What is Art?: The Struggle to Fictionalize Selflessness

• In Event: Tolstoy: Art, Mind, and Morbidity

Abstract

Tolstoy's pre- and post-crisis worldviews differ radically. The former is devoted most basically to what might be called the project of the self; the latter to an exactly opposed project of selflessness. Yet Tolstoy's strength as an artist was always in excavating the human interiority. This makes Christian art for him an awkward contradiction. Selflessness resists his aesthetic tendencies because it contradicts something fundamental in his vision. There are multiple ways of demonstrating this, but I will focus on the tension between the theory of art in What Is Art? – in many ways Tolstoy's most "pre-crisis" post-crisis work – and his actual practice. It is often argued Tolstoy's narratives simply cannot live up to the high standards of his Christianity. But the real picture is more complex. Tolstoy is beholden to crucial imperatives at odds with his Christianity that he never names, but never entirely escapes.

Author

• David M.B.L. Herman, U of Virginia