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"THE COUNTRY LABORER:
LEV TOLSTOI'S CONCEPTION OF ART"
by Mark C. Kennedy
Art enables men of the past few generations to experience all those feelings experienced by people before them and by the foremost men of their time....By words man communicates thoughts, and through art he communicates feelings to all men not only to the present, but of the past and future too."2To his longtime friend, the portrait artist Llya Repin, Tolstoi revealed a unique side of his idea of art. Repin had accompanied Tolstoi when Tolstoi had gone into the fields to plough. There, in his 60's dressed in simple homespun clothes and wearing boots he made for himself, Count Tolstoi ploughed a widow's field, stopping only now and then for water and for conversation with Repin who sketched him as he worked. Repin remarks about how happy Tolstoi was at those moments of rest from such work. It was in this context of work that Tolstoi denounced art. "I can't understand, " said Tolstoi, "why people should deprive themselves of the most blissful state and the happiest hours of their lives---those spent in laboring in the fields. The field laborer finds his reward in the knowledge that his work has brought him unquestionable benefit, in the pleasant fatigue he experiences, in a good appetite and sound sleep." Repin appreciated this, but did not appreciate Tolstoi's denunciation of art. Later on, in Moscow, Repin remarked to Tolstoi that he agreed with intellectuals who blamed Tolstoi for casting off art, that wonderful gift of God. He could not understand either why Tolstoi cast off his won art. To the idea of someone blaming him, Tolstoi retorted: Blame me! They are like children begging their nurse to tell them the same tale she told them last night--not a new one...only the one they heard last night. I know a young artist who gave painting: he found it positively immoral to devote himself to art in such times. He became a village schoolmaster."3Tolstoi was much satisfied with himself and pleased with the artist who had given up painting to become a schoolmaster. And while he like Repin as a person, he urged him more than once to give up art. He had hired Repin to do a portrait of him, but it had to be one that would please Tolstoi--one of Tolstoi at manual labor, or one which portrayed Tolstoi, but Repin as an artist was quite another: "Do you know what your art and your devotion to it remind me of?" Tolstoi asked Repin. Tolstoi went on to explain: A ploughman is bent on the task of digging deep into the soil and suddenly someone an artist steps into his path and says, pointing to a worm. 'Take pity upon the poor worm! Its barbarous to disturb him!" Or yet, 'couldn't you go round those charming wild flowers?' That's what your art is worth in these grave times!4Later on, but in the same period of Tolstoi's life, Llya Gintsburg, a gifted sculptor who had been elected to the Russian Academy of Fine Arts, had been commissioned by Tolstoi to do a bust of him at his home (Yasnaya Polyana). Tolstoi, again making a distinction between the person and the artist, berated the art of Gintsburg and denounced sculpture in general. Apologetically at first and then with great emotion he said to Gintsburg: I suppose I ought not to say such things to you, a sculptor...but I don't like sculptors. I don't like them because they've done a great deal of harm to art and to people. Their work is vicious. They have filled Europe with monuments and statures exalting people who do not deserve to be exalted, who have in fact, brought harm to humanity. All these captains and marshals and heads of governments have done nothing but damage, but the sculptors have represented them as benefactors of the people. And what is worse, in immortalizing them the sculptors often falsify their appearance. They turn weak cowardly, degenerate creatures into strong and powerful heroes; they portray a puny little fellow as a giant with a bulging chest and piercing glance. All lies and falsehoods. The sculptors have always been in the pay of the rulers and have always truckled to them. No other form of art has disgraced itself so completely.5Pieces of sculpture, novels, musical compositions, drama and comedy, poems, operas, all these once he had seen, read or heard them, fell under Tolstoi's stern disapproval. The question arises haere how could Tolstoi have defined art as marking and enhancing the evolution of our feelings on the one hand and so summarily have denounced so many works of art on the other? As contradictory as his attitude seems at first glance, it is not inconsistent with his definition of art nor with the criteria of art which flow logically from that definition. Tolstoi's every denunciation rested on these criteria, and so did his praise. What were these criterial? Why did he define art as he defined? How could he see some works of art as 'true' art and the rest as either 'bad' art or artlessness? to know the answers to these questions is to know how Tolstoy viewed himself, his class, the world in general, and the processes of change and destiny in context with the