Yasnaya Polyana, Tula province, Russian Empire

1. Craig, Edward, ed. Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. London: Routledge, 1998.

2. The Cambridge Companion to Tolstoy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

3. Dinah Birch, ed. The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

4. Kelly, Michael, ed. Encyclopedia of Aesthetics. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Tolstoi expressed philosophical ideas in his novels Voina i mir (War and Peace) (1865-9) and Anna Karenina (1875-7), which are often regarded as the summit of realism, as well as in shorter fictional works, such as Smert’ Ivana Il’icha (The Death of Ivan Il’ich) (1886), often praised as the finest novella in European literature. In addition, he wrote numerous essays and tracts on religious, moral, social, educational and aesthetic topics, most notably ‘Chto takoe iskusstvo?’ (’What Is Art?’) (1898), Tsarstvo Bozhie vnutri vas (The Kingdom of God Is Within You) (1893) and his autobiographical meditation ’Ispoved’’ (A Confession) (1884).

Tolstoi apparently used his essays, letters and diaries to explore ideas by stating them in their most extreme form, while his fiction developed them with much greater subtlety. Critics have discerned a sharp break in his work: an earlier period, in which he produced the two great novels, is dominated by deep scepticism; and a later period following the existential trauma and subsequent conversion experience described in ’Ispoved’’. Tolstoi stressed the radical contingency of events, valued practical over theoretical reasoning, and satirized any and all overarching systems. After 1880, he assumed the role of a prophet, claiming to have found the true meaning of Christianity. He ‘edited’ the Gospels by keeping only those passages containing the essence of Christ’s teaching and dismissed the rest as so many layers of falsification imposed by ecclesiastics. Tolstoi preached pacifism, anarchism, vegetarianism, passive resistance to evil (a doctrine that influenced Gandhi), a radical asceticism that would have banned sex even within marriage, and a theory of art that rejected most classic authors, including the plays of Shakespeare and Tolstoi’s own earlier novels.

1 Life

Born into a prominent aristocratic family, Tolstoi studied oriental languages and law at Kazan University, where he failed to earn a degree. He then tried to reform his estate according to philosophical principles, a topic which recurs in Anna Karenina, whose hero, Konstantin Levin, meditates on why such efforts almost invariably fail. A compulsive diarist, the young Tolstoi repeatedly formulated complex rules for behaviour, which he never followed, then devised rules for insuring obedience to the earlier rules, and at last reflected on the inadequacy of all rules or systems for an understanding of human behaviour, another key theme of his fiction. Enlisting in the army during the Crimean War, he wrote military stories (the Sevastopol sketches, 1855-6) concentrating on the difference between standard narratives, whether official, literary or historical, and the realities of combat. He later recalled that immediately after a battle, soldiers would narrate their experiences in a confused way and describe events as rife with contingency; but a month later, after official accounts had described a smooth series of military engagements in conventional language, the same soldiers would ‘remember’ events according to the received narratives. Such experiences led Tolstoi to a deep suspicion of narrative neatness, which rules out the contingency actually governing events, a theme central to War and Peace.

After the Crimean War, Tolstoi was hailed as a major writer but, always suspicious of the intelligentsia he deemed self-congratulatory, he joined no intellectual camp. In 1862 he married Sofia Andreevna Bers, and devoted the ensuing years to his marriage (he eventually had thirteen children) and the writing of War and Peace. In the 1870s he wrote Anna Karenina and then experienced the most significant of his many psychological crises, leading to the adoption of his own reformulated Christianity. His new ideas led to estrangement from his wife, and their marriage from this point on deteriorated and became complicated; it has been the subject of numerous, vaguely voyeuristic biographical treatments.

In addition to theological tracts and many essays, Tolstoi wrote endless diaries, which were evidently designed to be published and so resemble stage whispers. Regarded around the world as a sage, he corresponded with countless writers and thinkers, and his estate, Iasnaia Poliana, became a place of pilgrimage. His best fiction of the period deals with sexuality (in Kreitserova sonata (The Kreutzer Sonata) (1891)), death (The Death of Ivan Il’ich), and the complex psychology of sainthood (Father Sergei (1898)), but he also wrote one long novel, Voskresenie (Resurrection) (1899), usually regarded as a heavy-handed, didactic failure. Always perplexed by the contradiction between his wealthy life and the simple existence he preached, he fled Iasnaia Poliana and soon died in the course of his pilgrimage.

2 War and Peace

In his most lasting work, Tolstoi was deeply impressed by all those aspects of life that elude systematization or theoretical knowledge. He loved to formulate negative laws, dicta about what cannot be known or found in an unmixed state. ’Pure and absolute sorrow is as impossible as pure and absolute joy’, he writes in War and Peace, a sentence that reflects in its very style Tolstoian habits of thought.

In Tolstoi’s view, it is not primarily grand incidents, broad laws or dramatic decisions that shape individual or historical life, but the sum total of ordinary events. Life is made by ‘tiny, tiny alterations’ of action and consciousness, changes so small that they usually pass unnoticed, even though they are right before our eyes. What really counts is hidden in plain view, a sentiment that seems to have influenced Wittgenstein, who was an admirer of Tolstoi. At each small moment of existence, contingency reigns, not in the sense that anything can happen, but in the sense that more than one thing can happen. Time branches not only at critical moments, but always, and so our smallest decisions have moral value. Apparently inconsequential events may turn out to have great impact over time. Our decisions at critical moments are shaped by the climate of our minds, which in turn depends on the sum total of our smallest thoughts at odd moments.

No algorithm can reduce these small events to laws. With withering irony, Tolstoi, who was superb at logical analysis, detects the fallacies in attempts to construct systems that aspire to eliminate contingency. Theoreticians often assume that behind the apparent chaos of the social world reigns a hidden order, which may be expressed in a few simple laws; but Tolstoi insists that all such reasoning manages to rule out inconvenient facts and at crucial moments presumes what it hopes to prove. One example he cites for this is the Hegelian assumption that certain events not fitting a central story are ‘nonhistorical’. In War and Peace, he refers to reasoning by ‘stencil work’. Tolstoi suggests that the opposite assumption is closer to lived experience: the social world is fundamentally messy and order is always the result of work. It is regularity, not contingency, that requires an explanation.

In War and Peace, Tolstoi develops these insights in the philosophical reflections of his characters, in the events of their lives and in embedded essays, expressed not through a narrator but directly through the voice of the author. In this work, battle becomes a metaphor for history, and the radical uncertainty of combat, which only fools think can be reduced to a science of warfare, suggests the radical unpredictability of history. Tolstoi utterly rejects the possibility of laws of history and in several writings expressed particular animus to the idea of an underlying law of progress. One of the novel’s heroes, Prince Andrei, begins the novel believing in heroism, which he conceives as the ability to grasp the laws of battle and to act decisively upon them in dangerous moments. He eventually learns that battles cannot be shaped by strategy but are decided instead by ‘a hundred million diverse chances, which will be decided on the instant by whether we run or they run, whether this man or that man is killed’ - decided, that is, by events that are in principle unpredictable and chancy. The emphasis on what happens ‘on the instant’ reflects Tolstoi’s belief in the crucial importance of presentness and on the futility of assuming that only timeless principles represent the highest form of thinking. Tolstoi believed deeply in what Aristotle called phronesis, or practical reasoning (see Aristotle §23).

