What Is Art and Essays on Art

By Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy

Originally published in 1930, this book contains the widely respected essay 'What Is Art', by the well-known Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, and is highly recommended for inclusion on the bookshelf of any fan of his works. Many of these earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Obscure Press
• Release date: Oct 16, 2020
• ISBN: 9781528769648

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PART I

SCHOOLBOYS AND ART

The following account of Tolstóy’s walk with some boys from his school at Yásnaya Polyána shows how Tolstóy found himself faced by the question: what is art? put to him by a ten-year-old peasant boy. It then seemed to him that ‘we said all that can be said about utility and plastic and moral beauty’; but another thirty-seven years had to pass before, in What is Art?, he succeeded in elucidating the whole problem to his satisfaction.

THE classes generally finish about eight or nine o’clock (unless carpentering keeps the elder boys somewhat later), and the whole band run shouting into the yard, and there, calling to one another, begin to separate, making for different parts of the village. Occasionally they arrange to coast down-hill to the village in a large sledge that stands outside the gate. They tie up the shafts, throw themselves into it, and squealing, disappear from sight in a cloud of snow, leaving here and there on their path black patches of children who have tumbled out. In the open air, out of school (for all its freedom), new relations are established between pupil and teacher: freer, simpler, and more trustful—those very relations which seem to us the ideal that School should aim at.

Not long ago we read Gógol’s story Vii¹ in the highest class. The final scenes affected them greatly and excited their imagination. Some of them played the witch, and kept alluding to the last chapters. . . .

Out of doors it was a moonless winter night with clouds in the sky, not cold. We stopped at the crossroads. The elder boys, in their third year at school, stopped near me asking me to accompany them farther. The younger ones looked at us and rushed off down-hill. They had begun to learn with a new master, and between them and me there is not the same confidence as between the older boys and myself.

‘Well, let us go to the wood’ (a small wood about one hundred and twenty yards from the house), said one of them. The most insistent was Fédka, a boy of ten, with a tender, receptive, poetic yet daring nature. Danger seems to form the chief condition of pleasure for him. In summer it always frightened me to see how he, with two other boys, would swim out into the very middle of the pond, which is nearly a hundred and twenty yards wide, and would now and then disappear in the hot reflection of the summer sun and swim under water; and how he would then turn on his back, causing fountains of water to rise, and calling with his high-pitched voice to his comrades on the bank to see what a fine fellow he was.

He now knew there were wolves in the wood, and so he wanted to go there. All agreed; and the four of us went to the wood. Another boy, a lad of twelve, physically and morally strong, whom I will call Sëmka, went on in front and kept calling and ‘ah-ouing’ with his ringing voice to some one at a distance. Prónka, a sickly, mild, and very gifted lad from a poor family (sickly probably chiefly from lack of food), walked by my side. Fédka walked between me and Sëmka, talking all the time in a particularly gentle voice: now relating how he had herded horses in summer, now saying there was nothing to be afraid of, and now asking, ‘Suppose one should jump out?’ and insisting on my giving some reply. We did not go into the wood: that would have been too dreadful; but even where we were, near the wood, it was darker, the road was scarcely visible, and the lights of the village were hidden from view. Sëmka stopped and listened: ‘Stop, you fellows! What is this?’ said he suddenly.

We were silent and, though we heard nothing, things seemed to grow more gruesome.

‘What shall we do if it leaps out . . . and comes at us?’ asked Fédka.

We began to talk about Caucasian robbers. They remembered a Caucasian tale I had told them long ago, and I again told them of ‘braves,’ of Cossacks, and of Hadji Murad.¹ Sëmka went on in front, treading boldly in his big boots, his broad back swaying regularly. Prónka tried to walk by my side, but Fédka pushed him off the path, and Prónka—who, probably on account of his poverty, always submitted—only ran up alongside at the most interesting passages, sinking in the snow up to his knees.