conflicts, the troubles and torments of his age. It would be possible for me to go straight to his criteria of good and bad art, show how they applied in making judgments about any particular work and then write a conclusion. But this procedure would be artless, revealing nothing about the depth of feeling which Tolstoi possessed when he saw or heard something he like or despised. Instead, I'll proceed more indirectly and begin with a few situations which reveal his conception of art as he lived out that conception among those he admired and respected. ******************** Vladimir Mikhailovich Lopatin (1861-1935) was a barrister who became an actor in the Moscow Art Theater. In 1889, while he was still a judge, he was invited by Tolstoi to come to Yasnaya Polyana (Count Tolstoi's Estate) to take part in a play Tolstoi had just finished: "The Fruits of Enlightenment." It was a satire involving the life situations of three Mushiks or peasants. Lopatin was to play the part of the third Mushik. Lopatin knew fully that for all practical purposes Tolstoi was himself a Mushik, or at least that he had struggled all his life to understand them and to be like them. Lopatin when playing his part was aware of Tolstoi's intense interest. Every posture, facial expression, gesture and word--every intonation Lopatin enacted brought hearty laughter from Tolstoi. Later on, at tea, Tolstoi spoke of art and of artists and of their powers of observation in life generally.An artist's power of observation differs from that of other people in that he is able you see things in his environment that escape them. He sees the same things that other people do, but he sees them differently, and by portraying in his art the things that have escaped others, he makes others sees and understand them as he does. That is why every work of art teaches us something new. You for instance turning to Lopatin gave us a portrayal of a peasant all of us have seen in real life, but you were able to note and reproduce certain things that had escaped us; I myself found much that was new in your portrayal.6Art builds upon what we have already experienced by teaching us or by making us aware of what was already there to be seen--increasing our awareness of others and of nature. Originality in the artist is not being different from other artists, not being different for the sake of being different, but in seeing what others have not seen and in portraying what was not seen in context with what others had seen. In this way art and the artist increase our understanding of others, our appreciation of them, and consequently our ability to get along with them on peaceable terms. Art and artist are unifying forces of society--bringing about unity and coherence in a troubled world. creativity begins with an accurate and meaningful portrayal of what is either new to us or new in the world, and it ends only temporarily by making the whole of society aware of what is new. All this is both explicit and implicit in what Tolstoi said to Lopatin. But in this same situation, Tolstoi expressed this same attitude in a negative fashion when Lopatin spoke admiringly of William Shakespeare. Lopatin was both surprised and grieved to hear Tolstoi's disapproval of the Bard. Lopatin paraphrased Tolstoi in the following words: Lev Nikolayevich contended that people belonging to the so-called higher classes went into ecstasies over Shakespeare only because they felt they ought to, only because Shakespeare was generally acknowledged to be a genius, and not because they themselves were convinced of the universal significance of his works. On the contrary, thinking people found nothing of interest in the themes Shakespeare treated. His plays were out of date. Of what importance in our day was it that this person loved that person or another person ceased to Love? Personal passions, conflicts and intrigues could not touch the heart of our contemporaries. We demanded something quite different of art today--we demanded the solution of problems presented to us by a new way of life, new knowledge and new teachings.Tolstoi had, he said, gone to the materials from which Shakespeare had gotten his ideas for his plays, and he had found them to be superior by far to Shakespeare's distortions of them. Why? Because the folk materials which Shakespeare had used were not only meaningful to everyone in Shakespeare's time, but that they were also meaningful to everyone today. The same could not be said of most of Shakespeare's own renditions of these materials. In short, Shakespeare had not observed what had escaped others. His plays did not call for a portrayal of what was new. They did nothing to enhance our awareness (not even in their own time) of other people in relation to us. Even in their own time they were not original. They merely 'truckled' to the vanity of the higher classes. They still do this Tolstoi argued. And because of this, the masses fail to understand them. They in fact do the opposite. Art, in Tolstoi's opinion had to build upon what everyone experiences and yo shed light upon our problems of misunderstanding and ill-will towards others. Art had a to be, in short, 'accessible' to all of us. It had to shadow us what we had not seen, to build this into what we had seen, and to make us aware of our own reasons for misunderstanding. In this way art was communication of the most primary and important kind. It was the fountainhead of thought. Communication, accessibility, originality, clarity of expression, consistency with life, unity--thesewere the values which entered into all of Tolstoi's judgements, his praise and criticisms of specific workds of art and of artists who created them. Art had to be universal. These values developed in Tolstoi very early n his life. Others, he added others later. In 1878, Tolstoi's demand for clarity and unversality gave him in his own writing a great deal of frusttration. SophiaAndreyevna, Tolstoi's long laboring Countess, made the following entry in her diary: Oct. 24, 1878: He cannot write yet. Today he said: 'Sonya, if I do write, it must be do lucid that little children can read every word of it.Accessibility, clarity, unity, the weaving of the new into the experiences we share in common. Tolstoi frequently sought for clarity in several ways. He found it ploughing, unraveling yarn, making his boots, sitting for hours in conversation with peasants, taking long walks, learning foreign languages, going to folk festivals, experiencing everything of life possible to experience. He loved Mozart, Weber, and Haydan, and he was an accomplished pianist and violinist. When clear writing seemed impossible to him, he often sat for hours at the piano or with the violin playing works by composers whose art was for him the embodiment of clarity, universality, and communication of feeling. Alienation between individuals was the antithesis of art, the antithesis of evolution of feeling and of knowledge. He dispaired of alienation, and in his hot debates with artists about their art, heal ways made sure to convince them that he loved and respected them as persons,and make sure to consider seriously every on of their own views, however, trivial they seemed to him at the time. To Tolstoi, the State, the Church, the Aristocracy, the urban places of commerce and industry, and science were the symbols of alienation. They created it and perpetuated it. He hated servitude and loved the persons of servants. He hated what art had become, but loved the persons of artists. He hated magistrates, but loved their persons. In all he sought and believed he found something common, something universal. Art should make us aware of this common element in us all. It should not do the contrary. To find it was to search. To search was to go everywhere, experience all things and to teach this common element to all who could not go everywhere. A few excerpts from the diary of Sophis Anderyevan Tolstoya illuminate this point: June 18, 1887:...The other evening he amused himself by playing the piano for hours: Mozart, Weber, and Haydin--on the violin. One must rediscover clarity when it turns up lacking in our work. January 17, 1891: At dinner we joked about what it would be like if all the gentry changed places with the servants for a week. Lev frowned and went downstairs. I joined him and asked what was the matter. He replied: "Stupid talk about a sacred thing; I suffer enough as it is because we are surrounded by servants, and you make a joke of it. It hurts me especially in front of the children.We will have occasion to this attitude of Tolstoi's with regard to what he saw as the proper subject-matter of art, because as Tolstoi grew older and more religions in his outlook, asceticism became for him a value or a criterion of art and of life which at times tended to put all other criteria in the background--or at least to make the other criteria possible of achievement. We shall want later to examine the question whether for Tolstoi as for Arthur Schopenhauer, asceticism was the only way to achieve universality in art and peace in life. But to present a few more excerpts from the Countess, Tolstoi's diary: June 1, 1897: Lev Nikolayevich is writing an article about art, and I rarely see him at dinnertime. June 19, 1897: We met Lev Nikolayevich as he was seeing off a man who had been put in prison for writing a poem about he Khodynka disaster. Lev is continuing feverishly with his article on art and has nearly finished it. He is not doing anything else.Sophia Anreyevna's next entry makes it certain that Tolstoi's criteria which he applies to literature, painting and sculpture is also applied to music. His demand for inner consistency, logical flow, clarity or the avoidance of confusion is to be witnessed also in the following entry: March 14, 1898: Yesterday S. I. Taneyev called on us....He played a piano arrangement of his beautiful symphony and asked Lev Nikolayevich for this opinion of it. With great gravity and respect, Lev Nikolayevich told him that in his symphony, as in all new music, there is no logical development of melody, rhythm, or even harmony. No sooner does on begin to follow the melody tan it breaks off; no sooner does one catch the rhythm than it changes. One feels dissatisfaction all the time, whereas in a real work of art, one feels that it could not have been otherwise, that one phrase flows inevitably from the preceding one. One says to himself: "That is exactly how I would have done it."Tolstoi was possessed with the search for those unnoted things about life which would tell a great deal about people generally. He loved to discover in what seemed to be trivial what in actuality was universal. He praised those who also discovered such things and who portrayed them well. For this reason, according to his son Sorgei Lvovich Tolstoi he loved the writing of Charles Dickes, Thacheray, the domestic novels of Trollope, Mrs. Humphrey Ward, George Fliot and similar writers. While he liked Thackeray, he found him too cold. Of the French writers of his time, he especially like Victor Hugho--appreciating his Les Miserables more than other of Hugo's works perhaps. He did not really care for Flaubert, Balzac, and Daudet. He was not indifferent to Zola but found Zola's realism overdone with too much description of trivial things. "In Zola," Tolstoi said, "You eat goose for twenty pages."12 Of all his contemporaries, Tolstoi was most fond of the works of Dickesn. He delighted in the little, but the universal, things which Dickesn observed about people, the telling thingsaboaut them, the things which so many people do not see or think about--ntil they read Dickens. Aboaut this, the following concersqation took plece between Sergei Yelpatyevsky and tolstoi when the latter was in his late 70's: "You too loved Dickesn?' put in Tolstoi eagerly, "Did you read him in Russian? He's incomparably better in English. He had a tremendous influence over me, was my favorite writer, I've read him again and again. Have you? ....Which of the characters did you like best?"The tell-tale act. The little thing which escapes notice but tells so much about a character and about a lot of us, the human things--those were what Tolstoi sought most in art and sought most to render in his own. THE ELEMENTS WHICH MAKE AN ARTIST We have seen that for Tolstoi good art is art that communicates something new, that it increases our awareness of truths about people and about nature, that in doing this it enhances our appreciation of others and draws us closer to them because of our heightened understanding of them in their environment. We have seen that art must communicate clearly and be within the reach of all, that it weaves into our common experience what we did not know or feel about before, that it must be clear, internally consistent and true to the subject. What then must a person be to produce art of this kind? True, he must search widely in sharing the lives of so many different people in so many different walks of life--in the fields, in the prisons, in famine, at harvest time, in the streets, in other countries--everywhere and with all people--but what must an artist possess in himself, or short of it what might he try to cultivate in himself to produce art--universalistic art? Tolstoi gave this a good deal of thought, and in his many inspired conversations with friends, relatives, and guests he made his position quite clear. In conversing with Anatoly R. Koni, for example, Tolstoi said: In every work of literature we must look for three elements. The most important is what the author has to say, next is the love the author shows for his subject, and last is his technique. Only complete harmony between what the author has to say and the love with which he says it can create a true work of art, and if these two elements exist, the third element, technique, comes of itself.14A person without the first two elements might be a very fine person and be due all love and respect, but he would be no artist. He might have a fine technique but have nothing to say--able to see nothing new--and still be a fine person but not an artist. He might be a miserable person, sick with loneliness, mean and ugly to everyone he met, but he could be a superb artist--if he had something to say, if he loved to portray it. Considering some of his Russian contemporaries, Tolstoi, in trying to show the applicability of these elements, made certain interesting observations: When you come right down to it, Turgenev has very little to say, but he is possessed of a great love for his subject and a wonderful technique. On the other hand Dostoyevsky had tremendous things to say and no technique at all; Nekrasov has something to say and the technique of saving it but lacks true love for his subject.15Those who love their subject, who can see something that escapes the notice of others--those will develop technique and portray what they have to say. When they do, the portrayal will be art. A good deal earlier in life, when Tolstoi was fifty five, he expressed about the same things to G. A.Rusanov (August 1883). A certain writer Shchedrin, then popular among the younger gerneration, was said by Tolstoi to have these elemetns--through with a "note of melancholy" to be "detected in his latest works". Tolstoi was convinced too that when a person had these three elements in harmony that he would be most widely accepted by the