to militate against them; for Tolstoy, having assured himself that he and he alone has suddenly seen what should be obvious to all, proceeds to reiterate it, while holding the reader like an ancient mariner with his glittering eye. From Christ's teaching he accepts five commandments. No anger, no oath-swearing, no adultery; do not defend yourself; do not go to war. (More controversial aspects of Christ's teaching, such as ‘I came not to bring peace on earth but a sword’, which so much perplexed and upset Levin in Anna Karenina, can presumably be discarded.)

These teachings, he tells us are incontrovertibly laid down by Christ. They refer religion to daily life, and they are the foundation of all Tolstoy's subsequent beliefs, particularly pacifism and non-violence. In them he had found the answer to what had seemed the insuperably stubborn question: ‘What gives meaning to a man's life?’ for he writes that ‘there is a power enabling me to discern what is good. My reason and conscience proceed from it and the purpose of conscious life can only be to do its will – that is, to do good.’

That the acutely sceptical and analytical Tolstoy should find new and absolute meaning for himself in this is perhaps not so surprising as the fact that he could abandon so completely what must be called the worldly common sense that underlies his view of life in the novels.