Every one who knows anything of Russian peasant children knows that they are not accustomed to, and cannot bear, any caresses, affectionate words, kisses, hand-touchings, and so forth. I have seen a lady in a peasant school, wishing to pet a boy, say: ‘Come, I will give you a kiss, dear!’ and actually kiss him; and the boy was ashamed and offended, and could not understand why he had been so treated. Boys of five are already above such caresses—they are no longer babies. I was therefore particularly struck when Fédka, walking beside me, at the most terrible part of the story suddenly touched me lightly with his sleeve, and then clasped two of my fingers in his hand and kept hold of them. As soon as I stopped speaking, Fédka demanded that I should go on, and did this in such a beseeching and agitated voice that it was impossible not to comply with his wish.

‘Now then, don’t get in the way!’ he said once angrily to Prónka, who had run in front of us. He was so carried away as even to be cruel; so agitated yet happy was he, holding on to my fingers, that he could let no one dare to interrupt his pleasure.

‘More! More! It is fine!’ said he.

We had passed the wood and were approaching the village from the other end.

‘Let’s go on,’ said all the boys when the lights became visible. ‘Let us take another turn!’

We went on in silence, sinking here and there in the snow which was not hardened by much traffic. A white darkness seemed to sway before our eyes; the clouds hung low, as though something had heaped them upon us. There was no end to the whiteness amid which we alone crunched along the snow. The wind sounded through the bare tops of the aspens, but where we were, behind the woods, it was calm.

I finished my story by telling how a ‘brave’, surrounded by his enemies, sang his death-song and threw himself on his dagger. All were silent.

‘Why did he sing a song when he was surrounded?’ asked Sëmka.

‘Weren’t you told?—he was preparing for death!’ replied Fédka aggrieved.

‘I think he said a prayer,’ added Prónka.

All agreed. Fédka suddenly stopped.

‘How was it, you told us, your Aunt had her throat cut?’ he asked. (He had not yet had enough horrors.) ‘Tell us! Tell us!’

I again told them that terrible story of the murder of Countess Tolstóy,¹ and they stood silently about me watching my face.

‘The fellow got caught!’ said Sëmka.

‘He was afraid to go away in the night while she was lying with her throat cut!’ said Fédka; ‘I should have run away!’ and he gathered my two fingers yet more closely in his hand.

We stopped in the thicket beyond the threshing-floor at the very end of the village. Sëmka picked up a dry stick from the snow and began striking it against the frosty trunk of a lime tree. Hoar frost fell from the branches on to our caps, and the noise of the blows resounded in the stillness of the wood.

‘Lëv Nikoláevich,’ said Fédka to me (I thought he was again going to speak about the Countess), ‘why does one learn singing? I often think, why, really, does one?’

What made him jump from the terror of the murder to this question, heaven only knows; yet by the tone of his voice, the seriousness with which he demanded an answer, and the attentive silence of the other two, one felt that there was some vital and legitimate connexion between this question and our preceding talk. Whether the connexion lay in some response to my suggestion that crime might be explained by lack of education (I had spoken of that), or whether he was testing himself—transferring himself into the mind of the murderer and remembering his own favourite occupation (he has a wonderful voice and immense musical talent), or whether the connexion lay in the fact that he felt that now was the time for sincere conversation, and all the problems demanding solution rose in his mind—at any rate his question surprised none of us.

‘And what is drawing for? And why write well?’ said I, not knowing at all how to explain to him what art is for.

‘What is drawing for?’ repeated he thoughtfully. He was really asking, What is Art for? And I neither dared nor could explain.

‘What is drawing for?’ said Sëmka. ‘Why, you draw anything, and can then make it from the drawing.’

‘No, that is designing,’ said Fédka. ‘But why draw figures?’

Sëmka’s matter-of-fact mind was not perplexed.

‘What is a stick for, and what is a lime tree for?’ said he, still striking the tree.

‘Yes, what is a lime tree for?’ said I.

‘To make rafters of,’ replied Sëmka.

‘But what is it for in summer, when not yet cut down?’

‘It’s no use then.’

‘No, really,’ insisted Fédka; ‘why does a lime tree grow?’

And we began to speak of the fact that not everything exists for use but that there is also beauty, and that Art is beauty; and we understood one another, and Fédka quite understood why the lime tree grows and what singing is for.

