Tolstoy's 'What is Art?'

Terry Diffey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317673248
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria rusa

With its demand that works of art be judged according to the their morally didactic content, Tolstoy's reviled aesthetics has seemed to exclude from the canon far too many works widely accepted as masterpieces, including Shakespeare and Beethoven.

This book, first published in 1985, argues that these are not mere oversights on the part of Tolstoy: he knew full well the consequences of his line of reasoning. The author contends that, even if we disagree with and eventually reject much of what Tolstoy concludes, his account of the nature and purpose of art is nevertheless worth consideration.

Diffey's argument by no means accepts all of 'What is Art?', but by suggesting that the work is best interpreted as a counterpoint to the amoral aestheticism prevalent in Russia at the time, he does much to restore it to a status deserving attention, particularly in today's climate of extreme relativism.

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION

In writing a book about Tolstoy’s theory of art I am adding another member to the extensive, and perhaps poorly regarded, class of books about books. Not that there has been much close attention paid to Tolstoy’s theory, not at least in English¹. However, not every gap in learning or scholarship must be filled. Sometimes there is good reason for silence. In Tolstoy’s case the reason is surely the belief that there is no need to take seriously a theory of art which denies that most works of art in the European tradition since Shakespeare and Dante are works of art. Plainly this must be wrong; it must seem as absurd as a purported theory of religion, say, that denied Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, etc., were religions.

The sort of philosophy that I respect, however, does not have much regard for truth, plain or fancy, until it has understood that truth. I want to know why Tolstoy denies the name of art to much of Shakespeare or Beethoven. It is more important to the philosophy of art that we should know why Tolstoy is being absurd, if he is, than merely that he is being absurd. For what is often overlooked is that Tolstoy did not fall into his absurdities, as the complacent know them, out of ignorance. He did what he did with open eyes, hence the interest of his essay. If we follow him with an eye open to what he is about we may find in him a philosopher of art of some interest and power.

The received view of Tolstoy’s theory of art is that it is a poor and foolish thing, which has to face the difficulty that it is the work of one of the world’s great imaginative writers. People get round this by saying that after Tolstoy had written Anna Karenina he underwent a conversion. What is Art? belongs to the Messianic period at the end of Tolstoy’s life and need not therefore be taken seriously². This explanation, however, merely provides a bad excuse for not thinking.

Tolstoy’s essay is deeply pondered. Thinking about the subject occupied him, he says, for fifteen years³, so it is no hastily thrown together diatribe that he offers his readers. Our response should be to ask what Tolstoy is doing in What is Art? and how he does it. We should save our astonishment, if we must be astonished, for the fact that Tolstoy has presented us with a logically cogent and systematic theory, and this in addition to his achievement, already extraordinary, as a novelist. Indeed Tolstoy hoped that his work as an imaginative writer would attract public attention to his philosophical teaching⁴.

As a philosopher of art Tolstoy is concerned with first principles, but as Monroe Beardsley has observed, Tolstoy’s work is ‘so unorthodox in its main conclusions that its serious challenges have generally been shrugged off’⁵. Beardsley has also said that Tolstoy’s argument ‘is developed with great skill and consistency, and its startling rejections of nearly all the great works of music and literature, including his own, should make us examine the argument carefully step by step, for it deserves careful consideration, especially for the premises, not all explicitly stated, upon which it rests’⁶. These remarks of Beardsley have been the starting point for my investigation.

When I first encountered it some years ago Tolstoy’s essay seemed pretty disturbing, though from the outset I was more curious about the arguments by which he reached his conclusions than shocked by them. If, with the passage of time and some pondering, the essay no longer seems as strange as it once did, I hope that this is not, as Tolstoy says of certain art, because over time one can get habituated to anything, ‘even to the very worst things’ (176–177). Rather, I believe it is true, as Aylmer Maude, Tolstoy’s translator, says in his introduction to What is Art? that, ‘As the years pass Tolstoy’s masterpiece becomes better understood’ (p. xiv).

