Each of us can remember that the pleasures of taste were truly aesthetic (Fr.)].
And he tells how a glass of milk he drank in the mountains gave him aesthetic pleasure.
So the concept of art as a manifestation of beauty is not at all as simple as it seems, especially now that this concept of beauty includes, as the latest aesthetics do, our senses of touch, taste and smell.
But the average person either does not know or does not want to know this and is firmly convinced that all questions of art are very simply and clearly resolved by recognizing beauty as the content of art. For the average person it seems clear and understandable that art is a manifestation of beauty; and beauty explains for him all the questions of art.
But what is beauty, which, in his opinion, is the content of art? How is it defined and what is it?
As it happens in any business, the more obscure, more confusing the concept that is conveyed by the word, the more aplomb and self-confidence people use this word, pretending that what is meant by this word is so simple and clear that it is not worth even saying about what it actually means. This is what people usually do in relation to superstitious religious questions, and this is how people act in our time in relation to the concept of beauty. It is assumed that what is meant by the word beauty is known and understood by everyone. Meanwhile, this is not only unknown, but after mountains of books have been written about this subject for 150 years - since 1750, the time of the founding of aesthetics by Baumgarten - by the most learned and thoughtful people, the question of what beauty is is still still remains completely open and with each new work on aesthetics is solved in a new way. One of the last books I've read on aesthetics, by the way, is a pretty little book by Julius Mithalter called "Ratsel des Schonen" (the riddle of the beautiful). And this title quite correctly expresses the position of the question of what beauty is. The meaning of the word "beauty" has remained a mystery after 150 years of reasoning by thousands of scientists about the meaning of this word. The Germans solve this riddle in their own way, albeit in hundreds of different ways: aesthetic physiologists, mostly Englishmen of the Spencer-Grant-Allen school, also each in their own way; eclectic French and followers of Guyot and Taine - also each in his own way, and all these people know all the previous decisions of Baumgarten, and Kant, and Schelling, and Schiller, and Fichte, and Winckelmann, and Lessing, and Hegel, and Schopenhauer, and Hartmann, and Schassler, and Cousin, and Levek, etc.
What is this strange concept of beauty, which seems so understandable to those who do not think about what they say, and in the definition of which all philosophers of different peoples of the most diverse trends cannot agree in the course of a century and a half? What is the concept of beauty on which the reigning doctrine of art is based?
By the word "beauty" in Russian we mean only what pleases our eyesight. Although recently they have begun to say: "an ugly act", "beautiful music", but this is not in Russian.
A Russian person from the people who does not know foreign languages will not understand you if you tell him that the person who gave another his last clothes or something like that acted "beautifully", or, deceiving another, acted "ugly", or that the song is beautiful. In Russian, an act can be kind, good, or unkind and bad; music can be pleasant and good, and unpleasant and bad, but music can be neither beautiful nor ugly.
A person, a horse, a house, a look, a movement can be beautiful, but about actions, thoughts, character, music, if we really like them, we can say that they are good and bad if we don’t like them; “beautiful” can only be said about what pleases the eye. So the word and the concept of "good" includes the concept of "beautiful", but not vice versa: the concept of "beautiful" does not cover the concept of "good". If we say "good" about an object that is valued for its appearance, then we also say that this object is beautiful; but if we say "beautiful", then this does not mean at all that this object was good.
Such is the meaning attributed by the Russian language - therefore, the Russian folk sense - to words and concepts - good and beautiful.
In all European languages, in the languages of those peoples among whom the doctrine of beauty as the essence of art is widespread, the words "beau", "schon", "beautiful", "bello", retaining the meaning of the beauty of the form, began to mean goodness - kindness , that is, they began to replace the word "good".
So in these languages, expressions like "belle ame, schone Gedanken, beautiful deed" [Beautiful soul, beautiful thoughts, beautiful deed (French, German, English)] are already quite naturally used, to determine the beauty of the form, these languages do not have a corresponding word, and they must use a compound of the words "beau par la forme" [Beautiful in shape (fr.)], etc.
Observation of the meaning that the word "beauty", "beautiful" has in our language, as well as in the languages of the peoples among whom the aesthetic theory has been established, shows us that the word "beauty" is given by these peoples some special meaning, namely, the meaning of good.
At the same time, it is remarkable that since we Russians have been assimilating European views on art closer and closer, the same evolution has begun to take place in our language, and, already quite confidently and without surprising anyone, they speak and write about beautiful music. and ugly deeds and even thoughts, while 40 years ago, in my youth, the expressions "beautiful music" and "ugly deeds" were not only not common, but incomprehensible. Obviously, this new meaning, given by European thought to beauty, is beginning to be assimilated by Russian society.
What is this meaning? What is beauty, as the European peoples understand it?
In order to answer this question, I will write out here at least a small part of those definitions of beauty that are most common in existing aesthetics. I strongly ask the reader not to get bored and read these extracts or, what would be even better, read at least some learned aesthetics. Leaving aside the voluminous aesthetics of the Germans, Kralik's German book, Knight's English book, and Leveque's French book are very good for this purpose. It is necessary to read some learned aesthetics in order to form for oneself an idea of the variety of judgments and of the terrifying obscurity that reigns in this area of judgments, and not to take the word of another on this important question.
