SOURCE: "The Confession of Count Tolstoi," in The Dial, Vol. 8, No. 90, October, 1887, pp. 125-27.

In the following review of Confession, Hubbard praises Tolstoy's genuine religious faith and honesty, but laments that his religious epiphany may have cut short his career as a fiction writer.

The inner history of any strong personal experience is instructive; more deeply so when it is that of a man of ardent feeling, of earnest aspiration, and fine intellect. The life of Count Tolstoi, as it has been revealed in his writings, has excited universal interest. His genius was first made known through his earlier works of fiction; and immediately upon the enthusiasm which this created there came intimations of curiously eccentric conduct induced largely by intense and peculiar religious convictions. The novelist's own account of the singular tenets which have become the rule of his life, cutting short, as it is judged, a...