“Zhidebay-Borili” hosted the opening of the exhibition “Confession,” organized in collaboration with the Yasnaya Polyana Museum-Reserve and dedicated to the life and creative legacy of Leo Tolstoy
On October 16, the Abai State Museum-Reserve “Zhidebay-Borili” hosted the opening of the exhibition “Confession,” organized in collaboration with the Yasnaya Polyana Museum-Reserve and dedicated to the life and creative legacy of Leo Tolstoy.
In the 1870s, Leo Tolstoy experienced a profound spiritual crisis. Reconsidering his former beliefs was not easy for him. By the autumn of 1875, in a letter to Nikolai Strakhov, he complained about the difficulty of expressing the troubling thoughts that gave him no peace. After visiting the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra and the Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius in the autumn of 1879, the writer resolved to put his new worldview into writing. Thus, he created the autobiographical work “Confession,” a milestone that divided his life into two distinct periods. The exhibition is complemented by a video presentation.
The exhibition also aims to highlight Tolstoy’s spiritual affinity with great Kazakh thinkers — Abai Kunanbayev and Shakarim Kudaiberdyuly. Like Tolstoy, Abai and Shakarim sought the meaning of life, harmony between the individual and society, and the purity of spirit and conscience. A shared idea in their worldviews is the pursuit of moral integrity, faith, and spiritual perfection through self-knowledge.
The exhibition was attended by representatives of the intellectual community of the Abai Region and the city of Semey, employees of cultural institutions, and college students.