Here is what the German esthetician Schassler says, for example, about the nature of all aesthetic research in the preface to his famous lengthy and detailed book of aesthetics: ways of exposition, as in the field of aesthetics.On the one hand, elegant phrasing without any content, distinguished for the most part by the most one-sided surface; on the other hand, with an indisputable depth of research and richness of content, the repulsive clumsiness of philosophical terminology, dressing the simplest things in the clothes of abstract scientificity as if in order to make them worthy of entry into the illuminated halls of the system, and, finally, between these two methods of research and presentation, a third, constituting, as it were, a transition from one to the other, a device consisting in eclecticism, flaunting now elegant phrases, then pedantic scientific ... The same form of presentation, which would not fall into any of these three shortcomings, but would be truly concrete and, with essential content, would express it in a clear and popular philosophical language, nowhere can be found less often than in the field of aesthetics " .
It is worth reading at least the very book of the same Schassler to be convinced of the validity of his judgment.
"Il n" y a pas de science, - the French writer Veron also speaks about this subject in the preface to his very good book of aesthetics, - qui ait ete de plus, que l "esthetique, livree aux reveries des metaphysiciens. Depuis Platon jusqu" aux doctrines officielles de nos jours, on a fait de l "art je ne sais quel amalgame de fantaisies quintessenciees et de mysteres transcendentaux, qui trouvent leur expression supreme dans la conception absolue du beau ideal prototype immuable et divin des choses reelles" .
This judgment is more than just, as the reader will be convinced of this if he takes the trouble to read the following definitions of beauty that I wrote out from the main writers on the aesthetics.
I will not write out the definitions of beauty attributed to the ancients: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and before Plotinus, because, in essence, the ancients did not have that concept of beauty, separated from good, which is the basis and goal of the aesthetics of our time. By matching the judgments of the ancients about beauty to our concept - beauty, as is usually done in aesthetics, we give the words of the ancients a meaning that they did not have (see the excellent book by Benard "a -" L "esthetique d" Aristote "and Walter" a - "Geschichte der Aesthetik im Altertum" [Benard, Aristotle's Aesthetics; Walter, History of Ancient Aesthetics.]).
III
I'll start with the founder of aesthetics, Baumgarten (1714-1762).
According to Baumgarten [See. Schassler, ref. cit., p. 361. (Note by LN Tolstoy)], the object of logical knowledge is truth; the object of aesthetic (that is, sensual) cognition is beauty. Beauty is perfect (absolute), cognized by feeling. Truth is perfect, known by reason. Good is perfect, achieved by the moral will.
Beauty is defined, according to Baumgarten, by correspondence, that is, by the order of the parts in their mutual relation to each other and in their relation to the whole. The purpose of beauty itself is to please and arouse desire (Wohlgefallen und Erregung eines Verlanges), a position that is directly opposite to the main property and sign of beauty, according to Kant.
Regarding the manifestation of beauty, Baumgarten believes that we cognize the highest realization of beauty in nature, and therefore the imitation of nature, according to Baumgarten, is the highest task of art (the same position, directly opposite to the judgments of later aesthetics).
Ignoring the unremarkable followers of Baumgarten: Meyer, Eschenburg, Ebergart, who only slightly change the views of the teacher, separating the pleasant from the beautiful, I write out definitions of beauty from writers who appeared immediately after Baumgarten, who define beauty in a completely different way. These writers were Schutz, Sulzer, Mendelssohn, Moritz. These writers recognize, in contrast to Baumgarten's main proposition, that the goal of art is not beauty, but goodness. So, Sulzer (1720-1779) says that only that which contains goodness can be recognized as beautiful. According to Sulzer [See Schassler, ref. cit., p. 361. (Note by L. N. Tolstoy)], the goal of the whole life of mankind is the good of social life. It is achieved by cultivating a moral sense, and art must be subordinated to this goal. Beauty is what evokes and nurtures this feeling.
Almost the same understanding of beauty and Mendelssohn (1729-1786). Art, according to Mendelssohn, is bringing the beautiful, cognizable by a vague feeling, to the true and good. The goal of art is moral perfection.
For the aesthetics of this trend, the ideal of beauty is a beautiful soul in a beautiful body. So, these aestheticians completely erase the division of the perfect (absolute) into its three forms: truth, goodness and beauty, and beauty again merges with goodness and truth.
But such an understanding of beauty is not only not held by the later aesthetics, but the aesthetics of Winckelmann is again completely opposite to these views, separating the tasks of art from the goal of goodness in the most decisive and sharp way and setting the goal of art to external and even one plastic beauty.
According to the famous work of Winckelmann (1717-1767), the law and goal of all art is only beauty, completely separate and independent from good. Beauty, on the other hand, is of three kinds: 1) the beauty of forms, 2) the beauty of the idea, expressed in the position of the figure (relative to plastic art), and 3) the beauty of expression, which is possible only if the first two conditions are present; this beauty of expression is the highest goal of art, which is realized in ancient art, as a result of which the art of the present should strive to imitate the ancient.
