Of the other critics of the same tendencies I shall only name Skabitchévskiy (born 1838), the author of a very well written history of modern Russian literature, already mentioned in these pages; K. Arsénieff (born 1837), whose Critical Studies (1888) are the more interesting as they deal at some length with some of the less known poets and the younger contemporary writers; and P. Polevóy (1839-1903), the author of many historical novels and of a popular and quite valuable History of the Russian Literature; but I am compelled to pass over in silence the valuable critical work done by Druzhínin (1824-1864) after the death of Byelínskiy, as also A. Grigórieff (1822-1864), a brilliant and original critic from the Slavophile camp. They both took the “æsthetical” point of view and combated the utilitarian views upon Art, but had no great success.
TOLSTÓY’S “WHAT IS ART?”
It is thus seen that for the last eighty years, beginning with Venevítinoff and Nadézhdin, Russian art-critics have worked to establish the idea that art has a raison d’être only when it is “in the service of society” and contributes towards raising society to higher humanitarian conceptions—by those means which are proper to art, and distinguish it from science. This idea which so much shocked Western readers when Proudhon developed it has been advocated in Russia by all those who have exercised a real influence upon critical judgment in art matters. And they were supported de facto by some of our greatest poets, such as Lérmontoff and Turguéneff. As to the critics of the other camp, like Druzhínin, Annenkoff and A. Grigórieff, who took either the opposite view of “art for art’s sake,” or some intermediate view—who preached that the criterium of art is “The Beautiful” and clung to the theories of the German æsthetical writers—they have had no hold upon Russian thought.
The metaphysics of the German æsthetical writers was more than once demolished in the opinion of Russian readers—especially by Byelínskiy, in his Review of Literature for 1847, and by Tchernyshévskiy in his Æsthetic Relations of Art to Reality. In this Review Byelínskiy fully developed his ideas concerning Art in the service of mankind, and proved that although Art is not identical with Science, and differs from it by the way it treats the facts of life, it nevertheless has with it a common aim. The man of science demonstrates—the poet shows; but both convince; the one by his arguments, the other—by his scenes from life. The same was done by Tchernyshévskiy when he maintained that the aim of Art is not unlike that of History: that it explains to us life, and that consequently Art which should merely reproduce facts of life without adding to our compensation of it would not be Art at all.
These few remarks will explain why Tolstóy’s What is Art? produced much less impression in Russia than abroad. What struck us in it was not its leading idea, which was quite familiar to us, but the fact that the great artist also made it his own, and was supporting it by all the weight of his artistic experience; and then, of course, the literary form he gave the idea. Moreover, we read with the greatest interest his witty criticisms of both the “decadent” would-be poets and the librettos of Wagner’s operas; to which latter, let me add by the way, Wagner wrote, in places, wonderfully beautiful music, as soon as he came to deal with the universal human passions,—love, compassion, envy, the joy of life, and so on, and forgot all about his fairy-tale background.
What is Art? offered the more interest in Russia because the defenders of pure Art and the haters of the “nihilists in Art” had been accustomed to quote Tolstóy as of their camp. In his youth indeed he seems not to have had very definite ideas about Art. At any rate, when, in 1859, he was received as a member of the Society of Friends of Russian Literature, he pronounced a speech on the necessity of not dragging Art into the smaller disputes of the day, to which the Slavophile Homyakóff replied in a fiery speech, contesting his ideas with great energy.
“There are moments—great historic moments”—Homyakóff said—“when self-denunciation (he meant on the part of Society) has especial, incontestable rights.... The ‘accidental’ and the ‘temporary’ in the historical development of a nation’s life acquire then the meaning of the universal and the broadly human, because all generations and all nations can understand, and do understand, the painful moans and the painful confessions of a given generation or a given nation.” ... “An artist”—he continued—“is not a theory; he is not a mere domain of thought and cerebral activity. He is a man—always a man of his own time—usually one of its best representatives.... Owing to the very impressionability of his organism, without which he would not have been an artist, he, more than the others, receives both the painful and the pleasant impressions of the Society in the midst of which he was born.”
Showing that Tolstóy had already taken just this standpoint in some of his works; for example, in describing the death of the horse-driver in Three Deaths, Homyakóff concluded by saying: “Yes, you have been, and you will be one of those who denounce the evils of Society. Continue to follow the excellent way you have chosen.”[25]
At any rate, in What is Art? Tolstóy entirely breaks with the theories of “Art for Art’s sake,” and makes an open stand by the side of those whose ideas have been expounded in the preceding pages. He only defines still more correctly the domain of Art when he says that the artist always aims at communicating to others the same feelings which he experiences at the sight of nature or of human life. Not to convince, as Tchernyshévskiy said, but to infect the others with his own feelings, which is certainly more correct. However, “feeling” and “thought” are inseparable. A feeling seeks words to express itself, and a feeling expressed in words is a thought. And when Tolstóy says that the aim of artistic activity is to transmit “the highest feelings which humanity has attained” and that Art must be “religious”—that is, wake up the highest and the best aspirations—he only expresses in other words what all our best critics since Venevítinoff, Nadézhdin and Polevóy have said. In fact, when he complains that nobody teaches men how to live, he overlooks that that is precisely what good Art is doing, and what our art-critics have always done. Byelínskiy, Dobrolúboff and Písareff, and their continuators have done nothing but to teach men how to live. They studied and analysed life, as it had been understood by the greatest artists of each century, and they drew from their works conclusions as to “how to live.”
More than this. When Tolstóy, armed with his powerful criticism, chastises what he so well describes as “counterfeits of Art,” he continues the work that Tchernyshévskiy, Dobrolúboff and especially Písareff had done. He sides with Bazároff. Only, this intervention of the great artist gives a more deadly blow to the “Art for Art’s sake” theory still in vogue in Western Europe than anything that Proudhon or our Russian critics, unknown in the West, could possibly have done.