Tolstoy

There were also problems over at Pirogovo. To the horror of Tolstoy’s brother Sergey, whose way of life was very ancien régime, despite his unconventional marriage, both his daughters had become fervent Tolstoyans. In 1897 Varya became the common-law wife of Vladimir Vasiliev, who was one of Sergey’s peasants, and she left home. Her elder sister Vera was also a free spirit who shocked her father by having a child out of wedlock a couple of years later with Abdurashid Sarafov, a Bashkir who had come to Pirogovo to provide them with koumiss.⁷¹ Tolstoy felt very guilty. In 1897 Sonya’s strange obsession with Taneyev and his playing showed no sign of abating, and Tolstoy yearned again to leave home. At one point he got as far as writing a farewell letter to Sonya, but ended up stuffing it down the back of a chair after they made up.⁷² Sonya agreed not to invite Taneyev to Yasnaya Polyana again, and Tolstoy channelled his feelings about music, and what he regarded as its dangerous powers, on to the page. The product was his iconoclastic treatise What is Art?, which he had been thinking about writing ever since his daughter Tanya had become a student at the Academy of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in 1881.

What is Art? is of a piece with Tolstoy’s religious writings, in that it promotes the sort of Christian art to which he himself aspired. Art for Tolstoy was to the ability to communicate universal feelings of brotherly love to the widest possible audience. Everything else is made the subject of condemnation as ‘counterfeit art’, namely:

all novels and poems which transmit ecclesiastical or patriotic feelings, and also exclusive feelings pertaining only to the class of the idle rich, such as aristocratic honour, satiety, spleen, pessimism, and refined and vicious feelings flowing from sex-love – quite incomprehensible to the great majority of mankind.

In painting we must similarly place in the class of bad art all the Church, patriotic, and exclusive pictures; all the pictures representing the amusements and allurements of a rich and idle life; all the so-called symbolic pictures, in which the very meaning of the symbol is comprehensible only to the people of a certain circle; and, above all, pictures with voluptuous subjects – all that odious female nudity which fills all the exhibitions and galleries. And to this class belongs almost all the chamber and opera music of our times, beginning especially with Beethoven (Schumann, Berlioz, Liszt, Wagner) – by its subject-matter devoted to the expression of feelings accessible only to people who have developed in themselves an unhealthy, nervous irritation evoked by this exclusive, artificial, and complex music …⁷³

Into the category of ‘counterfeit art’ falls most of modern Western culture, deplored by Tolstoy as degenerate and elitist, not to mention all the fiction he himself wrote before he became an overtly Christian artist (such as the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina).

Looking back over the trajectory of Tolstoy’s career, it is possible to see that he took pains to transform himself into a different kind of artist long before his religious ‘conversion’ at the end of the 1870s. The love and care he invested in his ABC books is testament to his desire to simplify his artistic expression, just as the distress and discomfort he experienced writing Anna Karenina is witness to the pangs of conscience provoked by his return to writing for an educated audience. Tolstoy was never less than a consummate artist, however. The simplicity of the message conveyed by his late masterpiece The Death of Ivan Ilyich belies the sophisticated means with which the story is constructed on both the narrative and thematic levels, and his hard-won clarity exerted a huge impact on younger writers like Chekhov, whose linguistic register is deliberately unpretentious and straightforward. Tolstoy certainly recognised Chekhov as a major artist – they had warmed to each other at their first meeting, when Chekhov visited Yasnaya Polyana in the summer of 1895 (stealing Tanya’s heart, before Sonya nipped the development of any romantic feelings in the bud).⁷⁴ All the same, Tolstoy’s impossibly narrow criteria meant that most of Chekhov’s greatest stories (and all his plays) failed to make the grade as true art.