Beauty is understood in the same way by Lessing, Herder, then by Goethe, and by all the outstanding aestheticians of Germany up to Kant, from whose time another understanding of art begins again.
In England, France, Italy, Holland at the same time, independently of the writers of Germany, their own aesthetic theories were born, just as obscure and contradictory, but all aesthetics, just like the German ones, based on the concept of beauty, understand beauty. as something absolutely existing and more or less merging with good or having the same root with it. In England, almost at the same time as Baumgarten, even a little earlier, Shaftesbury, Gutchison, Gom (Note), Burke, Gogart and others write about art.
According to Shaftesbury (1670-1713), what is beautiful is harmonious and proportionate; what is beautiful and proportionate is true (true); what is beautiful and at the same time true is pleasant and good (good). Beauty, according to Shaftesbury, is known only by the spirit. God is the basic beauty - beauty and goodness come from the same source. So, according to Shaftesbury, although beauty is considered as something separate from good, it again merges with it into something inseparable.
According to Hutchison (1694-1747), in his Origin of our ideas of beauty and virtue, the aim of art is beauty, the essence of which is the manifestation of unity in multitude. In the knowledge of what beauty is, we are guided by the ethical instinct (an internal sense). This instinct may be the opposite of the aesthetic. So, according to Hutchison, beauty no longer always coincides with goodness and is separated from it and is opposite to it.
According to Home (1696-1782), beauty is that which is pleasing. And because beauty is determined only by taste. The foundation of true taste lies in the fact that the greatest richness, fullness, strength and variety of impressions lie in the most limited limits. This is the ideal of a perfect work of art.
According to Burke (1730-1797), "Enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and the beautiful", the majestic and beautiful that constitute the purpose of art, have as their basis a sense of self-preservation and a sense of publicity. These feelings, considered in their sources, are the means for maintaining the lineage of the individual. The first is achieved by food, protection and war, the second by communication and reproduction. And therefore self-preservation and the war associated with it are the source of the majestic, the public and the sexual need associated with it are the source of beauty [Kralik, Weltschonheit, Versuch einer allgemeinen Aesthetik, 304-306. K. Kralik, 124. (Note by L. H. Tolstoy.)].
These are the main English definitions of art and beauty in the 18th century.
At the same time in France they write about the art of Pere Andre, Bathe and then Diderot, d'Alembert, partly Voltaire.
According to Pere Andre ("Essai sur le Beau") (1741), there are three kinds of beauty: 1) divine beauty, 2) natural beauty and 3) artificial beauty.
According to Bathe (1713-1780), art consists in imitation of the beauty of nature and its purpose is pleasure. This is also the definition of Diderot's art. Taste is supposed to be the decider of what is beautiful, as is the case with the English. The laws of taste are not only not established, but it is recognized that this is impossible. The same opinion is held by d'Alembert and Voltaire.
According to the Italian aesthetics of the same time, Pagano, art is a combination into one of the beauties scattered in nature. The ability to see these beauties is taste, the ability to combine them into one whole is artistic genius. Beauty, according to Pagano, merges with goodness in such a way that beauty is manifested goodness, while goodness is inner beauty.
According to other Italians - Muratori (Muratori) (1672-1750), "Riflessioni sopro il buon gusto intorno le scienze e le arti" ["Reflections on good taste in science and art" (it.)] and especially Spalletti ( "Saggio sopro la belezza" ["Study on beauty" (it.)], 1765), art is reduced to an egoistic feeling, based, like Burke, on the desire for self-preservation and the public.
Of the Dutch, Gemsterhuis (1720-1790), who had an influence on German aesthetics and Goethe, is remarkable. According to him, beauty is that which gives the greatest pleasure, and that which gives us the greatest number of ideas in the shortest time gives the greatest pleasure. The enjoyment of the beautiful is the highest knowledge that a person can reach, because it gives the greatest number of perceptions in the shortest time.
Such were the theories of aesthetics outside Germany during the last century. In Germany, after Winckelmann, there is again a completely new aesthetic theory of Kant (1724-1804), which, more than all others, explains the essence of the concept of beauty, and therefore of art.
Kant's aesthetics is based on the following: man, according to Kant, cognizes nature outside himself and himself in nature. In nature, outside of himself, he seeks truth, in himself he seeks goodness - one is a matter of pure reason, the other is practical reason (freedom). In addition to these two tools of knowledge, according to Kant, there is also the faculty of judgment (Urtheilskraft), which makes judgments without concepts and produces pleasure without desire: "Urtheil ohne Begriff und Vergnugen ohne Begehren." This ability is the basis of aesthetic feeling. Beauty, according to Kant, in the subjective sense, is that which, without a concept and without practical benefit, is generally necessary to please, but in the objective sense, it is the form of an expedient object to the extent that it is perceived without any idea of the goal.
