| Title Orig: | Исповедь |
| Author: | Maxim Gorky |
| Country: | Russian Empire |
| Language: | Russian |
| Preceded By: | The Life of a Useless Man |
| Publisher: | Znaniye (compilation) |
| Release Date: | 1908 |
| Media Type: | Print (Paperback & Hardback) |
A Confession (Russian: Исповедь|Ispoved') is a 1908 short novel by Maxim Gorky. It first appeared in the Znaniye compilation (book 23, Saint Petersburg) and almost simultaneously came out as a separate edition via the Ladyzhnikov Publishers in Berlin.[1]
The tale of Matvey, a pilgrim, was based upon the real-life story of a religious sectarian in Nizhny Novgorod, and an article on him by Bogdan-Stepanets, a tutor at the local seminary. Later, in a sketch called "On the Edge of the World", Gorky mentioned another source, the manuscript by a Levonty Pomorets, which the writer's friend S.G. Somov brought with him from his Siberian exile.[1]
The novel, written in the times when Gorky became keenly interested in the new quasi-religious God-Building movement, horrified Vladimir Lenin who on several occasions criticized the attempts to unite Socialism and Christianity, mentioning A Confession.[2] Gorky explained: "I am an atheist. In A Confession the idea was to show the means by which man could progress from individualism to the collectivist understanding of the world. The main character sees 'God-building' as an attempt to reconstruct social life according to the spirit of collectivism, the spirit of uniting the people on their way to one common goal: liberating man from slavery, within and without."[3]