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Count Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy was born in 1828 and educated privately. He studied Oriental languages and Law at the University of Kazan, then led a life of pleasure until he joined an artillery regiment in the Caucasus in 1851. He served during the Crimean War and after the defence of Sebastopol wrote The Sebastopol Sketches, which established his reputation. He continued to write while developing educational projects, writing War and Peace and Anna Karenina between 1865 and 1876. A Confession marked an outward change in his life and works: he became an extreme rationalist and moralist, and his theories led to his excommunication from the Russian Holy Synod in 1901. He died in 1910.
Richard Pevear has published translations of Alain, Yves Bonnefoy and Alberto Savinio, as well as two books of poetry. He and his wife, Larissa Volokhonsky, have translated works by Pavel Florensky, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Nikolai Gogol, among others. Their translation of The Brothers Karamazov received the PEN translation award in 1991. They live in France.
Pick up any newspaper of our time, and in every one of them you will find a section on theatre and music; in almost every issue you will find a description of some exhibition or other, or of some particular painting, and in every one you will find reports on newly appearing books of an artistic nature - poetry, stories, novels. Read the first page
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Tolstoy's scathing and unapologetic look at 'Art History' can still be argued in our own culture. The times have changed but mankind has not. I would venture to say that Generation X understands very little about true artistic works, we are so bombarded with commercialism and materialism. We are only interested in what gives us erotic and material pleasure. But in the long run, temporal and vainglorious things did not satisfy Tolstoy and his contemporaries, and will not satisfy us either.
This work by Tolstoy is a summary of his 15 year spiritual journey and research of art and what it's all about. And who is the author! A genius himself! In this piece he tells us in plain language that the whole art of his century (with a few exceptions) is a product of a rotten class of people, a select few, whose main concerns were far from being common with the feelings of any normal human being. "Art, nowadays, is for pleasure, not for bringing moral values in the form of genuine feelings to a reader". This is basically the general idea of the work. At first, you feel dumbfounded reading this, but after a few pages, his statements start to make sense. Only a true moral feeling expressed in the right form, not necessarily beautiful, but understandible and to the point, is a true piece of art.
Now, let's go back and think for minute: do I really like Sheakspeare or is it the literary criticism the makes me feel that I am not a fully cultured person unless I acknowledge Sheakspeare as the greatest of all, or at least one of the greatest writers (playwrights) ever? Even if I think that he was too verbose and vague to begin with? That sometimes you read him and whole paragraphs go by without you fully understanding what he's talking about? Mind you, he wrote for the theater, which means characters' sentences need to be pretty concise and clear, so that the audience could follow them. Anyway, Tolstoy will help you understand this problem.
His main idea, again, is for art to convey the feelings of fraternity and love to the reader, not sexual desires, fake patriotism, shovinism or those exquisite feelings of the upper class. Art is about compassion, love, oneness of all people and good healthy humor. I totally agree with that.
One more thing: in this work, Tolstoy confronts the idea of goodness with the idea of beauty, saying that for the sake of beauty, the contemporary artists disregard goodness. This a very controversial statement, in my opinion, but there is a point there...
Also recommended: of course, War and Peace, Anna Karenina, Resurrection, Childhood, Boyhood & Youth, as true standards of literature, by which you can judge the works of others. All other fiction by Tolstoy is just as great and easy to read, especially his short stories, such as "Master and Man", "The Forged Coupon", etc. His other less known works that are revolutionary by their essence, are "My Confession", "What is My Belief (Religion)" and especially (really hard to find) "Critique of Dogmatic Theology", where he expounded his views on religion and traditional Church Christianity with all its absurd, useless dogmas, which only divert your attention from what Christ really taught. This is a very controversial work, which was prohibited in Russia of his day, but which is certainly worth reading. By the way, why doesn't Everyman's Library publish it?
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