public. His works would be remembered longest. The conversation drifted to Dostoyevsky, and Tostoi said: Notes from a Dead House is an admirable piece of writing but I do not think much of his other works. Certain places have been pointed out to me, and they really are excellent, but on the whole--on the whole I find him dreadful! Forced language, a constant effort to discover original characters, which, when found, are only roughly sketched out. On the whole, Dostoyevsky talks and talks, and in the end one is left in a fog as to what he wants to say. He's an odd mixture of lofty Christian morals, a defense of war and a toadying to priests, potentates and the state.Rusanov then asked Tolstoi, "Have you read The Karamazov Brothers?" "Couldn't finish it. The characters not only speak in the same manner as the author, but they speak one and a sick men. In his long talks with Maxim Gorky, the conversation drifted now and again to that subject. Tolstoi criticized Dostoyevsky's habit of mixing up colloquial Russian words with words of freign derivation and putting this in the mouths of his characters. In The Idiot, the chief blemish, Tolstoi said to Gorky, "is that Prince Myshkin is an epileptic. If he were a healthy man his genuine naiveté, his purity of heart would touch us deeply. But Dostoyevsky had not the courage to make him a healthy man. Besides, he didn't like healthy people. He was convinced that, since he was himself a sick man, the whole world was sick."18 In Anatoly Kon's recollections of Tolstoy, the three elements of the good artist appear in Tolstoi's critique of art critics. Here, where artists might learn something to help them, one finds nothing of the sort, because the critics generally have to idea what art is all about. The critics generally have no idea what art is all about. The critics, Tolstoi said: ....are not interested in what a writer has to say but only in his technique, whereas the true task of a critic is to discover and point out the ray of light in a work of art without which it is nothing. We want to write 'pour le gros du public'. the appraisal of such a reading public and and their love is the best reward a wrier can have, and the taste of the 'big public' is always the right taste, despite the snubbing of certain books by the critics. The public seeks moral enlightenment in a work of art, no matter how risqué the subject-matter may be--that is, however openly the author speaks of things that are commonly and hypocritically not mentioned.19So-called critics, along with the so-called artists they criticize, are caught up in the vicious business of competition for the favors of the economic and political eltes of the Russiona aristocracy. None of them further true art, Tolstoi believed, they only atempt to repress it. Thus, for Tolstoi, universal art is art that is accessible to all, for its clarity, its communication of new things, for its increasing our awareness and understanding of others, it reveals its purpose--to unify mankind, to create among all a common brotherhood. Artists who come closest to fulfilling this purpose are those who blend a love for their subject-matter with a genuine knowledge of the subject in an original way. Short of this, neither art nor artist could exist in full. Ostensibly then, true art cannot fully emerge until art and discourse has achieved its purpose that of universal cosmopolitanism or the common brotherhood of all mankind and on a global scale. *********************** The question raised at the beginning--how Tolstoi could love art and in his next breath denounce it summarily--has been answered. The abundance of artless work, near art, and had art was appalling to Tolstoi. There was so much which Tolstoi could not fit under his stern criteria of art--so many artists who for varied reasons (foppishness, mentally sick, literariness, 'toadying') could not love their subject, who could discover anything new and universal to say (being under the employ of the aristocracy), and who because of this believed that being different in 'technique' was the same as being 'original'. What they did not know was that 'originality' without origins was meaningless, and their origins were in the classes of people, the masses of people they shunned and despised--the county laborer, and the urban poor.We are now in position to see that Tolstoi's critique of art was at once a critique of the human condition, of Russian society in each of its many sectors, and of the manifold personal troubles of persons in each sector which lay such a burden upon people as to repress, but not destroy, any impulse to true art they possess. Here we become aware of prison life, why people are in prison, the role of the aristocracy in putting them there (The Resurrection), the conditions of War and Peace, the Nihilism of Turgenev, and of Anna Karenina's suicide. Here we become aware of the fetish for science and industrial commerce with its alienation of labor from art in the destruction of craft and craftsmanship. The education of art among the urban workers to mere labor-power paid for by heavy debts which then pay would never lift. The