The selections from What Is Art? appearing on the handout come mainly from chapters 5, 15, and 16. You can find the whole of the book in the text browser on course Moodle site, and page references below are to that version (references by chapter and paragraph refer to the handout).
Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) was born into the Russian nobility and became one of the most important novelists of the 19th century. His values and intellectual commitments changed over the course of his life and, by the time he wrote What Is Art?, they included forms of asceticism, pacifism, and anarchism. He regarded this as an expression of biblical Christianity, but he rejected institutionalized religion and much of the associated dogma.
One significant influence on Tolstoy’s later views was Schopenhauer. Although Schopenhauer’s influence on Tolstoy dates from around the same time as his influence on Nietzsche (the mid to late 1860s), the nature of the influence was different: for Tolstoy, Schopenhauer’s idea of the renunciation of the Will was especially important, but he saw Schopenhauer’s view of art as merely one example of a common sort of error.
• In the initial chapters of What Is Art?, Tolstoy surveys accounts of art up to his day. He takes them to be centered on beauty, and says, “we call ‘beauty’ that which pleases us without evoking in us desire” (p. 34). (He recognizes apparently different approaches to beauty but says of them, “we call beauty something absolutely perfect, and we acknowledge it to be so only because we receive, from the manifestation of this absolute perfection, a certain kind of pleasure,” ibid..) At the beginning of ch. 5, he asserts that the focus of an account of art should be shifted to “the purpose it may serve in the life of man and of humanity” (p. 40), and his own account of art follows immediately.
• In thinking about the account of art Tolstoy offers in the selection from ch. 5,
• think about the importance of a medium of communication (see especially, ¶¶5.10-11)—why do you think Tolstoy insists on it?—
• look closely at the statement of his definition in paragraphs 5.14 and 5.15, asking yourself how and why these two statements differ, and
• notice the range of things, Tolstoy is ready to count as art (see ¶5.21).
• In chapters 6-14, Tolstoy offers a historical explanation of the errors in current views of art (see the selections from chs. 6 and 9) and argues both that the range of art that is recognized as art has narrowed substantially (see the selection from ch. 10), and that much that is not really art has been counted as art (see the selection from chs. 12 and 14).
• Chapters 15 and 16 provide Tolstoy’s account of what art is good.
•
Since ch. 15 concerns the extent to which works have the qualities required for something to be a work of art to begin with, it provides, in effect, a further development of Tolstoy’s definition of art. The labels poetical,
realistic,
effectful,
and interesting
appearing in ¶15.2 are Tolstoy’s terms for the features produced by the four techniques for counterfeiting art that are discussed in ch. 11.
• Ch. 16 fills out the idea of Christian art with which Tolstoy contrasted most recent art in chs. 6-14. When thinking about the two kinds—“religious” and “universal” art—that he distinguishes in ¶16.19-20, be sure to note the examples in ¶16.23-24. They make it clear that “religious” art in Tolstoy’s sense need not be concerned with what would ordinarily be understood as religious subjects. Notice also the way the category of “universal” art is extended to ornament in ¶16.32-33. (In a note on p. 148, he says that in the whole of his work, he regards only two stories as examples of good art.)