# A Confession — Character guide

> Key figures in A Confession by Leo Tolstoy.

- [Narrator](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/a_confession_se/characters/narrator.md): He moves through drawing rooms, regimental camps, and editorial offices as a man others praise, yet he cannot stop auditing his own conduct and finding it fraudulent. His sharpest quarrel is not with society but with him
- [Solomon](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/a_confession_se/characters/solomon.md): Biblical king referenced for his wisdom and pessimistic reflections on life's vanity.
- [Schopenhauer](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/a_confession_se/characters/schopenhauer.md): German philosopher whose pessimistic worldview influences the narrator's crisis.
- [Leo Tolstoy](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/a_confession_se/characters/tolstoy.md): He is the celebrated author whom Petersburg salons flatter and whose name opens doors, yet the memoir strips the laurels off in public. He confesses to killing in war, ruining peasants, and hiding goodness in his fiction
- [Christ](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/a_confession_se/characters/christ.md): He is the standard the narrator measures himself against as he returns to the Orthodox Church, attending services, keeping the fasts, and repeating the prayers with deliberate attention. The tension is that the words of 
- [Dmitriy](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/a_confession_se/characters/dmitriy.md): A peasant or acquaintance who offers simple faith as a counterpoint to the narrator's doubt.
- [Buddha](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/a_confession_se/characters/buddha.md): Founder of Buddhism, discussed as an example of a path to escape suffering.

HTML index: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/a_confession_se/characters