Beauty is defined in the same way by the followers of Kant, among other things by Schiller (1759-1805). According to Schiller, who wrote a lot about aesthetics, the goal of art is, just like according to Kant, beauty, the source of which is pleasure without practical use. So art can be called a game, but not in the sense of an insignificant occupation, but in the sense of the manifestation of the beauty of life itself, which has no other goal than beauty.
In addition to Schiller, the most remarkable of Kant's followers in the field of aesthetics were Jean Paul and Wilhelm Humboldt, although they did not add anything to the definition of beauty, but they understood its various types, such as drama, music, comic, etc. .
After Kant, they write about aesthetics, in addition to minor philosophers, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel and their followers. According to Fichte (1762-1814), the consciousness of beauty follows from the following. The world, that is, nature, has two sides: it is the product of our limitations and it is the product of our free ideal activity. In the first sense the world is limited, in the second it is free. In the first sense, every body is limited, distorted, compressed, constrained, and we see ugliness; in the second, we see inner fullness, vitality, rebirth, we see beauty. So the ugliness or beauty of an object, according to Fichte, depends on the point of view of the beholder. And therefore beauty is not in the world, but in the beautiful soul (schoner Geist). Art is the manifestation of this beautiful soul, and its goal is to educate not only the mind - this is the work of a scientist, not only the heart - this is the work of a moral preacher - but the whole person. And therefore, the sign of beauty lies not in anything external, but in the presence of a beautiful soul in the artist.
Behind Fichte, Friedrich Schlegel and Adam Müller define beauty in the same direction. According to Schlegel (1778-1829), beauty in art is understood too incompletely, one-sidedly and in isolation; beauty is found not only in art, but also in nature, but also in love, so that true beauty is expressed in the combination of art, nature and love. Therefore, Schlegel recognizes moral and philosophical art as inseparable from aesthetic art.
According to Adam Müller (1779-1829), there are two beauties: one is public beauty, which attracts people as the sun attracts planets - this is predominantly antique beauty, and the other is individual beauty, which becomes such, because the contemplator becomes the sun himself, attracting beauty - this is the beauty of the new art. A world in which all contradictions are coordinated is the highest beauty. Every work of art is a repetition of this universal harmony. The highest art is the art of life.
Schelling (1775-1854) was the philosopher who followed Fichte and his followers and had a great influence on the aesthetic concepts of our time. According to Schelling, art is a product or a consequence of that worldview, according to which the subject turns into its object or the object becomes its own subject. Beauty is the representation of the infinite in the finite. And the main character of a work of art is unconscious infinity. Art is a combination of the subjective with the objective, nature and reason, the unconscious with the conscious. And therefore art is the highest means of knowledge. Beauty is the contemplation of things in themselves, as they are at the basis of all things (in den Urbildern). The beautiful is produced not by the artist by his knowledge or will, but by the very idea of beauty.
Of Schelling's followers, the most notable was Solger (1780-1819) ("Vorlesungen uber Aesthetik" ["Readings in Aesthetics" (German)]). According to Solger, the idea of beauty is the basic idea of every thing. In the world we see only a perversion of the basic idea, while art, by fantasy, can rise to the height of the basic idea. And therefore art is a semblance of creativity.
According to another follower of Schelling - Krause (1781-1832), true real beauty is the manifestation of an idea in an individual form; art is the realization of beauty in the realm of the human free spirit. The highest degree of art is the art of living, which directs its activity to adorn life so that it is a wonderful place of residence for a wonderful person.
After Schelling and his followers, a new one, hitherto consciously in many, and unconsciously in the majority, begins Hegel's aesthetic teaching, which has been retained. This teaching is not only no more clear and definite than the former teachings, but even more, if only possible, vague and mystical.
According to Hegel (1770-1831), God appears in nature and art in the form of beauty. God is expressed in two ways: in object and subject, in nature and spirit. Beauty is the translucence of an idea through matter. Truly beautiful is only the spirit and everything that is part of the spirit, and therefore the beauty of nature is only a reflection of the beauty inherent in the spirit: the beautiful has only a spiritual content. But the spiritual must manifest itself in a sensual form. The sensuous manifestation of the spirit is only the appearance of Schein). And this appearance is the only reality of the beautiful. So that art is the realization of this semblance of an idea, and is a means, together with religion and philosophy, to bring to consciousness and express the deepest tasks of people and the highest truths of the spirit.
Truth and beauty, according to Hegel, are one and the same; the only difference is that truth is the idea itself, as it exists in itself and is conceivable. The idea, manifested outside, for consciousness becomes not only true, but also beautiful. The beautiful is the manifestation of an idea.
Hegel is followed by numerous followers of him: Weisse, Arnold Ruge, Rosencrantz, Theodor Fischer, and others.
According to Weiss (1801-1867), art is the introduction (Einbildung) of the absolutely spiritual essence of beauty into external dead and indifferent matter, the concept of which, in addition to the beauty introduced into it, is the negation of any existence in itself (Negation alles Fursichsein "s) .
In the idea of truth, says Weisse, lies the contradiction between the subjective and objective sides of cognition; in the fact that the one I cognizes the Almighty. This contradiction can be eliminated through a concept that would unite in one moment of universality and unity, splitting into two in the concept of truth. Such a concept would be reconciled (aufgehoben) truth, and beauty is such reconciled truth.