money received by the poor in their service to science through industry was 'false money'. About his, Tolstoi remarked to Gorky: Science is a gold ingot concocted by a charlatan alchemist. You want to simplify it, to make it comprehensible to everyone--in other words, to coin any amount of this false money. When people realize the true value of this money they will not thank you for it.The Czarist regime and the aristocracy, the Church which had its own means of bleeding the poor and of not helping them during the famines, the urban bourgeois commercialists and their deplorable factories, prison-like factories for the destitute of both sexes and all ages, the traumatic degeneration of the peasantry owing to multiple oppressions of the country laborer as levied on they by the aristocracy, the Czarist Sate, and the famines--all this Tolstoi saw, felt, and wrote about. All this was a part of his art, and he saw it all in part from the vantage point of the country laborer, the incomparable mushik who begged in winter and ploughed in the spring, and whose children were escaping to a new kind of misery among the urban poor. EPILOGUE The evolution of knowledge parallels the evolution of feeling. When the one ceases to be universal, so also does the other. When discourse becomes the professional property of a patronized class, so does art. When the one fails of universality, so it is with the other. The purpose of art said Tolstoi, "is to actively influence the evolution of feelings, replacing the lower, less good feelings, less necessary for the well-being of mankind with better feelings necessary for this well-being." But the criteria for art, good art, were not to be found, Tolstoi felt, within art itself. The purpose of art is not defined within the sphere of art. Its purpose is defined elsewhere in culture. It is behind the love the person has for his subject and behind the impulse to see, and to bring to common awareness what has escaped the notice of others. The purpose of art is not technique. It is behind technique as a motivating force. Tolstoi saw that the true purpose of art lay in religion or more properly in religious perception in his own special sense. This religious perception Tolstoi felt to be universal--active in some sectors of life on Earth, but passive and dormant in other sectors, especially in the Catholic Church, in the Czarist State, and in the cities of Russia. But it lay everywhere. In the Middle East it is called Islam. In Russia that Tolstoi knew, it was called Christianity. This religious perception may be called different things but under the labels, in the hearts of men and women, it is all the same. The Church had become narrowed. Its functionaries had failed to be 'Catholic' in the original meaning of that word. It served its empire first, and its people last. The purpose of art was not defined by the Church of there, among its functionaries, religious perception had gone to sleep or else had been submerged by multiple rituals, empty ceremonies involving a language no one could understand--Latin. Art could find no purpose in a false language. It could be found only in common religious perception and expressed only in the language everyone knew and understood--the universal language of the people in each country, the language shunned b 'artists', the language of the country laborer. Drama, the theater arts, music, sculpture, painting, literature--all these depended upon the systematic exploitation of peasants and urban workers. Without their daily sacrifices, art in its worst, least accessible, forms could not exist. Behind every play put on for the nobility and the bourgeoisie were carpenters, janitors, plumbers, iron workers, tapestry makers, hundreds of workers, each suffering from poverty and debt--and none of them able to comprehend the narrowed, the superficial productions which were staged, often foppishly, for the numerical minority in power. Yet all the rubles for such productions had come originally from the sweat of the country laborer, from agriculture the source of all life. But still among the world's peasants the purpose and the power of art was alive. IT was not dead elsewhere, it merely slept or was submerged. Religious perception was everywhere, and art should awaken it where it slept, that it might fulfill its purpose--to end alienation and create the brotherhood of man, the highest possible feeling. .....There is and always has been a religious perception in every society, and it is by the standard of this religious perception that the feelings transmitted by a work of art are judged....The religious perception of our age, in its widest and most practicable application is the consciousness that our well-being, whether material or spiritual, collective or individual, temporal or eternal, lies in the growth of brotherhood among all men, and our living in harmony with one another.But foppish art, art which scrapes to, fawns over and flatters the politically powerful is far from universalistic, and the art of the peasant repressed by all this is slow to flower. On the other hand, protest art, art which transmitted