Leo Tolstoy’s Masochistic Diary: I Am Guilty of “Sloth,” “Cowardice” & “Sissiness” (1851) — openculture.com

1850 was a tough year for Leo Tolstoy. It was a time when his future successes were impossible to see while his past failures were all too obvious. A few years prior, he had been thrown out of the University of Kazan. His teachers wrote him off as “both unable and unwilling to learn.” Thereafter, he went into a spiral of dissolution, first in St. Petersburg and then in Moscow, where he drank, caroused and racked up some serious gambling debts.

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