Prónka agreed with us, but he thought rather of moral beauty: goodness.

Sëmka’s big brain understood, but did not acknowledge, beauty apart from usefulness. He was in doubt (as often happens to men with great reasoning power): feeling Art to be a force, but not feeling in his soul the need of that force. He, like them, wished to get at Art by his reason, and tried to kindle that fire in himself.

‘We’ll sing Who hath to-morrow. I remember my part,’ said he. (He has a correct ear, but no taste or refinement in singing.) Fédka, however, fully understood that the lime tree is good when in leaf: good to look at in summer, and that that is enough.

Prónka understood that it is a pity to cut it down, because it, too, has life:

‘Why, when we take the sap of a lime it’s like taking blood.’

Sëmka, though he did not say so, evidently thought that there was little use in a lime when it was sappy.

It feels strange to repeat what we then said, but it seems to me that we said all that can be said about utility, and plastic and moral beauty.

We went on to the village. Fédka still clung to my hand; now, it seemed to me, from gratitude. We were all nearer one another that night than we had been for a long time. Prónka walked beside us along the broad village street.

‘See, there is still a light in Masánov’s house,’ said he. ‘As I was going to school this morning, Gavrúka was coming from the pub, as dru-u-nk as could be! His horse all in a lather and he beating it! I am always sorry for such things. Really, why should it be beaten?’

‘And the other day, coming from Túla, my daddy gave his horse the reins,’ said Sëmka; ‘and it took him into a snowdrift, and there he slept—quite drunk.’

‘And Gavrúka kept on beating his horse over the eyes, and I felt so sorry,’ repeated Prónka again. ‘Why should he beat it? He got down and just flogged it.’

Sëmka suddenly stopped.

‘Our folk are already asleep,’ said he, looking in at the window of his crooked, dirty hut. ‘Won’t you walk a little longer?’

‘No.’

‘Go-o-od-bye, Lëv Nikoláevich!’ he shouted suddenly, and tearing himself awayfrom us as it were with an effort, he ran to the house, lifted the latch, and disappeared.

‘So you will take each of us home? First one and then the other?’ said Fédka.

We went on. There was a light in Prónka’s hut, and we looked in at the window. His mother, a tall and handsome but toil-worn woman, with black eyebrows and eyes, sat at the table, peeling potatoes. In the middle of the hut hung a cradle. Prónka’s brother, the mathematician from our second class, was standing at the table, eating potatoes with salt. It was a black, tiny, and dirty hut.

‘What a plague you are!’ shouted the mother at Prónka. ‘Where have you been?’

Prónka glanced at the window with a meek, sickly smile. His mother guessed that he had not come alone, and her face immediately assumed an artificial expression that was unpleasant.

Only Fédka was left.

‘The travelling tailors are at our house, that is why there’s a light there,’ said he in the softened voice that had come to him that evening. ‘Good-bye, Lëv Nikoláevich!’ he added, softly and tenderly, and began to knock with the ring attached to the closed door. ‘Let me in!’ his high-pitched voice rang out amid the winter stillness of the village. It was long before they opened the door for him. I looked in at the window. The hut was a large one. The father was playing cards with a tailor, and some copper coins lay on the table. The wife, Fédka’s stepmother, was sitting near the torch-stand, looking eagerly at the money. The young tailor, a cunning drunkard, was holding his cards on the table, bending them and looking triumphantly at his opponent. Fédka’s father, the collar of his shirt unbuttoned, his brow wrinkled with mental exertion and vexation, changed one card for another, and waved his horny hand in perplexity above them.

‘Let me in!’

The woman rose and went to the door.

‘Good-bye!’ repeated Fédka, once again. ‘Let us always have walks like this!’

¹ The Vii is an Earth-Spirit, and Gógol’s tale is gruesome.

¹ A daring leader of the hill-tribes, who was prominent when Tolstóy was serving in the Caucasus.

¹ Some details of this crime are given in ‘Why do Men Stupefy Themselves?’ one of Tolstóy’s Essays.

