Quotations by Tolstoy on ‘What is Art?’

Source

Professor Julie Van Camp placed a large number of quotations by Tolstoy from his What is Art? The first few are presented below. A number of them centre on the relationship between artist, art and ‘receiver’ of the art.

In a previous posting I suggested as a useful definition;

Art is culturally, and personally, significant meaning, skilfully encoded in an affecting, sensuous medium.
(After a definition by Richard Anderson quoted in Freeland (2001 p. 77))

Adding the ‘and personally’ phrase is vital because there is a vital distinction between the cultural and the personal in an aesthetic experience.

Professor Van Camp includes a list of questions for discussion but I’m wondering if another way of approaching Tolstoy’s thought is to bring into focus the view he appears to have of what it is to be human. Of course many of the implications of what Tolstoy says are what has preoccupied writers about art over the last century but on this site I am suggesting a neo-humanistic form – and such documents as this by Tolstoy can help in such a project.

I don’t have the time to do this at present but I have included some questions, and underlined some of what seem to me to be the key words/phrases in the first few excerpts – to indicate an approach to discovering how Tolstoy was answering the question, “What is it to be fully and positively human?” – in the context of his thinking about the aesthetic.

CHAPTER FIVE (excerpts). . .

#1. In order correctly to define art, it is necessary, first of all, to cease to consider it as a means to pleasure and to consider it as one of the conditions of human life. Viewing it in this way we cannot fail to observe that art is one of the means of intercourse between man and man. (RP Isn’t it pleasurable as well as being intrinsically human?)

#2. Every work of art causes the receiver to enter into a certain kind of relationship both with him who produced, or is producing, the art, and with all those who, simultaneously, previously, or subsequently, receive the same artistic impression. (RP Does it? If so what kind of relationship? Is it different now?)

#3. Speech, transmitting the thoughts and experiences of men, serves as a means of union among them, and art acts in a similar manner. The peculiarity of this latter means of intercourse, distinguishing it from intercourse by means of words, consists in this, that whereas by words a man transmits his thoughts to another, by means of art he transmits his feelings. (RP Doesn’t art deal in ideas as well? Isn’t speech intimately connected with feelings? Is the issue more to do with differences in the respective modes and how they govern perception?)

#4. The activity of art is based on the fact that a man, receiving through his sense of hearing or sight another man’s expression of feeling, is capable of experiencing the emotion which moved the man who expressed it. To take the simplest example; one man laughs, and another who hears becomes merry; or a man weeps, and another who hears feels sorrow. A man is excited or irritated, and another man seeing him comes to a similar state of mind. By his movements or by the sounds of his voice, a man expresses courage and determination or sadness and calmness, and this state of mind passes on to others. A man suffers, expressing his sufferings by groans and spasms, and this suffering transmits itself to other people; a man expresses his feeling of admiration, devotion, fear, respect, or love to certain objects, persons, or phenomena, and others are infected by the same feelings of admiration, devotion, fear, respect, or love to the same objects, persons, and phenomena. (RP Is the accurate ‘re-producibility’ of emotion really a fully satisfactory explanation – when we consider for example contemporary fine art? However empathy and compassion are surely the basis of much movement in art – aren’t they?)

#5. And it is upon this capacity of man to receive another man’s expression of feeling and experience those feelings himself, that the activity of art is based. (RP Tolstoy seems to assume that we ‘receive’ rather like hearing a radio broadcast. Doesn’t this down-play too much the nature of subjectivity and personal history?)

#6. If a man infects another or others directly, immediately, by his appearance or by the sounds he gives vent to at the very time he experiences the feeling; if he causes another man to yawn when he himself cannot help yawning, or to laugh or cry when he himself is obliged to laugh or cry, or to suffer when he himself is suffering – that does not amount to art. (RP So is the difference that art requires symbolic conventions as well as empathy and compassion?)

#7. Art begins when one person, with the object of joining another or others to himself in one and the same feeling, expresses that feeling by certain external indications. To take the simplest example: a boy, having experienced, let us say, fear on encountering a wolf, relates that encounter; and, in order to evoke in others the feeling he has experienced, describes himself, his condition before the encounter, the surroundings, the woods, his own lightheartedness, and then the wolf’s appearance, its movements, the distance between himself and the wolf, etc. All this, if only the boy, when telling the story, again experiences the feelings he had lived through and infects the hearers and compels them to feel what the narrator had experienced is art. If even the boy had not seen a wolf but had frequently been afraid of one, and if, wishing to evoke in others the fear he had felt, he invented an encounter with a wolf and recounted it so as to make his hearers share the feelings he experienced when he feared the world, that also would be art. And just in the same way it is art if a man, having experienced either the fear of suffering or the attraction of enjoyment (whether in reality or in imagination) expresses these feelings on canvas or in marble so that others are infected by them. And it is also art if a man feels or imagines to himself feelings of delight, gladness, sorrow, despair, courage, or despondency and the transition from one to another of these feelings, and expresses these feelings by sounds so that the hearers are infected by them and experience them as they were experienced by the composer. (RP Are the external indications’ conventions including symbolic conventions? Does art sometimes work as directly as immediate compassion and empathy in real life?)

Copyright Julie C Van Camp 1997

To see the whole list go HERE.

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