Abstract
This chapter outlines and evaluates Tolstoy’s theory of art as presented in his What is Art? I focus on his concept of emotion, moral emotions and their expression or elicitation in art works. Along the way I indicate where additional theorizing is required to defend his theory.
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Notes
- 1.
Contrary to some commentators, who see no relation between Tolstoy’s theory and the Western tradition in aesthetics other than negation. For instance, Morson (1987) and Silbajoris (1990), who in the conclusion to his book-length study of Tolstoy’s aesthetics claims that What is Art? should be read as a “withdrawal from all conventional standards and concepts of art carried onwards through history by the rising tide of civilization” and “the entire enormous structure of aesthetics that was built through long centuries” (Silbajoris 1990, 263; cf. Morson 1987, 37).
- 2.
It is worth noting that what could be called the pleasure principle returns here in Tolstoy’s aesthetics, despite his rejection of all theories grounded in beauty as pleasure-inducing. “The more particular the feeling conveyed, the more strongly does it affect the perceiver. The perceiver experiences the greater pleasure the more particular the state of mind into which he is transferred, and therefore the more willingly and strongly does he merge with it” (WiA, 121). Tolstoy appears to be suggesting that it is the particularity—and not the specific content—of the feeling that induces pleasure; in earlier texts such as his essay on Maupassant he explicitly identifies “clearness of expression” with “beauty of form” (Tolstoy 1969, 21), thereby complicating the general and fundamental contrast he draws in What is Art?.
- 3.
Caryl Emerson (2002, 244) notes that “sincerity” [iskrennost’] “is built off iskra, a ‘spark’: that which flashes momentarily and either catches fire or dies. The artistic effect either takes, or fails to take,” and Tolstoy likens the effect of genuine art to that of a spark: “It sometimes happens that people, while together, are, if not hostile, at least alien to each other in their moods and feelings, and suddenly a story, a performance, a painting, even a building or, most frequently, music, will unite them all with an electric spark [kak elektricheskoi iskroi], and instead of their former separateness, often even hostility, they all feel unity and mutual love” (WiA, 130–131).
- 4.
Compare in Anna Karenina the painter Mikhailov, who rejects the notion of mechanical technique in favor of the intuitive perception of an essence to be conveyed by the work: “If what he saw had also been revealed to a little child or to his kitchen-maid, they too would have been able to lay bare what they saw. But the most experienced and skilful painter-technician would be unable, for all his mechanical ability, to paint anything unless the boundaries of the content were first revealed to him” (Tolstoy 2000, 474).
- 5.
Similar claims: “Thus art is distinguished from non-art, and the worth of art is determined, regardless of its content, that is, independently of whether it conveys good or bad feelings” (WiA, 123); “The stronger the infection, the better that art is as art, regardless of its content—that is, independently of the worth of the feelingsit conveys” (WiA, 121; italics in original).
- 6.
- 7.
Compare in Anna Karenina the muzhik Platon’s words to Levin about a peasant who “lives for the soul. He remembers God. […] Everybody knows how—by the truth, by God’s way” (Tolstoy 2000, 794).
- 8.
For an interpretation that questionably makes artistic unintentionality intrinsic to Tolstoy’s expression theory of art, see Denner (2003).
- 9.
In “The Law of Love and the Law of Violence” (1908) he wrote: “And today this process [the “ever-increasing elucidations of the true meaning” of the teaching of the Gospels and the “ever-increasing alienation of man from the possibility of a good and reasonable life”] has reached the point where the Christian truth, formerly only recognized by a few, endowed with a keen religious sentiment, has been made accessible, in some of its aspects, to even the simplest people, through the doctrines of the Socialists; and yet life contradicts this truth at every step in the most crude and obvious way […] It is neither resolutions, nor the subtle, clever Socialist and Communist structures of unions, arbitrations, etc. that will serve mankind, but only when this spiritual awareness becomes general” (Tolstoy 1987, 202–203).
- 10.
Murdoch rejects the later Tolstoy’s emphasis on simplicity and folk tales, however, both in his aesthetic theory and in his literary practice, because such genres appear to deny the psychological depth required of art and morality to understand another individual. Cf. Murdoch (1993, Chapter 5) and Murdoch (1999 [originally 1959], 212). More work needs to be done here, however, as she also writes: “Certain parables or stories undoubtedly owe their power to the fact that they incarnate a moral truth which is paradoxical, infinitely suggestive and open to continual reinterpretation,” adducing the parable of the prodigal son as an example (Murdoch 1956, 50); thus there is conceptual space to differentiate kinds of forms and guidance within these genres.
- 11.
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Pickford, H.W. (2021). “Teaching of Life”: Tolstoy’s Moral-Philosophical Aesthetics. In: Bykova, M.F., Forster, M.N., Steiner, L. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Russian Thought. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62982-3_27
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