PART II

ON TRUTH IN ART

Preface to a Miscellany, ‘The Flower Garden,’ for Children.

‘O generation of vipers, how can ye, being evil, speak good things? for out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh. The good man out of his good treasure bringeth forth good things: and the evil man out of his evil treasure bringeth forth evil things. And I say unto you, that every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment. For by thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned.’ (Matt. xii, 34–37).

IN this book, besides tales in which true occurrences are narrated, there are also stories, traditions, proverbs, legends, fables, and fairy tales, that have been composed and written for man’s benefit.

We have chosen such as we consider to be in accord with Christ’s teaching, and therefore regard as good and truthful.

Many people, especially children, when reading a story, fairy-tale, legend, or fable, ask first of all: ‘Is it true?’ and if they see that what is described could not have happened, they often say: ‘Oh, this is mere fancy, it isn’t true.’

Those who judge so, judge amiss.

Truth will be known not by him who knows only what has been, is, and really happens, but by him who recognizes what should be according to the will of God.

He does not write the truth who describes only what has happened and what this or that man has done, but he who shows what people do that is right—that is, in accord with God’s will; and what people do wrong—that is, contrary to God’s will.

Truth is a path. Christ said, ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life.’

And so he who looks down at his feet will not know the truth, but he who discerns by the sun which way to go.

Verbal compositions are good and necessary, not when they describe what has happened, but when they show what ought to be; not when they tell what people have done, but when they set a value on what is good and evil—when they show men the narrow path of God’s will, which leads to life.

And in order to show that path one must not describe merely what happens in the world. The world abides in evil and is full of offence. If one is to describe the world as it is, one will describe much evil and the truth will be lacking. In order that there may be truth in what one describes, it is necessary to write not about what is, but about what should be; to write not the truth of what is, but of the kingdom of God which is drawing nigh unto us but is not as yet. That is why there are mountains of books in which we are told what really has happened or might have happened, yet they are all false if those who write them do not themselves know what is good and what is evil, and do not know and do not show the one path which leads to the kingdom of God. And there are fairy-tales, parables, fables, legends, in which marvellous things are described which never happened or ever could happen, and these legends, fairy-tales, and fables, are true, because they show wherein the will of God has always been, and is, and will be: they show the truth of the kingdom of God.

There may be a book, and there are indeed many novels and stories, that describe how a man lives for his passions, suffers, torments others, endures danger and want, schemes, struggles with others, escapes from his poverty, and at last is united with the object of his love and becomes distinguished, rich, and happy. Such a book, even if everything described in it really happened, and though there were in it nothing improbable, would nevertheless be false and untrue, because a man who lives for himself and his passions, however beautiful his wife may be and however distinguished and rich he becomes, cannot be happy.

And there may be a legend of how Christ and his apostles walked on earth and went to a rich man, and the rich man would not receive him, and they went to a poor widow, and she received him. And then he commanded a barrel full of gold to roll to the rich man and sent a wolf to the poor widow to eat up her last calf, and it might prove a blessing for the widow and be bad for the rich man.

Such a story is totally improbable, because nothing of what is described ever happened or could happen; but it may all be true because in it is shown what always should be—what is good and what is evil, and what a man should strive after in order to do the will of God.

No matter what wonders are described, or what animals may talk in human language, what flying carpets may carry people from place to place, the legends, parables, or fairy-tales will be true, if there is in them the truth of the kingdom of God. And if that truth is lacking, then everything described, however well attested, will be false, because it lacks the truth of the kingdom of God. Christ himself spoke in parables, and his parables have remained eternally true. He only added, ‘Take heed how ye hear.’

PART III

INTRODUCTION TO AMIEL’S ‘JOURNAL’

ABOUT eighteen months ago I chanced for the first time to read Amiel’s book, Fragments d’un journal intime. I was struck by the significance and profundity of its contents, the beauty of its presentation, and above all by the sincerity of that book.

While reading it I marked the passages which specially struck me. My daughter¹ undertook to translate these passages, and in this way these extracts from Fragments d’un journal intime were produced: that is to say, they are extracts from the whole many-volumed diary Amiel wrote day by day during thirty years, much of which remained unprinted.

Henri Amiel was born at Geneva in 1821, and was early left an orphan. Having completed a course of higher education at Geneva, Amiel went abroad and spent some years at the universities of Heidelberg and Berlin. Returning in 1849 to his native land he, a young man of 28, obtained a professorship at the Geneva Academy, first of Esthetics and afterwards of Philosophy, which he held till his death.

Amiel’s whole life was passed at Geneva, where he died, in 1881, in no way distinguished from the large number of those ordinary professors who, mechanically compiling their lectures from the latest books on their special subject, pass them on in an equally mechanical way to their hearers, or from the yet greater number of writers of verse lacking in substance, who supply these wares, which though no one needs them are still sold by tens of thousands in the periodicals that are published.

Amiel had not the slightest success either in the academic or literary field. When he was already approaching old age he wrote of himself as follows:

‘What have I been able to extract from the gifts bestowed upon me, and from the special circumstances of my half-a-century of life? What have I drawn from my soil? Is all my scribbling collected together—my correspondence, these thousands of sincere pages, my lectures, my articles, my verses, my various memoranda—anything but a collection of dry leaves? To whom and for what have I been of use? And will my name live for even a day after me, and will it have any meaning for any one? An insignificant, empty life! Vie nulle!’

Two well-known French authors have written on Amiel and his Journal since his death—his friend, the well-known critic, E. Scherer, and the philosopher Caro. It is interesting to note the sympathetic but rather patronizing tone in which both these writers refer to Amiel, regretting that he lacked the qualities necessary for the production of real works. Yet the real works of these two writers—the critical works of Scherer and the philosophical works of Caro—will hardly long outlive their authors, while the accidental, unreal work of Amiel, his Journal, will always remain a living book, needed by men and fruitfully affecting them.

For a writer is precious and necessary for us only to the extent to which he reveals to us the inner labour of his soul—supposing, of course, that his work is new and has not been done before. Whatever he may write—a play, a learned work, a story, a philosophic treatise, lyric verse, a criticism, a satire—what is precious to us in an author’s work is only that inner labour of his soul, and not the architectural structure in which usually, and I think perhaps always, distorting it, he packs his thoughts and feelings.

All that Amiel poured into a ready mould: his lectures, treatises, poems, are dead; but his Journal, where without thinking of the form he only talked to himself, is full of life, wisdom, instruction, consolation, and will ever remain one of those best of all books which have been left to us accidentally by such men as Marcus Aurelius, Pascal, and Epictetus.

Pascal says: ‘There are only three kinds of people: those who, having found God, serve Him; those who, not having found Him, are engaged in seeking Him; and those who, though they have not found Him, do not seek Him.

‘The first are sensible and happy; the last are senseless and unhappy; the second are unhappy, but sensible.’

I think that the contrast Pascal makes between the first and the second groups, between those who, as he says in another place, having found God, serve Him with their whole heart, and those who, not having found Him, seek Him with their whole heart, is not only not so great as he thought, but does not exist at all. I think that those who with their whole heart and with suffering (en gémissant, as Pascal says) seek God, are already serving Him. They are serving Him because by the suffering they endure in their search they are laying, and revealing to others, the road to God, as Pascal himself did in his Pensées, and as Amiel did all his life in his Journal.

Amiel’s whole life, as presented to us in this Journal, is full of this suffering and whole-hearted search for God. And the contemplation of this search is the more instructive because it never ceases to be a search, never becomes settled, and never passes into a consciousness of having attained the truth, or into a teaching. Amiel is not saying either to himself or to others, ‘I now know the truth—hear me!’ On the contrary it seems to him, as is natural to one who is sincerely seeking truth, that the more he knows the more he needs to know, and he unceasingly does all he can to learn more and more of truth, and is therefore constantly aware of his ignorance. He is continually speculating on what Christianity and the condition of a Christian should be, never for a moment pausing on the thought that Christianity is the very thing that he is professing, and that he is himself realizing the condition of a Christian. And yet the whole Journal is full of expressions of the most profound Christian understanding and feeling. And these expressions affect the reader with special force by their very unconsciousness and sincerity. He is talking to himself, not thinking that he is overheard, neither attempting to appear convinced of what he is not convinced of, nor hiding his sufferings and his search.