feelings of violence and hatred for the persons of those in power was no better than foppish art. It was perhaps more alienative than the rest. It could beget only violence and counter violence. It tore away the possibility for brotherhood of man. The key lay in increasing the awareness of persons as persons, not as magistrates, wardens judges, artists, but as persons. It was to make each of us are of our universal humanness. Art transmitting only hatred and violence, only stupidity and avarice, only lust debauchery could not fulfill the purpose of art. It could only tear it away. The good....art of our age....should be such that all....can experience the feelings it transmits. It should not be the art of any single circle of people, of any one class, nationality, or religious cult. That is, it should not transmit feeling that are accessible only to a man educated in a certain fashion, to a nobleman or a merchant, or a Russian, or a Japanese, or a Catholic, or a Buddhist....but feelings which are accessible to everyone....22The art of protestors would be the art of another alienated classand would not appeal to the human feeling common to us all. Tolstoi seemed convinced that the social conditions of urban industrialization and of aristocratic oppressive behavior had nothing to do with evolution. It was change, yes, but it was far from being evolution. He was equally convinced that the forces of religious perception of true art were struggling against the oppressive institutions of his time. He felt greatly optimistic about the upward movement toward the brotherhood of all mankind. He defined his own role in perpetuating this upward movement to universalism, to unity and coherence. In this regard he said that this general movement of thought and felling is "running through all the complex labor of mankind, which consists, on the one hand, in the removal of the physical and moral barriers to the union of men, and, on the other in establishing the principles common to all men, which can and must unite them in a single universal brotherhood." But it must be realized that universal brotherhood was not seen by Tolstoi as an ideal to be reached. It was a universal fact of life that lay dormant in some sectors and alive in others, and it lay in either state in the persons of us all. The most decisive fact that made Tolstoi so closely identify himself with peasants was that he found his universalism alive among them in every aspect of their lives. It was among them that universalism in life and art were most clearly visible to him, and this was also the fountainhead of all life everywhere. Tolstoi identified with the country laborer. This meant that he saw in peasants all the natural qualities and human feelings which had not yet been 'perverted' or 'atrophied' by the powerful classes. Their art was not an ideal to strive for but a natural expression of human feelings which all could understand just by living among them and then rediscovering one's self in them. To climb down off the back of the peasants would be to allow their art to flourish and mature. Thus Tolstoi set up schools for them, tutored them, set up food houses for them in times of famine, worked with them in the fields, gave them grain, food, money to survive the harsh winters. He lived as much as he could as a peasant, but he never quite succeeded in being one. Tolstoian humility was a constant struggle to achieve. It was not so for the peasants he so admired and with whom he identified himself. Even as Tolstoi was dying, he recognized that he had not succeeded in being a peasant not all the way through. He left his family. He left his home, he wandered away to die, knowing that the world was following his every last movement, leaning to hear his last words. He was acutely conscious of his failure when he exclaimed in his dying, "No! This is not how a peasant dies." Tolstoian humility was like that of Agamemnon. He knew his own greatness. No peasant was ever so fortunate. He believed in passivism and in passive resistance, as Gandhi came to believe. But he never reached the humility of Ghandi. Tolstoi's humanism was always at odds with his will, with his boundless ego, with his passions. And more than once he was more than a little despotic in his relations with others--despite the fact that he made a distinction between them as persons and as role players. His despotism shows in his willingness to make up a black list of all bad art and then to urge that it all be banned. The image of Tolstoi identifying with peasants, being ex-communicated, identifying with Lermontov, making his own shoes, writing such tremendous novels, of a man inspired to search for truth in the name of the brotherhood of all mankind, of a man who would not answer violence with violence but who would turn the other cheek--all this conceals an underlying despotism, a kind of tyranny which was also a part of Tolstoi's power and which is one of the chief forces against which Tolstoi struggled with in himself all his life. His diaries are plagued with the feelings of animosity toward this aspect of himself. He wants brotherhood but his own