In the late 1870s Count Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), author of the great novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, underwent a severe inward crisis. His life, the existence of all mankind and the universe, seemed completely futile to him. He overcame his despondency by thinking his way through to a religion of "the infinite" as God, and morality demanding simplicity of daily life, non-violence, and the abolition of government, church, science and industry. He spoke of this development as his conversion. However, his extensive diaries kept between 1847 and his death, and his Confession, the record of his crisis and conversion, show that both before and afterwards his all but exclusive and obsessive concern was with his own self.