Diary of a Madman

Tolstoy was an opinionated guy.  No surprise there, well at least it isn’t a surprise if one ever read a biography of Tolstoy, even a short one like that in Paul Johnson’s Intellectuals, well I suppose especially in Johnson’s because showing how absurd Intellectuals are was the whole point of Johnson’s book, a good book, by the way, highly recommended (Johnson’s, not Tolstoy’s (though of course many of Tolstoy’s books are also highly recommended))..  He (Tolstoy (though maybe Johnson too—I have no idea, to be honest)) was also a bit of a megalomaniac.  Yes, he (Tolstoy, not Johnson) wrote great, make that Great, novels.  But, even still, writing War and Peace does not give one license to inflict What is Art? upon an unsuspecting world.

The title of the book is an interesting question, one about which I have spent many a pleasurable hour puzzling with students.  When does something become Art?  Is the picture I draw on a chalkboard to illustrate a point in a lecture something which should be called Art?  With a capital A?  Is there Art with a capital A?  Is anything Art?  Is my desk a work of Art?  Does it matter if it is a steel, mass-produced desk or a handcrafted wood period piece?

A related question worth pondering: what exactly is the difference between Art and Science?  Everyone knows they are different, but what exactly is the difference?  Both are attempts to find something True, something which eludes us and needs investigation.  It is not clear that the motives of the Scientist and the Artist are all that different, but I have yet to find anyone who does not think a Scientist looking for the Essence of Nature with a microscope is not a fundamentally different exercise than an Artist looking for the Essence of Nature with a paintbrush. Why do we consider those activities to be unrelated?  Not different—obviously they are different—but in entirely different classes of action?

So, interesting questions here.  Tolstoy picks up pen to answer, definitively, the question. Or at least he wants us to think he is doing so.  His definition is some vague thing about how Art is some attempt by the artist to convey an emotion.  “Infecting people with the feeling felt by the artist” is how he puts it.  Not a helpful definition to be sure—is my scowl at my dog a work of art when my children see it and think, “Wow, Dad is annoyed at the dog. So the dog must be doing something bad and so maybe I should make sure the dog doesn’t do that thing?” In said example, I have consciously conveyed to others, by certain external signs, the feelings I experienced, and the others were infected by those feelings and experienced them—that’s Tolstoy’s definition of art.  But the vagueness of the definition is a relatively minor failing—which should tell you something about the nature of what is to come.  If a vague and poorly worded answer given to the question “What is Art?’ in a book by that name is a relatively minor problem, then what must the problem be?

I’d summarize it, but the Reader would not believe I was being accurate.  So, here is a quotation—really, this is a quotation:

“Every false work praised by the critics is a doorway through which burst the hypocrites of art.  
It is only thanks to the critics who, in our time, praise the crude savage and for us often meaningless works of the ancient Greeks: Sophocles, Euripides, Aeschylus, and especially Aristophanes,; or the moderns: Dante, Tasso, Milton, Shakespeare; in painting, all of Raphael, all of Michelangelo, with his absurd Last Judgment; in music, all of Bach and all of Beethoven, including his late period…[it goes on, but you get the point]”

Yep.  He said that.  What is Art?  Well it sure isn’t that utterly horrible stuff produced by Dante and Bach and Michelangelo.  Instead it is…well, religious songs sung by peasants and other such things.   

At one level, I want to think this whole thing is a joke, a 167 page joke.  But, alas, I know Tolstoy was serious.  He was that kind of a guy.  At another level, this book prompts a question I puzzle over frequently: which books have shelf life only because of the author’s other work?  If this book had been written by some anonymous Russian aristocrat, I doubt it would have been published let alone still be in print.  Yet, because Tolstoy wrote it, it is in print, with a new translation by Pevear and Volokhonsky (have you no shame?), published by Penguin Press.  Why?  Does anyone, anyone, take this thing seriously?  Sure, I can imagine it gets assigned in classes called “The Philosophy of Art” or some such thing, but why can’t we agree that it isn’t worth the bother?

We don’t want to end on such a negative note.  So here is one of those things which belong in the category of bad art.  (The exact quotation:  “’What, the Ninth Symphony belongs in the category of bad art?!’ I hear indignant voices exclaim.  ‘Without any doubt, ‘ I reply”)