Of all the non-fiction works of Leo Tolstoy, the literary historian is most interested in What is art?(1897). Everything classical, rational and popular corresponded to his own taste in literature and art. He didn't like anything romantic, embellished or excessive. He did not understand "pure poetry". He liked the classical theater of Racine, an analytical novel Stendhal, Genesis and Russian folk songs. Shakespeare's Elizabethan excess repulsed him. In his famous attack on Shakespeare, Tolstoy accuses him not only of being an immoral writer, but also of being a bad poet. He preferred Shakespearean tragedy to pre-Shakespearean King Lear, because it is simpler, not so "excessive", not so baroque. Voltaire would agree with many of Tolstoy's attacks on this tragedy. And in other great writers, Tolstoy found many shortcomings: Homer was an immoral poet, because he idealized anger and cruelty; Racine and Pushkin are secondary writers, because they addressed only a narrow aristocratic audience and were incomprehensible to the people. But Shakespeare is a bad writer, because he wrote badly, and Tolstoy was never so touched by his poetry. Art, according to Tolstoy, is that which "infects" with good feelings. “A person experiences this feeling, becomes infected with the state of the soul in which the author is, and feels his merging with other people, then the object that causes this state is art: there is no this infection, there is no merging with the author and with those who perceive the work - and there is no art ".
Father Andrei Tkachev about Leo Tolstoy
Shakespeare and Wagner did not infect Tolstoy with their feelings, and since he did not believe in the sincerity of people who claimed that the feelings of Wagner and Shakespeare “infected” them, then Shakespeare and Wagner are not art. Tolstoy contrasts them with the creations of primitive folk art - the biblical story Joseph, Hungarian Czardash, the theater of a primitive Siberian tribe - the Voguls. He cites someone's story about a Vogul play in which, very simply and naively, hunting for a deer and a doe's anxiety for her cub is depicted as an example of true art: "And I felt from one description that it was a true work of art," because feelings deer infected him. Everything that does not "infect" is not art, and only obscures art. Excessive technique, excessive splendor in the production of a play, excessive realism - all this obscures and detracts from the artistic value of a picture, play, book. The simpler, the more naked, the better. “In the story of Joseph, it was not necessary to describe in detail, as they do now, the bloody clothes of Joseph and the dwelling and clothes of Jacob, and the posture and outfit of the Pantephrian wife, how she, straightening the bracelet on her left hand, said: “Come in to me,” and etc., because the content of feelings in this story is so strong that all the details are superfluous and would only interfere with conveying feelings, and therefore this story is accessible to all people, touches people of all nations, classes, ages, has come down to us and will live for millennia . But take away the details from the best novels of our time, what remains? ( What is art?).
Portrait of Leo Tolstoy. Artist I. Repin, 1901
True art can be moral or immoral, depending on the moral value of the feelings with which it infects. Many works of modern literature, although they represent true art, are morally bad, because this is class art, understandable only by the rich and educated, and leads to disunity, not to unity. Tolstoy excludes very little from the general condemnation of modern literature for immorality. He names only a few works: Schiller (Rogues), Hugo (Outcasts), Dickens (A Tale of Two Cities, Christmas bells And Christmas carol in prose), George Eliot ( Adam Beed), Dostoevsky ( Notes from the House of the Dead) and... Beecher Stowe ( Uncle Tom's Cabin) - "as samples of the highest, arising from love for God and neighbor" art - art, in his words, "religious". As examples of not so high, but still good art, “art that conveys the simplest everyday feelings, such that are accessible to all people around the world,” Tolstoy calls, however, with great reservations Don Quixote, Moliere , David Copperfield And Pickwick Papers, stories by Gogol, Pushkin and Maupassant. But “due to the exclusivity of the transmitted feelings and the excess of special details of time and place, and, most importantly, the poverty of content compared with samples of popular ancient art, such as, for example, the story of Joseph the Beautiful, they are mostly accessible only to people of their own circle.”
This book is mine "What is art?" comes out now for the first time in its present form. It was published in Russia in several editions, but in all in such a censored form that I ask all those who are interested in my views on art to judge them only by the book in its present form. The printing of the book in a mutilated form with my name occurred for the following reasons. In accordance with my decision long ago not to submit my writings to censorship, which I consider an immoral and unreasonable institution, but to publish them only in the form in which they are written, I intended to publish this book only abroad, but my good friend, Professor Groth, The editor of a Moscow psychological journal, having learned about the content of my work, asked me to publish the book in his journal. Groth promised me to pass the article through the censorship in its entirety, if I would only agree to the most minor changes, softening some of the expressions. I had the weakness to agree, and ended up with a book signed by me, from which not only certain essential thoughts were excluded, but also alien and even completely contrary to my convictions thoughts were introduced.
