1859
The first months of 1859 he spent in Moscow, and here on the occasion of joining the Moscow Society of Lovers of Russian Literature, on 4th February, he for the first time made a public speech: a task for which, he once told me, he had no aptitude, and which he much disliked. He wrote it out, and it was to have appeared in the Proceedings of the Society, but for some reason never got printed. Its subject was 'The Supremacy of the Artistic Element in Literature,' and in it he maintained a position almost the opposite of the one he advocated so ardently and with such full conviction in What is Art? forty years later.
He was answered by the Slavophil A. S. Homyakóf, who presided at the meeting, and who in the course of his remarks said:
Allow me to remark that the justice of the opinion you have so skilfully stated is far from destroying the legitimacy of the temporary and exceptional side of literature. That which is always right, that which is always beautiful, that which is as unalterable as the most fundamental laws of the soul, undoubtedly holds, and should hold, the first place in the thoughts, the impulses, and therefore in the speech of man. It, and it alone, will be handed on by generation to generation and by nation to nation as a precious inheritance. But on the other hand, in the nature of man and of society there is continual need for self-indictment. There are moments, moments important in history, when that self-indictment acquires a special and indefeasible right, and manifests itself in literature with great definiteness and keenness....
The rights of literature, the servant of eternal beauty, do not destroy the rights of the literature of indictment, which always accompanies social deficiencies and sometimes appears as the healer of social evils....
Of course, Art is perfectly free: it finds its justification and its aim in itself. But the freedom of Art in the abstract, has nothing to do with the inner life of the artist. An artist is not a theory—a sphere of thought and mental activity—but a man, and always a man of his own times, usually its best representative, completely imbued with its spirit and its defined or nascent aspirations. By the very impressionability of his nature, without which he could not be an artist, he, even more than others, receives all the painful as well as joyous sensations of the society to which he is born....
So the writer, a servant of pure art, sometimes becomes an accuser even unconsciously, and despite his own will. I allow myself, Count, to cite you as an example. You consciously follow a definite road faithfully and undeviatingly; but are you really completely alien to the literature of indictment? Were it but in the picture of a consumptive post-boy, dying on top of a stove amid a crowd of comrades apparently indifferent to his sufferings [this refers to Three Deaths] have you not indicated some social disease, some evil? When describing that death, is it possible that you did not suffer from the horny indifference of good but unawakened human souls? Yes, you too have been and will be an involuntary indicter!
This question of the true position of literary art and its relation to the rest of life, was one which occupied Tolstoy for many years, and on which before the century closed he expressed himself in a book which must be reckoned with by all who may hereafter deal with the subject. The attitude he maintained at the time he entered the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature, was in striking contrast with that of the Slavophils, such as Homyakóf, and of the great majority of the leading Russian writers of that day, who were fired with the hope of Emancipation, just as in America at the same time, Lowell, Emerson, Whittier, Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Longfellow, Channing, Lloyd Garrison, and others, were stirred by the Anti-Slavery movement.
In April Tolstoy went to Petersburg and spent ten days very pleasantly with his aunt the Countess A. A. Tolstoy. By the end of the month he was back at Yásnaya. In July, Tourgénef, from France, wrote Fet a long letter in blank verse, a few lines of which indicate the relation between Leo Tolstoy and himself at this time:
'Kiss Nicholas Tolstoy on my behalf
And to his brother Leo make my bow,
—As to his sister also.
He rightly says in his postscriptum:
"There is no cause" for me to write to him,
Indeed, I know he bears me little love
And I love him as little. Too differently
Are mixed those elements of which we're formed.'