‘What science can there be’, Prince Andrei asks, ‘in a matter in which, as in every practical matter, nothing can be determined and everything depends on innumerable conditions, the significance of which becomes manifest at a particular moment, and no one can tell when that moment will come?’ Thus, the most effective soldier in the novel, Nikolai Rostov, cares nothing for theories but has developed the practical ability to grasp the shifting situations of each moment and, on the basis of unformalizable experience, to take advantage of unique and short-lived opportunities. The best generals in the novel, such as the Russian commander Kutuzov, know that they can be effective not by planning battles but by inspiring soldiers with the confidence to act intelligently. Kutuzov, in fact, falls asleep during councils of war because effective action depends on alertness. He explains that the best preparation for a battle, or any especially unpredictable and rapidly changing situation, is ‘a good night’s sleep’.

For a variety of reasons, historical narratives smooth out the contingencies of battles and of history. They therefore misrepresent the course of events, and, when taken as empirical knowledge on which to base future actions, lead to ill-conceived plans and to overconfidence in planning itself. In large part, the regularity of historical narratives reflects the essentially aesthetic need for a good story. Genres of historical writing differ, but each reflects a particular kind of plotting, all of which understate the radical uncertainty of the world precisely by telling a neat story. Plot contains implicit philosophy, and Tolstoi relentlessly teases out the hidden and fallacious assumptions behind various narrative forms. For reasons of mental economy, memory also works by filtering out the

contingent. Indeed, the fallacies of memory and narrative are present in initial acts of perception. In his novels, Tolstoi demonstrates these truths with portraits of events, their perception, their later appearance in memory and their encapsulation in the narratives characters and real historians construct.

In a series of draft introductions to War and Peace, Tolstoi evokes the image of a man viewing a distant hill on which only trees are visible. The man may conclude that the region in question contains nothing but trees. This conclusion would be a trick of perception, because smaller objects are simply not visible at a distance. In the same way, historians focus on unusual and big events because they are the most likely to be recorded. Part of the strategy of War and Peace is to contrast the picture of historians with a recreation of what events must have been like. We also commit this fallacy of perception in our individual lives, because memory does not preserve, or we cannot easily recall, small events that do not fit a pattern or story, but which may have been most effective and may even have constituted the essential quality of our lives. War and Peace is largely about the need to reverse some mental habits.

3 Anna Karenina

In both War and Peace and Anna Karenina, Tolstoi develops a theory of psychology. Perhaps indebted to Locke through the medium of Laurence Sterne’s novel Tristram Shandy, Tolstoi conceives the mind as an agglomeration of mental habits, each the result of small actions taken many times. These habits do not cohere into a whole; wholeness, like moral integrity, is a project we undertake but never complete. At any given moment, the mind has many thoughts and sensations, too many for effective action if we did not have the capacity to focus our attention on one or a few of them. Numerous tiny alterations are taking place on the periphery of consciousness, much as small events are always taking place in history, and these have their effect. But we rarely notice them, precisely because by definition one cannot focus one’s attention on what escapes one’s attention. One can only glimpse them at moments when attention shifts, and Tolstoi illustrates this process in detail.

Tolstoi is also famous for exploring in meticulous detail the relation of the body to the mind. At the periphery of attention characters are dimly aware of bodily sensations but are usually unaware of how they affect the direction of their thoughts. Or a character may be smiling out of habit or because of a thought experienced some time earlier, with the smile simply forgotten on his face. Anyone trying to guess his current thoughts by that smile would be mistaken because the mind is never whole and because at any given moment is temporally layered. We are all palimpsests.

In both War and Peace and Anna Karenina, Tolstoi develops an approach to ethics that might be called casuistical in the root sense of the word. Theoretical reasoning, proceeding from general principles to the particular situation, tends to oversimplify events. We do better by educating an ethical sensibility through sensitive attention to particular cases as they arise throughout life and then, at each moment, trusting a well-developed ethical sensibility (see Moral particularism).

Anna Karenina applies these general ideas to social life and to the problem of reform. As War and Peace rejects the romanticized idea of great heroes directing history, Anna Karenina may be viewed as a polemic against the assumption that romantic love (the sort to be found in Romeo and Juliet and in countless works of popular culture) is the only kind. The tragedy of Anna derives from her acceptance of this myth. The wiser characters, such as Kitty, understand that love may also be prosaic and that a successful marriage must be based precisely on prosaic love, which cultivates not grand gestures but small acts of intimacy that do not make a compelling story. The novel’s famous first sentence - ‘All happy families resemble each other; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way’ - suggests that unhappy families each have a unique story, whereas happy family lives are composed of prosaic incidents that do not make a compelling story. Plot is an index of error and of a life lived badly.

The novel’s hero, Levin, hopes to reform Russian agriculture by introducing Western machinery and applying the conclusions of social science. He discovers that successful reform never proceeds down from universal principles forced on a reluctant population, but by reasoning up from local conditions, which are always particular, and adopting measures that improve upon what already exists. We sense here Tolstoi’s deep conservatism and scepticism about the abstract theorizing of intellectuals.

4 Aesthetics and late writings

For Tolstoi before his conversion, realistic novels were the supreme art form because they provide, more than any other literary or non-literary writing, a rich sense of the particularities of ordinary existence. Nevertheless, novels also mislead because they, like other forms of narrative art, offer too neat a picture. Precisely because the author knows the story in advance and plans everything to fit, novels misrepresent our temporal experience by letting a pattern of the whole dictate what happens and by ruling out contingency. Tolstoi experimented with various ways of avoiding this error, and so wrote War and Peace (and to a great extent Anna Karenina) without an advance plan, letting each serialized part develop potentials in earlier parts but with no overall end in view. In fact, War and Peace never really ends, it just breaks off.

In Anna Karenina, Tolstoi developed a general theory of art on which he expanded in What Is Art? and other writings. The novel’s true artist, Mikhailov, paints not by applying techniques or by adhering to the tenets of any school, but by learning to see and record the particularities of experience. He is always observing small events of life and remembering them. Because everyone’s experience is unique, he can be certain that his painting will convey an aspect of experience no one else has conveyed.

In What Is Art?, Tolstoi first offers a showcase demolition of all the received schools of aesthetics and then presents his own view. Like Mikhailov, the true artist conveys an experience so sensitively that he manages to ‘infect’ his audience with the feelings he himself had. But many so-called artists work quite differently, by applying a set of abstract techniques copied from other artists. Though gaudily ‘interesting’, their work is not true but ‘counterfeit’ art because it results from no particular and unique experience. True art may be divided into good and bad on moral grounds. A bad but true artist successfully infects his readers with pernicious moral feelings (see Art and morality §3). Tolstoi rejects most of the canon of Western art as either immoral (Maupassant) or counterfeit (Wagner) or both (Shakespeare). His favourite example of good, true art was the story of Joseph in the Bible.

By goodness Tolstoi came to mean the tenets of Tolstoian Christianity. He rejected all miracles, all sacraments and the divinity of Christ. Relying on the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew: 6-7), he took Christ’s most important commandment to be ‘non-resistance to evil’, from which he derived a rejection of any institution based on force and so arrived at anarchism. He interpreted social and cultural institutions as so many curtains for concealing from ourselves our mortality (the theme of The Death of Ivan Il’ich) and for creating intermediaries between the practitioners of violence and ourselves, who benefit from it. He went so far as to argue that crime would cease if prisons and police were abolished. In these writings, Tolstoi seems far from the radical sceptic of his earlier years - and from occasional works of his old age, such as his novella Father Sergei, which reflects with evident self-irony on the distortions induced by aspirations to sainthood. Admirers of Tolstoi’s thought are divided between those who think of him as the prophet of non-resistance and those who prefer his sense of the futility of all-embracing systems.

