Tolstóy’s What is Art?

It is thus seen that for the last eighty years, beginning with Venevítinoff and Nadézhdin, Russian art-critics have worked to establish the idea that art has a raison d’être only when it is “in the service of society” and contributes towards raising society to higher humanitarian conceptions — by those means which are proper to art, and distinguish it from science. This idea which so much shocked Western readers when Proudhon developed it has been advocated in Russia by all those who have exercised a real influence upon critical judgment in art matters. And they were supported de facto by some of our greatest poets, such as Lérmontoff and Turguéneff. As to the critics of the other camp, like Druzhínin, Annenkoff and A. Grigórieff, who took either the opposite view of “art for art’s sake,” or some intermediate view — who preached that the criterium of art is “The Beautiful” and clung to the theories of the German æsthetical writers — they have had no hold upon Russian thought.

The metaphysics of the German æsthetical writers was more than once demolished in the opinion of Russian readers — especially by Byelínskiy, in his Review of Literature for 1847, and by Tchernyshévskiy in his Æsthetic Relations of Art to Reality. In this Review Byelínskiy fully developed his ideas concerning Art in the service of mankind, and proved that although Art is not identical with Science, and differs from it by the way it treats the facts of life, it nevertheless has with it a common aim. The man of science demonstrates — the poet shows; but both convince; the one by his arguments, the other — by his scenes from life. The same was done by Tchernyshévskiy when he maintained that the aim of Art is not unlike that of History: that it explains to us life, and that consequently Art which should merely reproduce facts of life without adding to our compensation of it would not be Art at all.

These few remarks will explain why Tolstóy’s What is Art? produced much less impression in Russia than abroad. What struck us in it was not its leading idea, which was quite familiar to us, but the fact that the great artist also made it his own, and was supporting it by all the weight of his artistic experience; and then, of course, the literary form he gave the idea. Moreover, we read with the greatest interest his witty criticisms of both the “decadent” would-be poets and the librettos of Wagner’s operas; to which latter, let me add by the way, Wagner wrote, in places, wonderfully beautiful music, as soon as he came to deal with the universal human passions, — love, compassion, envy, the joy of life, and so on, and forgot all about his fairy-tale background.

What is Art? offered the more interest in Russia because the defenders of pure Art and the haters of the “nihilists in Art” had been accustomed to quote Tolstóy as of their camp. In his youth indeed he seems not to have had very definite ideas about Art. At any rate, when, in 1859, he was received as a member of the Society of Friends of Russian Literature, he pronounced a speech on the necessity of not dragging Art into the smaller disputes of the day, to which the Slavophile Homyakóff replied in a fiery speech, contesting his ideas with great energy.

“There are moments — great historic moments” — Homyakóff said — “when self-denunciation (he meant on the part of Society) has especial, incontestable rights....The ‘accidental’ and the ‘temporary’ in the historical development of a nation’s life acquire then the meaning of the universal and the broadly human, because all generations and all nations can understand, and do understand, the painful moans and the painful confessions of a given generation or a given nation.”...“An artist” — he continued — “is not a theory; he is not a mere domain of thought and cerebral activity. He is a man — always a man of his own time — usually one of its best representatives...Owing to the very impressionability of his organism, without which he would not have been an artist, he, more than the others, receives both the painful and the pleasant impressions of the Society in the midst of which he was born.”

Showing that Tolstóy had already taken just this stand point in some of his works; for example, in describing the death of the horse-driver in Three Deaths, Homyakóff concluded by saying: “Yes, you have been, and you will be one of those who denounce the evils of Society. Continue to follow the excellent way you have chosen.” The speech of Homyakóff is reproduced in Skabitchévskiy’s History (1. c.). I was very anxious to get Tolstóy’s speech, because I think that the ideas he expressed about “the permanent in Art, the universal” hardly did exclude the denunciation of the ills from which a society suffers at a given moment. Perhaps he meant what Nekrásoff also meant when he described the literature to which Schédrin’s Provincial Sketches had given origin as “a flagellation of the petty thieves for the pleasure of the big ones.” Unfortunately, this speech was not printed, and the manuscript of it could not be found. ²⁵