It is as if one were present without a man’s knowledge at the most secret, profound, impassioned, inner working of his soul, usually hidden from an outsider’s view.

And therefore while one may find many more shapely and elegant expressions of religious feeling than Amiel’s, it is difficult to find any more intimate or more heart-searching. Nor long before his death, knowing that his illness might any day end in strangulation, he wrote:

‘When you no longer dream that you have at your disposal tens of years, a year, or a month, when you already reckon in tens of hours, and the coming night brings with it the menace of the unknown, obviously you renounce art, science, politics, and are content to talkwith yourself, and that is possible up to the very end. This inner conversation is the only thing left to him who is sentenced to death but whose execution is delayed. He (this condemned man) concentrates within himself. He no longer emits rays, but only talks with his own soul. He no longer acts, but contemplates . . . Like a hare he returns to his lair, and that lair is his conscience, his thought. As long as he can hold a pen and has a moment of solitude he concentrates before that echo of himself and holds converse with God.

‘This is however not a moral investigation, not a repentance, not an appeal; it is only an Amen of submission.

‘ My child, give me thine heart.

‘Renunciation and agreement are less difficult for me than for others, because I want nothing. I should only like not to suffer. Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane prayed for that same thing. Let us say with him: Nevertheless, not my will, but thine, be done! and let us wait.’

Such was he on the eve of his death. He is not less sincere and serious throughout his Journal, in spite of the elegance, and (in passages) apparent choiceness of phrasing, which had become a habit with him. In the course of the whole thirty years of his Journal he felt what we all so carefully forget—that we are all sentenced to death and our execution is only deferred. And that is why this book is so sincere, serious, and profitable.

1893

¹ That is, Márya Lvóvna, Tolstóy’s second daughter, who was devoted both to her father and to his teachings.

PART IV

INTRODUCTION TO S. T. SEMËNOV’S PEASANT STORIES

I LONG ago laid down for myself the rule of judging every artistic production from three aspects, first from the side of its content; in how far is what the artist reveals from a new side important and necessary for man—for any production is, I think, a work of art only if it reveals a new side of life: secondly, in how far is the form of the work good, beautiful, and in accord with its contents: and thirdly, to what extent is the relation of the artist to his subject sincere, that is, in how far does he believe in what he presents to us. This last quality always seems to me the most important in artistic work. It gives its force to a work of art and makes it infectious, that is, it evokes in the spectator, the hearer, or the reader, those feelings which the artist himself experiences.

And Semënov possesses that quality in the highest degree.

There is a well-known story of Flaubert’s which Turgénev has translated, La légende de Julien l’hospitalier; the last episode, intended to be the most touching in the story, is one in which Julien lies down in the same bed with a leper and warms him with his own body. This leper is Christ, who carries Julien off to heaven with him. All this is told with great mastery, but I always remain perfectly cold when I read that story. I feel that the author himself would not have done, and would not even have wished to do, what his hero does, and therefore I myself do not wish to do it and do not experience any agitation when reading of this amazing exploit.

But when Semënov describes the simplest story it always touches me. A village youth comes to Moscow to get a place, and helped by a coachman from his part of the country who is living with a rich merchant, he gets a job as the yard-porter’s assistant. This place had previously been held by an old man. The merchant, by his coachman’s advice, had discharged the old man and taken the lad in his place. The lad comes in the evening to begin his service, and standing in the yard hears the old man complain, in the porter’s lodge, that

Reviews for What Is Art and Essays on Art

[danielstj · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

An interesting conception of the basis of art by the famed Tolstoy. The prose is stiff, but the ideas are original and considerable. A pleasant read, and one that gives rise to careful logical, and moral, consideration of the idea of art itself.3 stars.

[isolde100_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A book that could have been written today. His observations on the corruption of art and the creative process are as current as they were in 1899.