By the time he was fifty Tolstoy had already written War and Peace and Anna Karenin, novels that would assure him of immortality. He had a wife, a large estate and numerous children; he was 'a happy man' and in good health, yet life had lost all meaning. A Confession (1879), a poignant fragment of autobiography, described a crisis familiar to many people. It records Tolstoy's depression and estrangement from the world, his desperate desire to find answers to the simplest questions of life and the beginnings of his passionate intellectual search for 'a practical religion not promising future bliss, but giving bliss on earth.'