At any rate, in What is Art? Tolstóy entirely breaks with the theories of “Art for Art’s sake,” and makes an open stand by the side of those whose ideas have been expounded in the preceding pages. He only defines still more correctly the domain of Art when he says that the artist always aims at communicating to others the same feelings which he experiences at the sight of nature or of human life. Not to convince, as Tchernyshévskiy said, but to infect the others with his own feelings, which is certainly more correct. However, “feeling” and “thought” are inseparable. A feeling seeks words to express itself, and a feeling expressed in words is a thought. And when Tolstóy says that the aim of artistic activity is to transmit “the highest feelings which humanity has attained” and that Art must be “religious” — that is, wake up the highest and the best aspirations — he only expresses in other words what all our best critics since Venevítinoff, Nadézhdin and Polevóy have said. In fact, when he complains that nobody teaches men how to live, he overlooks that that is precisely what good Art is doing, and what our art-critics have always done. Byelínskiy, Dobrolúboff and Písareff, and their continuators have done nothing but to teach men how to live. They studied and analysed life, as it had been understood by the greatest artists of each century, and they drew from their works conclusions as to “how to live.”

More than this. When Tolstóy, armed with his powerful criticism, chastises what he so well describes as “counterfeits of Art,” he continues the work that Tchernyshévskiy, Dobrolúboff and especially Písareff had done. He sides with Bazároff. Only, this intervention of the great artist gives a more deadly blow to the “Art for Art’s sake” theory still in vogue in Western Europe than anything that Proudhon or our Russian critics, unknown in the West, could possibly have done.

As to Tolstóy’s idea concerning the value of a work of Art being measured by its accessibility to the great number, which has been so fiercely attacked on all sides, and even ridiculed — this assertion, although it has perhaps not yet been very well expressed, contains, I believe, the germs of a great idea which sooner or later is certain to make its way. It is evident that every form of art has a certain conventional way of expressing itself — its own way of “infecting others with the artist’s feelings,” and therefore requires a certain training to understand it. Tolstóy is hardly right in overlooking the fact that some training is required for rightly comprehending even the simplest forms of art, and his criterion of “universal understanding” seems therefore far-fetched.

However, there lies in what he says a deep idea. Tolstóy is certainly right in asking why the Bible has not yet been superseded, as a work of Art accessible to everyone. Michelet had already made a similar remark, and had said that what was wanted by our century was Le Livre, The Book, which shall contain in a great, poetical form accessible to all, the embodiment of nature with all her glories and of the history of all mankind in its deepest human features. Humboldt had aimed at this in his Cosmos; but grand though his work is, it is accessible to only the very few. It was not he who should transfigure science into poetry. And we have no work of Art which even approaches this need of modern mankind.

The reason is self-evident: Because Art has become too artificial; because, being chiefly for the rich, it has too much specialised its ways of expression, so as to be understood by the few only. In this respect Tolstóy is absolutely right. Take the mass of excellent works that have been mentioned in this book. How very few of them will ever become accessible to a large public! The fact is, that a new Art is indeed required. And it will come when the artist, having understood this idea of Tolstóy’s, shall say to himself: “I may write highly philosophical works of art in which I depict the inner drama of the highly educated and refined man of our own times; I may write works which contain the highest poetry of nature, involving a deep knowledge and comprehension of the life of nature; but, if I can write such things, I must also be able, if I am a true artist, to speak to all: to write other things which will be as deep in conception as these, but which everyone, including the humblest miner or peasant, will be able to understand and enjoy!” To say that a folk-song is greater Art than a Beethoven sonata is not correct: we cannot compare a storm in the Alps, and the struggle against it, with a fine, quite mid-summer day and hay-making. But truly great Art, which, notwithstanding its depth and its lofty flight, will penetrate into every peasant’s hut and inspire everyone with higher conceptions of thought and life — such an Art is really wanted.