GARY SAUL MORSON

References and further reading

Berlin, I. (1970) The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History, New York: Simon & Schuster.(Views Tolstoi as torn between scepticism and dogmatism.)

Eikhenbaum, B. (1930) Tolstoi in the Sixties, trans. D. White, Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1982. (By a leading Russian formalist, this book also examines Tolstoi’s relation to the thinkers of his time.)

Feuer, K.B. (1996) Tolstoy and the Genesis of ’War and Peace’, ed. R. Miller and D. Orwin, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.(Considers the creation of the novel in relation to Tolstoi’s evolving thought about society.)

Gustafson, R.F. (1986) Leo Tolstoy, Resident and Stranger: A Study in Fiction and Theology, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Outlines Tolstoi’s theological views and reads Tolstoi’s late ideas into his early fiction.)

Morson, G.S. (1987) Hidden in Plain View: Narrative and Creative Potentials in ’War and Peace’, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.(Discusses Tolstoi’s views on history, historiography and psychology in relation to the forms and themes of War and Peace.)

When Tolstoy referred (in late unfinished memoirs) to the vices necessary for becoming an author, he meant the desire to influence others and to be loved by them. Unlike his very private brother Nikolai, he felt this keenly. He told his wife that when he read a favorable review of Childhood while on a hunting trip in 1852, he choked back “tears of joy.” As he mentioned many times in his early diaries and drafts of early works, he regarded his reader as potentially a close friend. While this is a convention of sentimentalist prose, Tolstoy adopted it for personal as well as professional reasons. (Many critics associate his need for intimacy with the loss of his mother before he was three, and his father when he was nine.) Even in his old age, in 1890, he told a disciple (P. A. Sergeenko) that because he no longer cared for glory, in his drama The Light Shines in the Darkness he now wanted “to speak out my most sincere and intimate thoughts.”

Inasmuch as Tolstoy's personal reasons for writing fiction were partly confessional, he resisted such writing (often unsuccessfully) as undignified. He had another purely personal reason for writing fiction as well. Like many people, he fantasized about life as a means of understanding and controlling it. Very often, therefore, his works are counterpoints to his life at the time he wrote them, and represent imagined solutions to real-life problems. So, for instance, he wrote Anna Karenina with its happy ending (for the Levins) while he was going through a protracted crisis that began just after he finished War and Peace in 1869, and led eventually to A Confession with its avowed rejection of his earlier life. As Tolstoy grew older, the gap between his art and life in this respect began to narrow. Always prone to radical experimentation, he tried more and more to live the solutions that he was advocating in his books. Contradictions between his life and his theories led eventually to a final real-life crisis. At age eighty-two, on October 28, 1910, after having threatened to do so intermittently for more than twenty-five years, Tolstoy finally left home to begin a new life more consistent with his ideas. Perhaps it was lucky for him that he died a little over a week later at the railroad station of Astapovo. His death provided one of those tidy endings that he abjured in fiction because “life isn't like that.” Had he lived on, it would have meant a return to struggle and paradox. Just one of these paradoxes was pointed out to me by Tolstoy's biographer Lidiia Dmitrievna Gromova-Opul’skaia in private conversation: it was only because of her loving care of him that Tolstoy was alive in 1910 finally to leave his wife. No sooner did he leave her than he died.

It is significant that, according to Tolstoy, the specific vice of poets is vanity, the lowest manifestation of the political passion of love of glory. The notorious anarchist and pacifist who believed that politics was by its very nature corrupting and corrupt was himself at bottom a political man who at age twenty-three conceived himself as born “to have great influence over the happiness and well-being of others” (diary, March 29, 1852). Tolstoy scholar Boris Eikhenbaum compared him to Napoleon, both in ambition and in his brilliant and successful maneuvering to remain relevant for over fifty years within an evolving literary and cultural milieu. His greatest political achievement, in which he joins Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Pushkin, was as a founding poet of his nation. He came to manhood in the 1840s and 1850s, just as Russians were struggling to define themselves as a modern people, and his works contributed to that project of national identity. From the time it appeared, War and Peace was immediately perceived as a founding epic, a Russian Iliad.

Both Tolstoy's personal circumstances and the time in which he lived shaped his political beliefs. His father, an officer in the Napoleonic Wars, was captured and then freed in 1814 during the occupation of Paris. After five years of service in government, he retired to his wife's estate of Iasnaia Poliana, where Tolstoy was born. The Tolstoys, with 800 serfs, were independently wealthy, but members of an aristocracy whose political power had been steadily eroded under the Romanov tsars. Tolstoy grew up under Nicholas I, who came to power after a failed putsch by the aristocracy and, as much as possible, concentrated power in his own hands. Nicholas wanted soldiers, not advisors, and for him the aristocracy was a military caste only. Tolstoy once commented to his friend and biographer Aylmer Maude that Russians were freer than Englishmen, who had to occupy themselves with politics. From the other side of the fence, Maude speculated that their isolation from the hard practical tasks of governing made Russians prone to "extremely radical solutions." Of Tolstoy himself he said that "Tolstoy had no adequate sense of being a responsible member of a complex community with the opinions and wishes of which it is necessary to reckon. On the contrary, his tendency was to recognize with extraordinary vividness a personal duty revealed by the working of his own conscience and intellect, apart from any systematic study of the social state of which he was a member."

Tolstoy drew upon his own biography when he described young Dmitrii Olenin, the hero of The Cossacks, on the eve of his departure to the Caucasus:

At the age of eighteen he was free—as only rich young Russians in the forties who had lost their parents at an early age could be. Neither physical nor moral fetters of any kind existed for him; he could do as he liked, lacking nothing and bound by nothing. Neither relatives, nor fatherland, nor religion, nor wants existed for him.

The Cossacks, begun as early as 1852 but published only in , reveals the state of mind of the young Tolstoy in another way as well. Olenin is careful not to commit himself to anything or anyone that would diminish this freedom, but he is also consciously searching for a goal, "an aspiration or an idea" for which he could sacrifice himself and his freedom. This sense of personal freedom on the one hand and idealism on the other was typical of Russian gentry youth on the eve of the emancipation of the serfs in 1861.

As a hereditary aristocrat, Tolstoy was interested in politics: as a university student, he started a commentary on Catherine the Great's Instruction, and in 1849 he even considered a career in the civil service. He joined the army in 1852. An artillery officer, he served on the front lines during the Crimean War and witnessed the corruption and favoritism that, in his mind, undermined the heroic efforts of Russian soldiers on the battlefield. Like Prince Andrei in War and Peace, he suggested reforms to his superiors, but got nowhere. Tolstoy's later political anarchism derives in part from such disillusionments. His experience suggested to him that a meaningful, free life was possible only outside politics, and this became his lifetime opinion. In his fiction, his characters undergo educations that turn them away from politics, just as he turned away. Moral education is more important for him than political education, and he connects political or social change with individual change wrought by education.

Yet inasmuch as Tolstoy's writings almost all concern the relation of the individual to society, they inevitably have a political dimension. He sought, paradoxically for us, a social organization outside of representative government, in which he did not believe. But why should he have believed in it? No matter how many reforms the Romanov tsars introduced to modernize Russia during Tolstoy's lifetime, starting after the defeat of the Crimean War, none of them willingly gave away one iota of power. Every one of them reserved for himself the right to override the law, and by so doing made it impotent. Is it surprising that Tolstoy regarded political organizations as unjust attempts by the strong to oppress the weak? This is mostly what they were in the Russia of his lifetime.

Many Russians hoped that the abolition of serfdom would generate a new social cohesiveness. It is no accident that War and Peace was written in the decade immediately after the emancipation. In it, Tolstoy depicts the whole Russian people acting in concert as a model for a future, harmonious nation. He deliberately minimizes the tensions among the classes during the Napoleonic period, and he insists that the gentry, the main actors in the novel, are members of the Russian people along with peasant soldiers and merchants who all support the war. In fact, however, the emancipation and its aftermath exacerbated social problems in Russia rather than alleviated them. It destroyed the economic foundations of gentry life but—in a futile effort to avoid this result—ruined the peasants by freeing them without land. Migration to the cities swelled an urban proletariat which eventually became the focus of revolutionary agitation. From the late 1870s, determined persecution by the government of radical groups (who first agitated in the countryside, and only in the 1890s concentrated on cities) heightened discord.

Tolstoy's personal crisis depicted in A Confession (1881) had political as well as personal causes and is organically linked to the political radicalism that he began to espouse soon after he wrote it. Starting in the early 1880s, he called for the dissolution of the state and the establishment in its place of a universal Christian brotherhood in which loosely organized small communities supported themselves and no one tyrannized over his fellows. In What Then Must We Do? (1882–86), he claimed that governments with their armies and police help the rich and powerful to oppress the poor. The privileged claim to have freed themselves from the necessity of working so as to be of use to others. But Tolstoy argues that “there is not one government or societal activity which would not be considered by many people to be harmful”; and therefore, the so-called usefulness of the privileged is always imposed by force on the people it is supposed to help. There is no such thing as a government to which every individual has given consent, and only such a government would be just. All rulers, democratic or otherwise, should admit that “their main motivation is their own personal advantage.” What Then Must We Do? was written during a period of political crisis: Pan-Slavists were extremely critical of the treaty ending the Russo-Turkish War; in 1877, the government in the late 1870s was determined to crush the populist movement; and Alexander II was assassinated by radical populists in 1881. Tolstoy warned that revolution was not only imminent, but had been averted only by guile for the last thirty years, that is, since the death of Nicholas I and the defeat in the Crimean War (ch. 39).

By 1900 (fifteen or so years later), in The Slavery of Our Times, Tolstoy’s indictment of existing Russian society had been extended to all modern solutions to societal ills, including Marxism, which became important in Russia only in the 1890s. He argued bluntly that so long as people, rich and poor, insisted on living at the present standard of prosperity, slavery would be necessary to maintain it. The problem, according to him, was not as easy as improving the conditions of workers, themselves corrupted by city living. What was needed was a return to a rural life in which people did meaningful work in natural surroundings. Whatever cooperation such communities required would be supplied locally and agreed upon by all.

For Tolstoy in his later years, political instincts became the evil that must be overcome in order for the Kingdom of God to be established on earth. Practically, the least believable part of his political program is his claim that if individuals only considered their own self-interest, then we would all moderate our passions and live in harmony. Thousands of years of evidence to the contrary do not sway Tolstoy from this “simple” idea. He blames all past injustices on the crimes of the rich and powerful, but he seems to think that in the future these same spoilers can be talked into mending their ways. He presents the rewards of this past behavior as all connected to physical, material existence. The powerful want to rule the weak so that they need not work themselves, and so that they can indulge bodily passions. But, although he does not emphasize it, he has not forgotten the love of glory which Prince Andrei defines in War and Peace as the desire that others, even those he despises, love him. This passion requires the cooperation of others, and hence, politics. In What I Believe, Tolstoy asserts that the striving for “earthly happiness,” which, although he does not mention it, includes at its pinnacle the love of glory, arises out of fear of death. We indulge our passions and seek to extend our existence by controlling others in an effort to forget and even avoid death; but since death is inevitable, we would be wise to give up these unjust activities and to live within the boundaries of material necessity.

Although Tolstoy thought that people almost always acted in accordance with their feelings rather than their thoughts, he never gave up attempting to appeal to reason in himself and others. (In fact, he became more, not less, of a rationalist in his old age, and therefore more of an Enlightenment thinker.) During his short stint at Kazan University in 1847, he studied philosophy and kept a diary. As a thinker, however, Tolstoy was always more moralist than metaphysician: he always had a practical, moral reason for philosophizing. This didactic side made him a natural teacher. Pedagogy, in various forms of which he engaged throughout his life, was no sideline for him; in his mind, in fact, it was a less personal and therefore more justifiable reason for writing. The surviving philosophical fragments from Tolstoy’s student days stand in relation to the diaries as theory to practice. The diaries set rules based on philosophical generalizations and record Tolstoy’s moral progress (or, more often, his backsliding). Reading these early unpublished writings in the 1920s, Eikhenbaum established that Tolstoy’s fiction grew originally out of the diaries, but the philosophical fragments are equally important. His shift from philosophy to fiction was as much strategic as temperamental. In his mind, the purpose of both was didactic—to lead his reader to virtue and freedom through education. The failure of his early attempts to control and shape his own life (and the consequences of his own Rousseauist philosophical orientation) taught him that education had to take place not through reason and philosophy, but through the sentiments and, therefore, art.

In the art that grew from his twin fascinations with details and philosophical generalization, the young Tolstoy may be said to have had two goals: to recreate reality and to order it according to higher moral truth. All of Tolstoy's fiction is autobiographical in some way. He believed that truth resides in individual experience, and hence that what he learned from self-observation could be applied to humankind in general. This premise underlies all his art, starting with his first great work, the trilogy Childhood–Adolescence–Youth, in which he attempted to recapitulate the first three stages of life. The fourth stage is described in the other masterpiece of Tolstoy's youth, The Cossacks, which was originally entitled Young Manhood.

Tolstoy's belief in the necessity of grounding all knowledge in personal experience also influenced his poetics. He worked on a style that would place the reader within a scene or character by appealing first to the reader's own sense perceptions and memories. The success of this technique is responsible for Tolstoy's reputation, already established in the nineteenth century, as the greatest realist writer. To structure his vivid realism, Tolstoy developed an authoritative narrative voice—a voice first heard thundering in the Sevastopol stories written as a response to different stages of the siege of Sevastopol during the Crimean War. Impersonal though it may sound, it would be a mistake to call this voice objective or merely logical. It is Tolstoy himself speaking directly and lyrically to his readers, in tones reminiscent of his mentor Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In Tolstoy’s fictional works, this voice does not dominate; in his nonfiction, it does; but in both, the intention of the author is the same: to infect the reader with his ideas and feelings. Already in 1853 he declared that the “main interest” of any literary work was “the character of the author” as expressed in it: “The most pleasant [works] are those in which the author seems to hide his personal viewpoint but remains consistent in it wherever it appears” (November 1, 1853). Once located imaginatively within the perspective of a given character or narrator, the reader will identify with his thoughts as well. In nonfictional works, the author steps out from behind his vividly imagined narratives, but he still relies on numerous parables and interpolated narratives to make his points. In other words, even in these, appealing as he does more to feeling than to reason, for philosophical reasons he still is more poet than philosopher.