It happened in this way. At first, Grotto softened my expressions, sometimes weakening them, for example. replaced the words "always" with the words "sometimes"; the words "all" with the words "some"; the word "ecclesiastical" - the word "catholic"; the word "Virgin" - the word "Madonna"; the word "patriotism" - the word "false patriotism"; the word "palaces" - the word "chambers", etc., and I did not find it necessary to protest. When the whole book was already printed, it was demanded that the censorship replace, black out entire sentences, and instead of what I said about the harm of landed property, put the harm of the landless proletariat. I agreed to this and some other changes. I thought it was not worth it to upset the whole thing because of one expression. When one change was allowed, it was not worth protesting about another, because of a third. Thus, little by little, expressions crept into the book that changed their meaning and attributed to me what I could not wish to say. So, when the book ended in printing, some of its integrity and sincerity had already been taken out of it. But one could take comfort in the fact that the book in this form, if it contained anything good, would be of use to Russian readers, for whom otherwise it would be inaccessible. But that was not the case. Nous comptions sans notre hote [We count without a host (fr.)]. After the four-day period established by law, the book was arrested and, by order from St. Petersburg, handed over to spiritual censorship. Then Grot refused any participation in this matter, and spiritual censorship was in charge of the book as it pleased. Spiritual censorship is one of the most ignorant, corrupt, stupid and despotic institutions in Russia. Books that do not agree in any way with the religion recognized as the state religion in Russia, which end up there, are almost always banned altogether and burned, as was the case with all my religious writings published in Russia. Probably, this book would have suffered the same fate if the editors of the journal had not used all means to save the book. The result of these troubles was that the spiritual censor, a priest, probably as interested in art as I am in worship, and understanding as much in it, but receiving a good salary for destroying everything that his superiors might not like, crossed out from the book everything that seemed to him dangerous for his position, and replaced, where he found it necessary, my thoughts with his own, so, for example, where I speak of Christ going to the cross for the truth he professed, the censor crossed it out and put "for the human race", i.e. e. attributed to me, therefore, the assertion of the dogma of redemption, which I consider one of the most unfaithful and harmful church dogmas. Having corrected everything in this way, the spiritual censor allowed the book to be printed.
It is impossible to protest in Russia: not a single newspaper will print it; it was also impossible to take away one's article from the journal and thereby embarrass the editor in front of the public.
The matter remains the same. A book has appeared, signed with my name, containing thoughts that are presented as mine, but do not belong to me.
I submitted my article to a Russian journal so that, as I was convinced, my thoughts, which might be useful, could be assimilated by Russian readers, and ended up signing my name under the essay, from which it can be concluded that I I consider only false patriotism to be bad, and in general I consider patriotism to be a very good feeling, that I deny only the absurdities of the Catholic Church and do not believe only in the Madonna, but believe in Orthodoxy and the Mother of God, that I consider all the writings of the Jews, combined in the Bible, to be holy books and the main meaning of Christ I see in his redemption by his death the human race. And most importantly, I assert things that are contrary to the generally accepted opinion, without any foundation, since the reasons for which I assert are omitted, and statements that are not based on anything are left.
I have told this whole story in such detail because it strikingly illustrates the undoubted truth that any compromise with an institution that does not agree with your conscience - a compromise that is usually made in view of the common good, inevitably draws you, instead of good, not only in recognition of the legitimacy of the institution you reject, but also participation in the harm that this institution produces.
I am glad that though with this statement I can correct the mistake in which I was involved in my compromise.
Take any newspaper of our time, and in each you will find a department of theater and music; in almost every issue you will find a description of this or that exhibition or a single painting, and in each you will find reports on the emerging new books of artistic content, poems, stories and novels.
It is described in detail and immediately how this happened, how such and such an actress or actor in such and such a drama, comedy or opera played or played this or that role, and what virtues they showed, and what is the content of the new drama, comedy or opera. , and their advantages and disadvantages. With the same detail and care, it is described how such and such an artist sang or played such and such a piece on the piano or violin, and what are the advantages and disadvantages of this piece and his playing. In every big city there is always, if not several, then probably one exhibition of new paintings, the merits and demerits of which are analyzed with the greatest profundity by critics and connoisseurs. Almost every day new novels and poems come out, separately and in magazines, and the newspapers consider it their duty to report to their readers in detail about these works of art.
To support the arts in Russia, where only one hundredth of what is needed to provide the entire people with the means of education is spent on public education, millions of government subsidies are given for academies, conservatories, and theaters. In France eight millions are assigned for the arts, and the same in Germany and England. Huge buildings are built in every big city for museums, academies, conservatories, drama schools, for performances and concerts. Hundreds of thousands of workers - carpenters, masons, dyers, joiners, upholsterers, tailors, hairdressers, goldsmiths, bronzers, compositors - spend their whole lives in hard labor to satisfy the requirements of art, so that there is hardly any other human activity than military, which would absorb as much power as this one.
To evoke in oneself a feeling once experienced and, having evoked it in oneself, by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds, images expressed in words, to convey this feeling so that others experience the same feeling - this is the activity of art. Art is a human activity, consisting in the fact that one person consciously transmits to others the feelings he experiences through known external signs, while other people become infected with these feelings and experience them.