will crops out continually to obstruct it in his relations with others. He continuously struggled against his passions seeking to convert them into cosmopolitan lines of action. What muddled his image as a pacifist--in his own mind--was that in his passions, in his will, and deep down, he was not a pacifist. He was a man of great turbulence of emotion, of desire, a man of tremendous ego, and a strong will. He was forever conscious of his own hatreds, and what he hated was virtually unforgivable, made no distinction between the person and the behavior of the person. It would take a Gandhi, not a Tolstoi, to make for the achievement of the brotherhood of all mankind. Gandhi's compassion was more real somehow, Tolstoi's was more like that of Arthur Schopenhauer, the only philosopher whom Tolstoi ever really cared for. Like Schopenhauer, Tolstoi rejected the value of pure reason, just as he rejected pure science and pure industry. Like Schopenhauer, Tolstoi saw himself and the world as one of continual struggle to allay the unrelenting force of blind will. Like Schopenhauer, Tolstoi saw intellect as the creation of the will and saw it as the only force which could be used to allay the will. Both men saw or believed that through intellect alone one could achieve peace among all mankind. Both believed that when blind will had its way no peace was possible. Both believed that only when the intellect could achieve a state of pure desirelessness could the soul of mankind be at peace. Only then could religious perception be highest. Only then would universalism come about in life and in art. No peasant ever died like Lev Tolstoi died. No peasant ever had to die that way wreathing with himself, still searching for himself. Anyone wanting to find Tolstoi, will have to look for him in a very strange place. Somewhere between pure reason and pure desire you will find compassion, there between Apollo and Dionisius you will also find Lev Tolstoi wrestling against his boundless passions, attempting still to use his intellect to allay all that he disavowed within himself--attempting still to find universalism and world peace in the simple homespun of the country laborer. NOTATIONS 1This juxtaposition between Tertulian and Tolstoi is, regretfully, not my own, some of the further implications of this contrast are, however. The one who initially made this comparison was Leonard Leonov in his "Thoughts about Tolstoi," given as an address, to a memorial meeting for Tolstoi held in the Bolshoi Theater on November 19, 1960, the fiftieth anniversary of Tolstoi's death. This address was reprinted in Reminiscences of Lev Tolstoi (translated by Margaret Wettlin). (Moscow: Foreign languages Publishing House, n.d.) pp. 2`1-22. Cf. pp. 75-76 of this same book for excerpts from the diary of the Countess Tolstoi pertaining to the events of Tolstoi's excommunication. 2As quoted by Yuri Davydov in. The October Revolution and the aRts: Tolstoi, Blok, Mayakovsky, Einstein, (Trans. by Bryan Bean and Bernard Meares (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1967) p. 13. This is a brilliant portrayal of Tolstoi's conception of art as a universal and as a class-bound phenomenon. The critique which follows this portrayal, while no less brilliant, is understandably harsh is view of the fact that Tolstoi took a dim view of science and industry which after Lenin was to become the official building stone of the image of the new Soviet man. The contributions of the several artists mentioned in the title of this book, as they figure into the October Revolution are exceptionally well handled by Davydov. 3Llya Repin, "Lev Tolstoi as I Knew Him," in Reminiscences, op. cit., p. 304. For material on Tolstoi as a field worker and peasant, see Repin's "Count Lev Tolstoi, Personal impressions and Reminiscences," same volume, pp. 290, ff. Tolstoi as quoted by Repin. 4As quoted by Repin, Reminiscences of Lev Tolstoi, op.cit., p. 304. 5Llya Y. Gintsburg, "Memories of the Past," in Reminiscences, Ibid., pp. 331-332. Ginstburg quotes Tolstoi from memory here. 6As quoted by Vladimir Mikhailovich Lopatin, in "Stage Reminiscences," in Ibid., pp. 340-341. 7Ibid., pp. 341-342. 8Sophia Andreyevna Tolstoi, "Diary", in Ibid., p. 61, et seq, for similar passages. 9Ibid., pp. 63-65. 10Ibid., p. 70 11Ibid., pp. 70-75 12Serget Lvovich Tolstoi, "Essays on the Past: My Father in the Seventies," in Reminiscences, op. cit., p. 110. 13Sergei Yakovlevich Yelpatyevsky, "Reminiscences of Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoi," as quoted from memory by the author in Reminiscences, Ibid., p. 221. 14Anatoly Fyodorovich Koni, "Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoi," author quotes Tolstoi. Ibid., pp 182-183. 15Ibid., p. 183. 16Gavrill A. Rusanov, "Visit to Yasnaya Polyana, 24-25 August, 1883," quoting tolstoi, in Reminiscences, Ibid., pp. 165-166. 17Ibid., p. 168 18Maxim Gorky, "Lev Tolstoi," Ibid., p. 384. 19Koni, op. cit., p. 183. 20Gorky, op. cit., p. 381. 21Tolstoi quoted by Yuri Davydo, op.cit., p. 14 ff. 22Ibid., p. 15. to communicate with Mr. Kennedy. December Newsletter Go To Current Newsletter |