Tolstoy’s philosophy was anchored in a complex model of human psychology developed in his student days. He explained it in 1857, in drafts for the never-finished second half of Youth:

I remember that the basis of the new philosophy consisted in the fact that man consists of body, feelings, reason, and will, but the essence of the human soul is will, and not reason; that Descartes, whom I had not read then, was wrong to say Cogito, ergo sum, because he thought only because he wished to think, consequently, one should say: volo, ergo sum. On this basis, the faculties of man can be divided into the will of the mind, the will of the feelings, and the will of the body.

Even though will is the essence of human nature, will itself is not a unified force in this psychological model. The moral goal that Tolstoy set himself in his first diaries was to organize his soul so that the various parts were in harmony with one another. For this to happen, the “will of the mind” had to govern the other “wills.” As Tolstoy soon discovered, however, the mind itself could go astray. Especially troublesome was the “big brain” that, left to its own devices, indulged in dangerous mental gymnastics that destroyed unselfconscious moral instincts and tradition without providing anything conscious to replace them. In the early 1850s, Tolstoy read the “Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar” in Rousseau’s Émile, and adopted the Vicar’s resolution to eschew all metaphysics except what was necessary to objectively ground moral freedom and law. He abandoned forever any attempt to directly connect with God or metaphysical truth and became instead a kind of transcendentalist, which he remained, although in differing degrees and in different ways, his entire life.

In the early 1880s, Tolstoy began to see himself as more a sage and moral leader than an artist. Unlike artists, gurus depend upon an articulated moral teaching, and Tolstoy spent the first half of this decade developing one. In parallel and contrast to the autobiographical project of the 1850s, he planned and largely executed a large work consisting of A Confession (1879–82), An Investigation of Dogmatic Theology (1879–81, 1884), A Translation and Harmony of the Four Gospels, and What I Believe (1882–84). The four parts would move from a description of Tolstoy’s crisis of faith (A Confession), through an examination and dismantling of contemporary Christianity (the two middle works), to a statement of faith as practiced by Tolstoy himself and recommended to others (What I Believe).

Tolstoy's Christianity was ethical and anti-metaphysical. God was inaccessible except through “knowledge of the meaning of human life” (What I Believe, ch. 9). This knowledge is progressive and ethical: only when one rejects, through experience and the power of reason, the “illusoriness of the finite” does one then turn to and believe in the “infinite.” In practical terms, this meant a moral evolution from the natural life of the body, centered around self and family, to life centered around the well-being of others. Tolstoy’s social theories, developed at the same time, depended on this central premise. He began to spend winters in Moscow in 1881, and for the first time encountered urban poverty. In response, he wrote first a powerful description of what he saw entitled “On the Moscow Census,” and then What Then Must We Do? In this latter work, he says that philanthropy for the poor is not the solution to societal injustices. Instead, the rich must abandon their idle way of life and model a good life for the poor and for society. This “solution” was also to apply to the artist. In the 1880s, Tolstoy tried very hard to change his life to make it conform to his new ideas, and his wife’s opposition to this led to their estrangement. Already in 1884, he made his first attempt to leave home.

Tolstoy insisted that personal moral reform was more important than social action, which by itself, without the proper moral attitude, would not have lasting results. In any case, a properly organized society would not require large-scale or institutionalized social action, because everyone would be able to feed and clothe himself. In 1891–92, despite this official position, which he continued to advocate even in articles on the famine, Tolstoy and his family organized famine relief in his own and neighboring provinces. When it first began, the tsarist government denied the seriousness and even the existence of the famine, for which its economic policies were partly responsible. Tolstoy’s article “On Hunger” was banned, whereupon Tolstoy arranged for it to be translated and published in several foreign countries. Partly as a result of the publicity generated by this and other articles by Tolstoy, aid flowed into the stricken areas from Russian and foreign contributors.

Already famous as Russia’s greatest living author and moral authority, Tolstoy now became a social activist and a lightning rod for political dissent. By the early 1890s, he was being widely read abroad: in fact, since all his controversial tracts and some of his fiction were banned at home but immediately translated and distributed elsewhere, foreign readers had easier access to them than did Russians. Readers all over the world, as well as at home, responded to his cries de cœur, which promoted a new religious faith based on reason and ethics rather than dogma. In 1891, Ernest Howard Crosby (1856–1907), an American diplomat from a prominent New York family stationed in Alexandria, Egypt, read a French translation of On Life, Tolstoy’s philosophical explanation of his new ideas. He immediately wrote Tolstoy to tell him of its impact on him: “Altho’ brought up in Christian surroundings, I never saw and felt before the real secret of Christ’s teaching and the real grounds of our faith and hope. All that you say finds an echo in my own heart and it is all so beautifully simple and self-evident.” This one work changed Crosby’s life. He left his job, embarked on a life of public service based on his new ideals, and became Tolstoy’s main advocate and disciple in the United States.

Another American, Jane Addams, just out of college, read My Religion (or What I Believe) and, a little while later, What to Do (or What Then Must We Do?). Addams, who went on to found Hull House and the settlement house movement, credited Tolstoy with inspiring her life’s work and visited him in 1896. In the 1890s, during a period of imperialist wars, Tolstoy became involved in the pacifist movement. He used his immense prestige as a writer to champion various causes in Russia and around the world, and many of his artistic works from this thirty-year period were written in their service. His teachings influenced Gandhi in India, and the kibbutz movement in Palestine, and at home his moral authority rivaled and often exceeded that of the tsar and church. At home too, the older Tolstoy was a hero of resistance.

It is something of a historical irony that we read Tolstoy today for his positive portrayals of gentry life, rather than for his later, satirical works. In a sense, these writings, so famous in their own time, are victims of their own success: in some small measure because of them, the regime and world they attacked have disappeared.

Tolstoy himself proclaimed loud and clear that he changed course in 1880, so much so that the writings of the following decade, both fictional and polemical, can be understood as an attempt to reinvent himself as another psychological being. There were personal reasons for this, the main ones being his own aging and various deaths in his family. He himself thought that these “biological” events had brought him to his senses, and to a right understanding of the world at last. When he was writing War and Peace, he had believed that nature was moral, and needed only to be fully expressed in an art which at its core was mimetic rather than didactic. The later Tolstoy believed less in the fusing of nature and morality, and used art to convey a moral lesson from his narrator, who now becomes the persona of an author bent on directly infecting his readers.

Another way that he himself explained his evolution is that in later life he ceased to believe in the natural coupling of aesthetics and ethics. The consequences of this change in thought are artistically expressed in a metaphor that develops through four appearances in A Confession. In chapter three, Tolstoy compares himself as a youth, with his early uncritical acceptance of “perfectification” (sovershenstvovanie) and progress as worthy goals of life, to a feckless passenger “carried in a boat through wind and waves,” who answers the natural question “Where are we heading?” with the answer: “somewhere.” Toward the end of chapter four, he repeats that “outside life carried me along on its waves while I believed that life has sense, although I could not express it.” In chapter ten, he identifies the common people as those who will teach him the meaning of life and who “carry the likes of me and the Solomons [from Ecclesiastes] along the waves of life.” Chapter twelve ends with a metaphor extended to Homeric length to poetically encapsulate Tolstoy’s early life and conversion. Having embarked on the boat first mentioned in chapter three, having been given oars and directed to the other shore, he rowed out into the current. He worked conscientiously at first, but was influenced by others to drop his oars and drift with the current. Only when disaster loomed ahead did he look back, see the peasant rowers behind still headed for the other shore, and joining them, saved himself.

