Tolstoy

Mann’s comparison of the consistency of Wagner’s artistic evolution with that of Tolstoy is instructive, for both Wagner and Tolstoy came to distinguish the simple religion of love and compassion for the poor and oppressed that Jesus Christ had founded from the deforming edifice of the Christian church (it is striking that they both made a serious study of Renan’s Life of Jesus in 1878). They both wished to revive the spiritual essence of Christianity by removing its superstitious elements and the Old Testament notion of a vengeful God in order to create a purer and more practical religion. And the pacifism and vegetarianism both espoused in their final years went hand in hand with their views on the regeneration of society and a corresponding desire to simplify their aesthetic style. Before he died in 1883, Wagner came to see vegetarians and anti-vivisectionists as the harbingers of cultural renewal, and, ever the Romantic idealist, he hoped that through the medium of religious art (specifically music, his kind of music) a culture of compassion would replace the contemporary ‘civilisation’ of power and aggression. Tolstoy came to the same conclusions, but naturally the religious art he had in mind was primarily of the verbal kind. Both Wagner and Tolstoy were anxious for the rest of the world to gain insight into Jesus’ radical idea that responding to violence with more violence can only lead to the further desecration of nature.

Tolstoy’s deliberations in What is Art? were the fruit of long reflection and characteristically intense study, but were not at all objective, and out of step with the age in which he lived. As the age of modernism dawned, Tolstoy himself was now an anomaly as an artist. It was in 1896, after all, that Chekhov’s Seagull was first performed, a play which Tolstoy thought was complete rubbish. In his pointed comparison of ‘new’ and ‘old’ art in the play, Chekhov offers subtle comments of his own on the question of ‘What is art?’, but typically refuses to be partisan. Like his stories, his great plays stand on the cusp of a new aesthetic sensibility, indebted on the one hand to the legacy of Tolstoy’s generation, but also heralding things to come. Tolstoy was still alive as Russian artists began to become leaders of the European avant-garde, and he died only three years before the Futurists declared in their manifesto A Slap in the Face of Public Taste that they wished to throw ‘Pushkin, dostoyevsky, Tolstoy etc. etc.’ overboard from the ship of modernity.

Tolstoy’s chaotic publishing habits had not improved over the course of his career; indeed, they became more chaotic in his last years when different versions of his works appeared in Russia and England. Apart from the problems with negotiating censors, Tolstoy continually revised his manuscripts, and then his proofs, and he also continually changed his mind about where and how he wanted his works to appear in print. This did not make it easy for his editors and translators, and that was certainly the case with What is Art?, the first English edition of which was prepared by Aylmer Maude, an important figure in anglophone Tolstoy studies. Maude was the son of an Ipswich vicar and a Quaker mother, and had moved to Moscow in the early 1870s when he was sixteen years old. While he was working as a manager of the Russian Carpet Company, he married Louise Shanks, who was also English but born in Russia, and later they pooled their considerable linguistic resources to become distinguished translators of Tolstoy’s writings. Maude had fallen under Tolstoy’s spell after first meeting him in 1888, and their conversations in the 1890s led him to the conclusion that he could not spend his life selling carpets. In 1897, when the Maudes moved back to London, they stayed first at the Brotherhood Church in Croydon, as Chertkov’s family had done earlier that year, and then followed them to Purleigh, near Maldon in Essex, where the first English Tolstoyan colony had been set up the year before.

In 1896 the colony consisted of just three men, all anxious to chase the utopian dream of living off the plot of land that had been bought by the more affluent members of the Brotherhood Church, but their number had already risen to fifteen by the end of 1897, and there were a further thirty-five or so like-minded people living nearby. The Maudes contributed generously by donating two cows, providing meals and holding concerts at their farmhouse. It was in Essex that Aylmer Maude completed his translation of What is Art?, which was no small feat, as he himself has described in the biography of Tolstoy he started publishing in 1908: