By the 1880s, the Russian novelist had written the masterpieces War and Peace and Anna Karenina, achieving what he’d spent his life pursuing. On paper, Tolstoy embodied success in every dimension of nineteenth-century Russian life. He was a literary genius.
He was a privileged aristocrat. And he was a father and husband, with a marriage that would last nearly five decades and yield thirteen children. Yet these distinctions only intensified his anxiety as he questioned what they meant—and if he even wanted them anymore.
He was increasingly uncertain about who he was, and worse: whether he wanted to keep being that way. In 1882, in his fifties, Tolstoy finished writing A Confession—a raw exploration of his looming crisis. Who was the real Tolstoy?
And more urgently, could he change? More than a century later, in a different country and a completely different life, those same questions would surface again—not in the mind of a Russian novelist at the height of his career, but in a fledgling actress deciding whether she wanted to continue to be one at all. Peyton McDavitt knew her move to Hollywood was a gamble, aimed at making up for lost time.
She’d loved acting as a kid, performing in school plays and regional theater. But as she grew older, acting felt like an all-or-nothing proposition whose pursuit required abandoning everything else she cared about: school, sports, music. Rigid identities mean that who and what we’ve been keeps us from becoming anyone or anything else.
But acting was still her dream job. And finally, at twenty-three, she was ready to commit to it the way she committed to anything she did: completely. At least, that was the plan.
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