Tolstoy’s readers, following this trope to its triumphant climax in chapter twelve, would inevitably be reminded of the comparison of history to a great ocean in the first epilogue of War and Peace and the explanation of its author that each individual, while going about his own business, unconsciously plays a role in currents and upheavals in the ocean which reflect the unknown will of God in history. Hundreds of pages earlier, in Book Two, Chapter Seven (Chapter Four in Maude’s translation), soldiers crossing a bridge are portrayed through the eyes of Nesvitsky, an officer-observer, as waves of a great river. In his great novel of expansive optimism, Tolstoy allows us to go with the flow—so long as we don’t abandon our humanity—and he assimilates the political and historical life of peoples into nature. In A Confession, the metaphor of the river represents not only human history, but a mix of physical life, passion, and outside, corrupt opinion—all the things, so it seemed to Tolstoy by then, that human beings are born to resist. In Resurrection, the river metaphor recurs in the wild spring break-up of the ice that accompanies the hero Nekhliudov’s seduction of Maslova. The use of water imagery is complicated in the novel, which begins with a rejuvenating spring rainfall and elsewhere compares water and pity, but at most we can say that nature by itself keeps us free—every spring the ice breaks in the river and the imprisoned torrent flows again—but not moral.

As suggested above, the sea change in Tolstoy’s ideas affected his attitude toward art. In A Confession he explains that in his early, mistaken period (when he wrote both War and Peace and Anna Karenina), he had conceived of art as strictly mimetic: “the expression of life of every sort in poetry and the arts made me happy, I enjoyed looking at life in the mirror of art... this play of lights and shadows—the comic, the tragic, the touching, the fine, the terrible in life—comforted me” (ch. 4). When he realized that his life did not in fact make sense, his idea of art did not change, but mimesis becomes “either unnecessary, superfluous and funny or torture.” What is unsaid but implied in this passage is that earlier, Tolstoy had equated life and its ethical meaning, and art as a “mirror” was the perfect vehicle to express both the true and the good. Later, when he comes to believe that morality requires the rejection of the “play of lights and shadows” that Stiva Oblonsky so eloquently defends in Anna Karenina, his art, no longer reigning supreme, is officially subordinated wholly to the task of self-conquest and for the most part becomes “torture” for Tolstoy himself and his readers. His most typical later fiction was therefore both more naturalistic and more moralistic at the same time. On one end of the spectrum of these later didactic works are realistic stories with clear-cut morals like The False Coupon, and on the other are modern parables like Esarhaddon and The Restoration of Hell, which shade into Bunyanesque allegory or medieval morality plays as they illustrate moral points.

In keeping with these new ideas, the novel Resurrection differs significantly in structure from his two previous ones. No good love story balances a bad one here; instead, the reader must follow the main character, Dmitrii Nekhliudov, as he gradually gives up personal happiness for love for others. As a Rousseauist, Tolstoy had always hated excess and social organization beyond that practiced in small communities, but he now went further to denounce the body itself as an unruly force that had to be tamed in order for life to be happy and virtuous. He debunks passions by carrying their consequences to negative extremes. In The Kreutzer Sonata, for instance, we are expected to admit that we all have, if only momentarily, hated our spouses and wanted to kill them. If such an impulse has ever crossed our minds, as it apparently had Tolstoy’s, then, as the epigraph to The Power of Darkness goes: “When the claw is caught, the whole bird is lost.” We cannot resist playing out the whole scenario with Pozdnyshev—from lust to murder—and then Pozdnyshev, backed up by Tolstoy, turns to us and says, you see, sex, even in marriage, is bad, and leads to murder. Not even animals are spared. Strider, narrated by a gelding, exposes the unnaturalness of ownership, but also suggests that sexual passion addles the minds of his fellow horses. With magnificent confidence that his reader will follow him everywhere, in his late stories Tolstoy rages against the body so as to achieve for himself and his readers that embrace of the infinite that he believes will only come when one’s belief in the pleasures and goodness of the finite—that is, the material—is destroyed.

In many ways, of course, Tolstoy was consistent in his beliefs throughout his life. To the extent that this is true, his later, avowedly dogmatic works and tracts on various subjects are continuations of the project of self-analysis and moral improvement initiated in the 1840s, during his university years. Behind all the twists in his ideas and behavior, there is a psychological consistency in his life from beginning to end. His genius is narrow but deep: no man has lived a more sincere life than he did, or one more dedicated to serving the needs of the individual. This consistency produced a great artist, and also a flawed thinker and activist who contributed to the tragic political history of his country. From his early youth he longed for an emotional intimacy with others that his mind could accept as truthful. His greatest work of art, War and Peace, is, among other things, a fantasy of such complete intimacy, expressed in the marriage of Pierre and Natasha. Experience disabused him of the possibility of such a union based on feeling alone, and he spent the second part of his life trying to construct one based on reason. The more reasonable he claimed to be, however, the more isolated he became from others, including members of his own family. For the last thirty years of his life, he lived as a stranger in his own house, preaching love and sowing dissension.

His theories wrought havoc abroad as well as at home. Whilst remaining absolutely true to his own individual needs, he accused the members of his class of selfishness, and imagined, along with many other Russians of his generation, that Russian peasants were different psychological beings than himself—both better and simpler. Not spoiled by “civilization,” they would willingly share naturally sparse goods and limit their passions. As he strapped on his armor in one last public battle during the Russo-Japanese War, the revolution of 1905, and its aftermath, he called for a social contract based on moderation and love of others, to be peopled by those unspoiled Russian peasants and young people whom he had conjured into existence.

All the while he was spinning his theories, however, Tolstoy did not lose touch with the wellspring of his genius in his own soul, and he continued to produce great works of art from this source. It is significant that the happiest, most lyrical moments in his later diaries are almost always solitary encounters with nature. In human interactions his passions are often on display, leaving him vulnerable to accusations of inconsistency or even hypocrisy that he is the first to level against himself. Tolstoy’s contemporaries, like writers Anton Chekhov and Maxim Gorky, who witnessed his struggles to “Be Reasonable,” regarded him with awe as a Titan among men. We do not share the privilege of knowing him personally, and even scaling the mountain of evidence left by Tolstoy himself and by memoirists does not give us a view of the giant himself, alive and whole. My own opinion is that Tolstoy did not intend to make sense in his old age, and therefore cannot be reconstituted according to rules of psychology or reason. In keeping with his later beliefs, he presented both himself and his fictional characters as trying to be good and rationally consistent—and rarely, if ever, succeeding at it. In this sense, in his own mind he became more like his contemporary and rival Fyodor Dostoevsky, whom he once described (in a letter to Strakhov) as “all struggle.” The older Tolstoy stressed that great writers are not better than other people—they do not sit on Olympus, as he put it in What Then Must We Do?—on the contrary, great in vice as well as virtue, they convey their moral lessons through their struggles, as portrayed for us in their works.

Notes:

1. He said this to G. A. Rusanov in 1883. See N. N. Gusev, Letopis’ zhizni i tvorchestva L’va Nikolaevicha Tolstogo, 1818–1890 (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1958), p. 561.

2. Ibid., p. 61.

3. Gusev, Letopis’ zhizni i tvorchestva L’va Nikolaevicha Tolstogo, 1891–1910 (Moscow: Goslitizdat, 1960), p. 358.

4. Lev Tolstoi, semidesiatye gody (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1960), p. 32.

5. The Life of Tolstoy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), vol. I, p. 59.

6. Ibid., vol. I, p. 60.

7. See The Young Tolstoy, trans. and ed. Gary Kern (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1972).

8. Compare the 1847 philosophical fragment in which he states that the goal of philosophy is to make human beings free (PSS 1:229) with another untitled fragment, probably written in 1851, in which he states that people read fiction to become virtuous, and therefore happy (PSS 1:246).

9. Detstvo. Otrochestvo. Iunost’ (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo “Nauka,” 1978), p. 474.

10. Robert Whittaker, “Tolstoy’s American Disciple: Letters to Ernest Howard Crosby, 1894–1906,” TriQuarterly 98 (Winter 1996/1997), p. 212.

11. Ibid., pp. 221–22.

12. One can add others—from the sour grapes of old age to the possibility, first suggested by William James in Varieties of Religious Experience, that Tolstoy suffered from a depressive mental illness that made him spiritually profound but sapped his love of life.

13. The changes actually took place more gradually, and can be seen infecting Anna Karenina. Only in 1880, however, did Tolstoy clearly articulate his differences with his own earlier position, and therefore decisively distanced himself from it. An added complication later on was the fact that the “new” Tolstoy was not able to fully satisfy his own artistic impulses, and had to do this on the sly, hiding not only from others, but from himself. The creation of his greatest late work, Hadji Murat, thus became an illicit activity.

14. See his explanation to Aylmer Maude in 1901 about the difference in this respect between himself and John Ruskin (Gusev, Letopis’ [1960], p. 385).

15. The metaphor, discredited, recurs in the mouth of Slavophile intellectual Koznyshev in Anna Karenina.

     

Tolstoy’s writing life divides quite sharply between two periods, which are separated by a time of spiritual and psychic crisis. In the earlier period, he wrote his greatest works of fiction. In the later, although he continued to write fiction, he concentrated on the ethical, political, and aesthetic implications of the religious views he had developed during that crisis (which he describes in A Confession).

Tolstoy has special relevance for aesthetics in three ways. First, he was, by common critical assessment, one of the supreme fiction writers who has ever lived. Moreover, he was a writer who attempted self-consciously to engage philosophical issues in his fiction. In War and Peace, he not only wrote a great historical novel about the conflict between Napoleonic France and Russia filled with memorable characters (and much of his own family’s history), but he also reflected on the nature of human history. Second, Tolstoy was concerned with the nature of fiction and participated in some of the lively critical debates in nineteenth-century Russia about the possibilities of fiction. Third, late in his life, he wrote a book titled What Is Art? in which he presented a critique of previous theories of art, and in which he proposed his own definition and analysis of art. This work, though not the product of a trained philosopher, has been one of the most provocative in the history of aesthetic theory. Interestingly, Tolstoy denounces his own earlier writings (including War and Peace and Anna Karenina) in this book from the perspective of his late religious views. After a brief overview of Tolstoy’s view of fiction and What Is Art? this essay will discuss Tolstoy’s own definition of art and some of the more common objections to it.

Tolstoy’s View of Fiction. Although Tolstoy was not a philosopher, he began his career as a writer of fiction at a time when philosophical issues permeated the atmosphere of Russia. He both attempted to deal with philosophical—even metaphysical—issues in his fiction and engaged in the lively critical debates about the nature of fiction that were so prominent among writers in the 1850s and 1860s. A terminology derived from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel helped frame these debates. Much of the tradition of critical discussion about Tolstoy stresses what is seen as his divided nature. For Isaiah Berlin, for example, in The Hedgehog and the Fox, Tolstoy was best understood as a fox (someone who knows many different things) who wanted to be a hedgehog (someone who knows one big thing—who has achieved a systematic understanding of reality). It was, however, a commonplace of the time to think of analysis as the detailed understanding of individual elements and events, and synthesis as the capacity to integrate these particulars in a single unifying vision. Moreover, the relationship of these two capacities was thought of as dialectical—a Hegelian term often used of Tolstoy by his contemporaries. To a writer such as Henry James, the novels of Tolstoy with their naturalistic and metaphysical ambitions must appear to be “large loose baggy monsters,” but, for Tolstoy, the naturalistic representation of life would be incomplete without a reflective attempt to understand the meaning of life.

Tolstoy was obsessed by basic philosophical issues throughout his life—such issues as the true nature of a human being, the relationship of the individual to history, the nature of goodness, the possibility of human happiness—and he sought to embody, and to investigate, these issues, first in his fiction, later in his essays and in his life. Perhaps the most important philosophical influence on him was Jean-Jacques Rousseau; even late in life he identified Rousseau and the Gospels as the principal influences on his thought and art. Tolstoy’s understanding of Rousseau’s view of human nature underlies much of his fiction in the earlier period of his writing career. By the time he came to write What Is Art? Tolstoy had repudiated what most people judge to be his greatest artistic achievements. This was not because his fundamental concerns had changed, however, but because he had reached new religious conclusions about those concerns. Well before his religious conversion, he regarded his fiction as philosophical and didactic. He never held the view of “art for art’s sake,” and although he was committed to a broadly naturalistic view of fiction, he always felt that it was his task to go beyond the representation of possible realities in order to attempt to achieve an integrated understanding of those fictional realities.

What Is Art? The context of the title’s question already shows the direction of Tolstoy’s thought. He asks this question by considering the money that is spent on art, the effort and expense of training performing artists such as opera singers and ballet dancers, and the effort involved in a rehearsal of an opera. (In the famous passage describing the opera rehearsal, he achieves an alienated distance from what he describes by pretending that he has no acquaintance with the cultural practice of opera.) The question of the justification for all this activity requires an answer to the more basic question of what art is: what does it do for human beings?

Tolstoy gives a brief history of aesthetic theorizing (derived mainly from Max Schasler’s history of aesthetics) in order to show that this history consists of a chaos of conflicting opinions. He writes that “Art in all its forms is bounded on one side by the practically useful, and on the other by unsuccessful attempts at art. How is art to be marked off from each of these?” (1959). This is the task of definition, and he goes on to give his own definition of art, which he then uses to judge what has been offered as art in his own time. Of that, he writes that he has come to the “conviction that almost all that our society considers to be art, good art, and the whole of art, far from being real and good art, and the whole of art, is not even art at all but only a counterfeit of it” (ibid.). It is his sense of the endemic threat of fraudulence in art that motivates much of what Tolstoy writes. He gives special attention to the refutation of aesthetic theories that depend on notions of beauty or pleasure, though he also attempts to explain the historical origin of such theories. Tolstoy also devotes considerable attention to the evaluation of art.

Tolstoy’s Theory of Art. At the outset, a number of different questions asked about art by Tolstoy should be distinguished:

1. What is art as opposed to nonart?

2. How is art, as art, to be evaluated? (Tolstoy makes a not always successful effort to separate this from the first question.)

3. How is the content of art to be evaluated? (It is here that Tolstoy introduces his own religious views.)

4. Which works are examples of good art, bad art, and nonart? (Tolstoy’s critical judgments, presented as answers to this question, have occasioned outrage among most readers of his book.)