Art is not, as metaphysicians say, a manifestation of some mysterious idea, beauty, God; it is not, as aesthetic physiologists say, a game in which a person releases an excess of accumulated energy; is not a manifestation of emotions by external signs; is not the production of pleasant objects, the main thing is not pleasure, but is necessary for life and for movement towards the good of an individual person and humanity, a means of communication between people, uniting them in the same feelings, and other people are infected by these feelings and experience them.
Previously, they were afraid that objects that corrupt people would not fall into the number of art objects, and they banned all of it. Now they are only afraid that they might be deprived of some pleasure given by art, and patronize everyone. And I think that the latter error is much grosser than the first, and that its consequences are much more harmful.
So most of the upper classes of that time, even popes and clerics, basically didn't believe in anything. These people did not believe in church teaching because they saw its inconsistency; to recognize the moral, social teaching of Christ, as it was recognized by Francis of Assisi, Chelchitsky and most sectarians, they could not, because such a teaching destroyed their social position. And these people were left without any religious worldview. And without a religious worldview, these people could not have any other measure of the price of good and bad art, except for personal enjoyment. Recognizing pleasure, that is, beauty, as the measure of goodness, the people of the upper classes of European society returned in their understanding of art to the crude understanding of the primitive Greeks, which Plato had already condemned. And according to this understanding, a theory of art was formed among them.
And here is an arbitrary combination of these three incommensurable and alien concepts ( goodness, beauty and truth) in one served as the basis of that amazing theory, according to which the distinction between good art, conveying good feelings, and bad art, conveying evil feelings, was completely erased; and one of the lowest manifestations of art, art only for enjoyment - that against which all teachers of mankind warned people - began to be considered the highest art. And art became not the important thing it was meant to be, but the empty pastime of idle people.
The first consequence of this was that art was deprived of its infinitely varied and profound religious content. The second consequence was that, having in mind only a small circle of people, it lost the beauty of form, became pretentious and obscure; and the third and main thing is that it ceased to be sincere, but became invented and rational.
The variety of feelings arising from religious consciousness is infinite, and all of them are new, because religious consciousness is nothing but an indication of a new creating relation of man to the world, while feelings arising from the desire for pleasure are not only limited, but long ago known and expressed. And therefore, the unbelief of the upper European classes led them to the poorest, in terms of content, art.
Perverted art may be incomprehensible to people, but good art is always understood by everyone.
It is said that the best works of art... are available only to the elite, prepared to understand these great works. But if the majority does not understand, then it is necessary to explain to him ... But it turns out that there is no such knowledge, and it is impossible to interpret works ... but this means not explaining, but accustoming. And you can accustom to everything and to the most bad. Just as it is possible to accustom people to rotten food, to vodka, tobacco, opium, so it is possible to accustom people to bad art, which, in fact, is being done.
Art differs in this from rational activity, which requires preparation and a certain sequence of knowledge (so that one cannot teach trigonometry to a person who does not know geometry), that art affects people regardless of their degree of development and education, that the beauty of pictures, sounds, images infects every person, at whatever stage of development he may be. The point of art is precisely to make understandable and accessible what could be incomprehensible and inaccessible in the form of reasoning. Usually, when receiving a truly artistic impression, it seems to the recipient that he already knew this before, but he just did not know how to express it.
If a painter beautifully paints a wound with blood, the sight of this wound will amaze me, but there will be no art. A single note stretched out on a mighty organ will make a striking impression, often even cause tears, but there is no music here, because no feeling is conveyed. And yet such physiological effects are constantly taken by people of our circle for art, not only in music, but in poetry, painting and drama. They say that today's art has become refined. On the contrary, it has become extremely crude due to the pursuit of showiness.
In order for a person to be able to produce a true object of art, many conditions are needed. It is necessary that this person stand at the level of the highest world outlook for his time, so that he experiences the feeling and has the desire and opportunity to convey it, and at the same time still has a talent for some kind of art. All these conditions, necessary for the production of true art, are very rarely combined. In order to produce with the help of developed techniques: borrowing, imitation, showiness and entertainment, semblances of art, which are well rewarded in our society, you only need to have talent in some field of art, which is very common.
It is even easier for a talented person in the field of painting or sculpture to produce objects like art. To do this, he only needs to learn to draw, paint and sculpt, especially naked bodies. Having learned this, he can never stop writing, ... depicting everything that seems beautiful: from a naked woman to copper basins.
And as soon as art became a profession, the main and most precious property of art, its sincerity, was significantly weakened and partly destroyed. A professional artist lives by his art, and therefore he must constantly invent the subjects of his works.
It is impossible to interpret the works of the artist. If it were possible to explain in words what the artist wanted to say, he would have said it in words.
In painting, the main training is to draw and write from originals and from nature, predominantly a naked body, the very one that is never seen and almost never has to be depicted by a person engaged in real art, and to draw and write as they drew and wrote. former masters; they teach to compose pictures, setting such themes, similar to which were treated by former recognized celebrities.