In certain respects, indeed, time has caught up with Tolstoy. His views on science (276–288) with their emphasis on the social responsibility of science seem less far-fetched now than they did only a few years ago, when the prevailing wisdom which was the doctrine of science for science’s sake was rarely questioned. Tolstoy’s repudiation too of what is now called élitism in art is a familiar attitude these days particularly among young people. And today we are scarcely perturbed when somebody suggests that our evaluations of art are contingent upon our own historical situation:

How many of the works we in Europe smugly call ‘world classics’ will really prove so when there is a global culture? How much of Shakespeare, Goethe, Dante, Tolstoy or Racine will have meaning for the rising generations of Asia and Africa?

‘Macbeth’, it seems, translates readily to Africa and Japan. ‘Phèdre’ is imaginable in most languages and civilisations. But a good deal we treasure as universal doubtless will turn out of purely parochial interest, while works we consider peculiarly rooted in their time and place may find wider relevance than we foresaw. I shouldn’t be surprised if the second class included Peer Gynt …⁷

That there is life and power to disturb in Tolstoy’s philosophy of art is evinced by the wide range of responses which it has provoked. These run from the admiring to the denunciatory; from Tolstoy as ‘the one truly titanic figure in our history’ (of the concept of art)⁸ to him as ‘the shrill voice of the literary fishwife’⁹.

Ranged in admiration are Roger Fry:

In my youth all speculation on aesthetic had revolved with wearisome persistence around the question of the nature of beauty …

It was Tolstoy’s genius that delivered us from this impasse, and I think that one may date from the appearance of What is Art? the beginning of fruitful speculation in aesthetic¹⁰.

and Francis Sparshott: ‘a work which writers on aesthetics always mention but seldom take seriously. But very seriously it should be taken, as the attempt of an honest, brave, observant and intelligent man to clear his mind of the cant with which all talk about art is clotted’¹¹.

In their fascinating book Wittgenstein’s Vienna, Janik and Toulmin tell us that in Vienna in the 1890s a lively interest was taken in Tolstoy’s writings, and notably in What is Art? ‘which effectively discredited the fashionable aestheticism of the time, and revived interest in art as the main channel of moral communication’¹².

At the other extreme are the (incompatible) charges that What is Art? is incoherent¹³, a ‘disgraceful and silly pamphlet’¹⁴ and that Tolstoy ‘knew what art was, and knowing crucified it’¹⁵.

On the other hand, though few readers, W.H. Auden thinks, ‘probably, find themselves able to accept Tolstoi’s conclusions in What is Art?, … once one has read the book, one can never again ignore the questions Tolstoi raises’¹⁶. Nevertheless Tolstoy is mistaken, Auden thinks, in denying the gratuitous in art:’… he tried to persuade himself that utility alone, a spiritual utility maybe, but still utility without gratuity, was sufficient to produce art, and this compelled him to be dishonest and praise works which aesthetically he must have despised’¹⁷

Arnold Hauser thinks that in ‘the estrangement of art from the broad masses and the restriction of its public to an ever smaller circle Tolstoy had recognized a real danger’ but sees Tolstoy’s rejection of refined art and ‘fondness for the primitive, “universally human” forms of artistic expression’, as ‘a symptom of the same Rousseauism with which he plays off the village against the town and identifies the social question with that of the peasantry … it is inconceivable’, he remarks,¹⁸ ‘that a man who created such artistically exacting works as Anna Karenina and The Death of Ivan Ilych accepted without reservations out of the whole of modern literature apart from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, only Schiller’s Robbers, Hugo’s Misérables, Dickens’ Christmas Carol, Dostoevsky’s Memoirs from Underground and George Eliot’s Adam Bede’¹⁹.

Władysław Tatarkiewicz, the Polish historian of aesthetics, has mildly observed that the doubts about the usefulness and value of art felt in antiquity are not shared today: ‘Tolstoy is alone in his condemnation of art’²⁰. Samuel Alexander (in a chapter entitled ‘Some Errors’) objects rather that Tolstoy misconstrues t...