Tolstoy claims that the first question can only be answered by considering the purpose that art may serve “in the life of man and humanity. . . . [Art is] one of the conditions of human life. Viewing it in this way we cannot fail to observe that art is one of the means of intercourse between man and man” (1959). Tolstoy then draws a fairly crude distinction between thought and feeling, and suggests that whereas speech is the medium for the communication of thought, the essence of the intercourse of art is the transmission of feeling. Of course, not all transmission of feeling from one human being to another is art, though art is based on the human capacity to share the feelings of fellow humans. Here is Tolstoy’s definition of art from What Is Art?:

To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced and having evoked it in oneself then by means of movements, lines, colours, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others experience the same feeling—this is the activity of art.

Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that others are infected by these feelings and also experience them. (Ibid.)

Several aspects of this definition require comment. First, Tolstoy emphasizes both the expression of feeling by the artist and the reception of feeling by the audience. Because his theory is often broadly categorized as an “expression” theory, it is worth noting that, for Tolstoy, expression, to be achieved, requires reception by an other. Moreover, he requires that the audience experience the same feeling as that experienced by the artist, rather than that they understand what the feeling was that the artist experienced. (Unfortunately, Tolstoy has no philosophical account of feeling or emotion to offer here, so the implications of this definition are difficult to assess.) It is immediately obvious from this definition that sincerity of the artist is required for something to be art (a requirement that Tolstoy shortly makes explicit.)

Second, one should note that his definition does include a reference to the media of the various arts (“movements, lines, colours, sounds, or forms expressed in words”) and that he requires a conscious manipulation of the medium by the artist. Tolstoy has been criticized for his lack of attention to the formal elements of the arts, and it is true that he pays very little specific attention to these elements throughout What Is Art? Nonetheless, there is a place for them in his theory. The artist must have a command of these elements adequate to fashion an object capable of evoking in an audience the feeling experienced by the artist. Art is not produced by the simple spontaneous expression of emotion.

Third, however, it should be noted that this definition covers more than had come to be classified as part of the “fine arts” by the time Tolstoy wrote. His own example of artistic activity is of a boy telling of his frightening encounter with a wolf, producing in his audience the feelings he has experienced. This feature of Tolstoy’s theory was welcome to its author who, as we shall see, was opposed to almost everything considered to be a part of the “fine arts” not only of his own time but throughout history.

The second question—“How is art, as art, to be evaluated?”—is the point at which Tolstoy’s view of the relationship between art and morality/religion should be discussed. Tolstoy has commonly been interpreted as holding a moral view of art, which he specifically opposes to the “art-for-art’s-sake” aestheticism of the nineteenth century. This interpretation may ultimately be compelling, but his presentation of his view is complex. He holds that it is a necessary condition of a work of art that it produce an “infection” of its audience of its author’s “condition of soul” or feeling. When he gives a criterion for what he calls the “quality of art (which depends on its form) considered apart from its subject-matter,” he writes that “not only is infection a sure sign of art, but the degree of infectiousness is also the sole measure of excellence in art. . . . The stronger the infection the better is the art, as art” (ibid.). Here we seem to have a criterion of evaluation that is decidedly nonmoral. That Tolstoy intends this seems to be confirmed by his statement, “If a work is a good work of art, then the feeling expressed by the artist—be it moral or immoral—transmits itself to other people” (ibid.). This seems to imply that there can be a good work of art whose content is immoral, which would be precluded by any simple equation of the artistically good with the morally good. Of course, this would still leave open the possibility that works of art can be subject to moral judgment—it would just refuse the claim that nothing can be a good work of art unless it is morally good.

Matters become complicated, however, with Tolstoy’s answer to the third question: “How is the content of art to be evaluated?” Tolstoy carefully distinguishes the quality of art considered apart from its subject matter from the quality of the feelings that form the subject matter of works of art, and deals with these issues in separate chapters. For judgments about the former, the degree of infectiousness is the criterion, and that degree is determined by the individuality of the feeling, the clarity of its transmission, and the sincerity of the artist (and Tolstoy claims that sincerity entails individuality and clarity). For judgments about the latter, one must employ moral/religious truth. Tolstoy claims that the value of the feelings transmitted by works of art must be judged in terms of the highest religious perception of the age, and that the religious perception of his age is

the consciousness that our well-being, both material and spiritual, individual and collective, temporal and eternal, lies in the growth of brotherhood among men—in their loving harmony with one another. . . . And it is on the basis of this perception that we should appraise all the phenomena of our life and among the rest our art also. (Ibid.)

It might seem that we now have two standards of evaluation that might not be in agreement: one standard evaluates the quality of the work of art in terms of infectiousness; the other evaluates the quality of the content of the work in terms of religious truth. This picture is complicated by the fact that Tolstoy has a normative view of sincerity, however. He holds that the religious perception articulated above is true; therefore, feelings not in accord with it are what he calls “perverted.” Because an artist who expresses such feelings is necessarily alienated from the truth of his or her nature, such expression can never be deeply “sincere.” Hence, despite that fact that he attempts to separate the evaluation of art as art, and the evaluation of its content, Tolstoy may have a moral criterion for true art after all.

Finally, the fourth question: which works are examples of good art, bad art, and nonart? The most famous feature of What Is Art? is Tolstoy’s almost complete rejection of the traditional “canon” of fine arts. Here is a list of some of the artists whose work Tolstoy condemns as pseudoart or bad art: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Dante Alighieri, Torquato Tasso, William Shakespeare, John Milton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, Maurice-Polydone-Marie-Bernard Maeterlinck, Henrik Ibsen, Gerhart Hauptmann, Michelangelo, Raphael, Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, most of Johann Sebastian Bach, late Ludwig van Beethoven (especially the Ninth Symphony), Franz Liszt, Hector Berlioz, Richard Wagner, Johannes Brahms, Émile Zola, Rudyard Kipling, and almost all of the literary works of Tolstoy (including War and Peace and Anna Karenina). Tolstoy does give some examples of works that satisfy his criteria of orthodox and value; these include primarily folk art and religious literature of great antiquity, but also a few modern literary works. Among the latter are Les Misérables, some works of Charles Dickens, the works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, George Eliot’s Adam Bede, and some stories by Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, and Guy de Maupassant. One might note that Tolstoy’s particular critical judgments result from his application of his theory, and that one might agree with the theory and still dispute those particular judgments. Some have attributed Tolstoy’s late repudiation of the tradition of high art that he had loved to his deeply divided personal nature. He was also a deeply sensual man, who railed against human sensuality. Ultimately, for Tolstoy, his aesthetic theory was one more weapon to be used against the social institutions of his culture. Nonetheless, his insistence that art is one of the conditions of human life, and must be understood in relationship to human nature and human communication, has provided inspiration to later theorists.

[See also Expression Theory of Art; Literature, article on Literary Aesthetics; and Russian Aesthetics.]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Work by Leo Tolstoy
What is Art? and Essays on Art. Translated by Ayimer Maude. Reprint, New York and Oxford, 1959.

Other Sources
Bayley, John. Tolstoy and the Novel. New York, 1967; reprint, Chicago 1988.
Matlaw, Ralph, ed. Tolstoy: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1967.
Orwin, Donna Tussing. Tolstoy’s Art and Thought, 1847–1880. Princeton, N.J., 1993.
Silbajoris, Rimvydas. Tolstoy’s Aesthetics and His Art. Columbus, Ohio, 1990.
Steiner, George. Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. New York, 1959; 2d ed., New Haven, 1996.
Wasiolek, Edward. Tolstoy’s Major Fiction. Chicago, 1978.
Wilson, A. N. Tolstoy. New York, 1988.