The truth was that Tanayev had simply precipitated a reaction prepared long before. It was inevitable that after condemning the pleasures of the senses Tolstoy should be brought to reject all forms of art that were not useful to the people. He might have qualified his verdict, attached a few judicious concessions to it, but it was not in his nature to be diplomatic. Just as he strove to reproduce every shade in a landscape or the expression of a face or state of mind, so, when it came to philosophical ideas, he saw everything in black and white. Starting out from premises that seemed sound to him, he lumbered ahead looking neither right nor left, preferring to end in an impasse rather than to swerve by so much as a hairsbrcadth from a straight line. If he happened to change his mind on the way, he did not gradually shift his course but tacked about all at once, proclaimed the opposite of what he had said the previous day, and called his about-face a conversion or rebirth. "Why talk in subtleties," he wrote in his diary, "when there are so many flagrant truths to be told?"
In aesthetics, the first of the "flagrant truths" was embodied in the statement that "art must not be regarded as a means of procuring pleasure, but as an aspect of social life." Therefore, for Tolstoy, the artist's duty was not to give form, color and rhythm to his flights of fancy, but to amuse the workers after their hard day of labor, and give them "rest, as refreshing as in their sleep. When an artist begins to say, 'I am not understood, not because I am incomprehensible (that is, bad) but because my listeners-readers-spcctators have not yet reached my intellectual level,' he has abandoned the natural imperatives of art and signed his own death warrant by ignoring the mainspring of creation." The criterion of quality was, hence, the approval of the masses, however ignorant and illiterate they were. The notion that a work might be beautiful and have no meaning for the masses was an invention of the wealthy, who, out of pride and perversity, had encouraged the artists to work for a narrow circle of so-called connoisseurs. And thanks to them, modern art was running to wrack and ruin. "The artist of tomorrow will realize that it is more important and useful to compose a talc, a touching little song, a divertissement or sketch or light interlude, or draw a picture that will delight dozens of generations, that is, millions of children and adults, than a novel, symphony or painting that will enchant a few representatives of the wealthy classes and then be forgotten forever."
Carried away by his theory, Tolstoy furiously set about demolishing the alleged geniuses of the race. French literature fared worst at his hands, not only because its authors positively indulged themselves in the study of amorous passion, but also bccausc its poets had so refined and polished their style that their products were no more than puzzles in code. Down with Charles Baudelaire, that convoluted, unclean versifier! Down with Verlaine the drunkard, incapable of expressing a thought clearly, recommending—heavens above!—"that gray song where Precise and Vague join hands!" Down with Mallarme, who was proud of being so obscurc when he ought to have been ashamed! And all those manufacturers of verse, Jean MorЈas, Henri dc Regnier, Maeterlinck. . . . What aberration had led the French to abandon their last great poets—Lccontc dc Lisle and Sully Prudhomme?
Tilings weren't much better in the field of painting: Monet, Manet, Renoir, Sisley, l'issarro, all compounders of fog, splitters of the sable hairs on their brushes, intellectuals refusing all contact with the people to wallow in an art for the initiated! Were there any blue faces, or landscapes composed of hordes of multicolored dots? There were not, right? Then into the wastebasket with the Impressionists! But they were not the only guilty ones. Those painters whose sole occupation was to represent "the pleasures and graccs of a life of leisure and idleness" must also be scrapped, along with those whose paintings had "a symbolical meaning comprehensible only to people of a certain class," and those whose pictures were "full of feminine nudity, such as arc to be seen in galleries and exhibitions."
The same depravity prevailed in the music of Beethoven, Schumann, Berlioz, Liszt and Wagner—"dedicated to the expression of sickly states of nervous emotion." All works that departed from the traditions of the people (folkdances or songs) were to be banished, except possibly "Bach's famous air for violin, one of Chopin's nocturnes and a dozen pieces or passages in Ilaydn, Schubert, Beethoven and Chopin . . One must not be afraid to denounce the public's blind veneration for ccrtain taboo titles, such as Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, which was thought to be so admirable; Tolstoy did not believe it deserved its reputation, and to prove his point he asked two questions: 1. "Does the work give birth to elevated religious feelings?" Answer: "No; becausc no music of any kind can produce such feelings." 2. "If the work docs not belong to the category of religious art, then does it have another characteristic of good modern art, i.e., does it unite people in a community of feeling?" There again, the answer was negative. And the author adds, "Not only do I fail to sec that the feeling expressed by the Ninth Symphony is capable of uniting people who have not been especially trained to enter into this complicated form of hypnosis, but I cannot even imagine how a crowd of normal beings can be touched by this interminable, muddled and artificial work, in which only one or two short passages manage to emerge from an ocean of incomprehensible sound."
When he contemplated all the perversions of art, he felt sorry for the millions of good souls working twelve or fourteen hours a clay printing books, or wearing themselves out shifting the scenery of amoral plays in theaters, or those who had devoted their entire lives from the age of ten to suppling their fingers so that they could play some musical instrument, or those who did acrobatics and risked their lives in circuses. . . . According to him, the muzhiks were right to express surprise at the sight of a monument to Pushkin, who was not a saint, had been killed in a duel and "whose sole merit was to have written some frequently improper love-poetry." Similarly, he approved of the peasants in Brittany and Nonnandy who were offended by the tributes paid to the de-
praved Baudelaire or the drunken Verlaine. He said the artists of tomorrow must give up mystification, go to the people and revive their jaded inspiration through contact with them. With what pride this latter-day inquisitor watched the flames leaping at the stakes on which he had flung all the decadent and false works of those little Western witches!
The final version of What Is Art? is actually relatively mild: his true feelings were expressed in his diary of the period:
"Yesterday, I glanced through Fet's books—novels, short stories and poetry. I recalled the time we spent together at Yasnaya Polyana, our interminable four-handed sessions at the piano, and I plainly saw that all this music and fiction and poetry is not art, that men do not have the slightest need for it, that it is nothing but a distraction for profiteers and idlers, that it has nothing to do with life. Novels and short stories describe the revolting manner in which two creatures become infatuated with each other; poems explain and glorify how to die of boredom; and music does the same. And all the while life, all of life, is beating at us with urgent questions—food, the distribution of property, labor, religion, human relations! It's a shame! It is ignoble! Help me, Father, to serve you by destroying falsehood."26 Or: