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Tolstoy: 'What Is Art?' Trans. by A. MAUDE, reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press. Ed. by W. GARETH JONES. Bristol: Bristol Classical Press. 1994. xx + 226 pp. 10.95 [pounds sterling].

This book offers very good value. It is a paperback, but the covers are glossy, with a Wagnerian illustration of a naked Rhine maiden with attendant dwarf sliding down the mighty chest of what might be a goddess. The print has been enlarged by thirty per cent from that of the elegant Centenary Edition. The result is a handsome volume, though the cover illustration represents everything that Tolstoi hated about art of the fin de siecle. The Rhine maiden waves an invitation to sensual enjoyment, the dwarf has a Satanic leer, the goddess, or Mother Earth, is a piece of meaningless mumbo-jumbo, meant to impress the ignorant and the credulous. For Tolstoi art of this type was intended to deprave and corrupt.

But What Is Art?, first published in English in Maude's translation in 1898, is not simply the work of an angry old man who hates the new fashions in art, music, and literature that are sweeping Europe at the turn of the century. As W. Gareth Jones makes clear in his introduction, Tolstoi had been engaged in a search for a definition of true art ever since his first published work, Childhood, and there are many scenes in his artistic works that explore 'genuine' and 'counterfeit' art.

In 1881, when his daughter Tat'iana enrolled in the Academy of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in Moscow, Tolstoi began to engage in impassioned debates with professors of the Academy on the essential nature of art. His doubts about whether art was a worthwhile and useful activity, contributing to the well-being of mankind, were of long standing. Now he became convinced that there was much that was good in art, but how could you separate the good from the dross? He began the sort of task that he had undertaken in his study of Christianity: that is, to separate out what could unquestionably be accepted as good by any reasonable man (represented by himself) from all the accretions caused by centuries of abuse, misrepresentation, and hypocrisy. As Jones points out, What Is Art? is not just an iconoclastic outburst of criticism of accepted theories and accepted 'great' artists, such as Beethoven, it is an attempt to point the way towards art of genuine value.

Since his incorporation of extensive theoretical passages on the philosophy of history into War and Peace Tolstoi had acquired the reputation of a great artist but a poor philosopher. His rewriting and reinterpretation of the Gospels added to the poor opinion, held by intellectuals and professional philosophers, of him as a thinker. His renown was inextricably linked with notoriety. His renunciation and castigation of his previous life and literary works, his campaign against smoking, his vegetarianism all contributed to the idea that he need not be taken too seriously. Many contemporaries dismissed What Is Art? as just another fad. But while some critics denounced his reductionist logic, his dogmatism, and his lack of true philosophical culture, others, from that time to this, have found inspiration not only in the art but in the thought of Tolstoi. George Bernard Shaw, Gandhi, Bulgakov, Bakhtin, Wittgenstein, and Solzhenitsyn all owe a debt to the thought of the later Tolstoi.

The principal thought in What Is Art? is that art and science (like religion) do not exist without communication. When one person communicates his feelings to another person and infects him with them (causes the recipient to re-create in himself those feelings), then that is art. Art is a form of knowledge, and it contributes to an understanding of the real world.

People will naturally respond to feelings they recognize. Those feelings may be good or bad. It is the task of art to reflect and pass on good feelings, whether they be about commonly accepted virtues such as bravery and loyalty or about the essence of the Christian religion, which by this time had been refined by Tolstoi to one all-embracing idea: brotherly love. When art passes on feelings of brotherly love it helps to create a new religious understanding, a more advanced form of the Christian religion.

With this publication, as with his previous publication of some of Tolstoi's later polemical works in translation, Jones has helped to reintroduce the thought of the later Tolstoi to the English-speaking public.

<ADD> GARETH WILLIAMS UNIVERSITY OF WALES, SWANSEA< /ADD>

Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition)

Williams, Gareth. "Tolstoy, 'What is Art?'." The Modern Language Review, vol. 92, no. 1, 1997, p. 266+. Literature Resource Center, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=LitRC&sw=w&u=sain11218&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA19793453&it=r&asid=3f519e67f238b457bf006ee1cc5377c3. Accessed 11 Apr. 2017.