To accustom people to what is like art, wean them from understanding real art. From this it comes that there are no people more obtuse to art than those who have gone through the professional schools of art and have made the greatest progress in them. In order for people who were born artists to be able to learn the methods of various kinds of art developed by former artists, there must be such classes in drawing and music - singing in all elementary schools, after passing which any gifted student could, using existing and accessible to all samples, independently improve your art.
People who are not corrupted by the false theories of our society have a very definite idea of what people can be honored and praised for. ... or physical strength ... or moral, spiritual strength ... And these people ... suddenly see that, in addition to people who are praised, revered and rewarded for physical strength and moral strength, there are also people who are praised , exalted, rewarded on an even larger scale than the heroes of strength and goodness, for the mere fact that they sing well, compose poetry, and dance. They see that singers, writers, painters, dancers are making millions, that they are given more honors than saints, and people of the people and children are perplexed.
It involuntarily seems that the existing art has only one definite goal: the widest possible dissemination of debauchery.
A real work of art can appear in the soul of the artist only occasionally, as the fruit of a previous life, just like the conception of a child by a mother. Counterfeit art is produced by masters, artisans non-stop, if only there were consumers.
True art does not need decorations, like a wife of a loving husband. Counterfeit art, like a prostitute, must always be embellished.
The reason for the appearance of real art is an inner need to express the accumulated feeling, as for a mother the reason for sexual conception is love. The cause of counterfeit art is self-interest, just like prostitution.
A person will not, as now, eat an egg laid by a hen he raised ... but will eat tasty, nutritious food that will be prepared in laboratories by the combined efforts of many people ... A person will hardly need to work, so that all people will be able to indulge in the very idleness to which the upper ruling classes now indulge.
Nothing more clearly than these ideals shows to what extent the science of our time has deviated from the true path.
Attention! Danger! Alert! An attempt is being made to send a highly moral message through the Internet!
Once Dima Hardy, in the comments to my post about the Bible, executed on calfskin parchment and decorated with luxurious illustrations, that this is the art of our time. At that time I could neither agree nor argue with this statement, and went off to read Tolstoy - just shortly before that, I came across his treatise on art. Apparently, the time has come to read it, I decided, printed out this rather voluminous work and began to read it in the subway.
It should be noted that the term art itself is quite multifaceted, it often means craftsmanship, and creativity, and aesthetics, and craft, and the definitions of this concept - from everyday, stereotypical to those based on ancient philosophical schools - cannot be counted at all. But not Leo Tolstoy, of course.
Although the work is quite voluminous, I read it avidly. By the way, Tolstoy has a very subtle humor, if you try, you can see it behind the most neutral, verified, I would not even be afraid to say, politically correct, formulations.
What a question?
The question of art is not at all idle, as it may seem. I googled about his role in his native federation.
It turned out that, however! The state considers culture (and therefore art as a direction of human activity in the field of culture) an important tool for ensuring "social stability, economic growth and national security of the state" and has set itself the task of forming a "singlecultural space ".
It is gratifying that the concepts of "culture" and "mass communications" are still divorced at the level of understanding of the Ministry of Culture. It is sad that at the same time they are already like Yin and Yang with a single budget, by the way, considerable. IN In 2007, federal budget expenditures on support for culture and the media amounted to 1.2% of GDP. For comparison - 3.8% was spent in 2007 on healthcare and sports, 5.7% on education, about 2.7% on defense.
If you look at the structure spending within the budget, it becomes obvious that the main emphasis is on supporting the carriers (or carriers?) of cultural beats, such as museums, exhibitions, libraries, theaters, circuses, television and radio, cinema, news agencies (for some reason, it still does not appear there Internet, probably it is in the budget of the Ministry of Defense). For the reproduction of those who create these beats, apparently, the Ministry of Education is responsible.
During the time of Lev Nikolayevich, less money was spent on education than on the dissemination of its results in the form of art. Apparently, this is how the foundations of the consumer society were laid and the era of mass culture was born, in which the satisfaction of cultural needs will be for a person beforeonly a service, and not the result of his life.
To support the arts in Russia, where only one hundredth of what is needed to provide the entire people with the means of education is spent on public education, millions of government subsidies are given for academies, conservatories, and theaters. Hundreds of thousands of workers - carpenters, masons, dyers, joiners, upholsterers, tailors, hairdressers, goldsmiths, bronzers, compositors - spend their whole lives in hard labor to satisfy the demands of art, so that there is hardly any other human activity than military, which would absorb as much power as this one.
But not only are such enormous labors spent on this activity, human lives are spent on it, just like on war: hundreds of thousands of people from a young age devote all their lives to learning how to twirl their legs very quickly (dancers) ; others (musicians) to learn to play keys or strings very quickly; still others (painters) to be able to draw with colors and write everything that they see; the fourth is to be able to turn every phrase in every way and find a rhyme for every word. And such people, often very kind, intelligent, capable of any useful work, run wild in these exceptional, stupefying occupations and become dull to all the serious phenomena of life, one-sided and quite self-satisfied specialists who can only twirl their legs, tongue or fingers.
To art!
Lev Nikolaevich wrote his treatise "What is art?" Fifteen years. You readily believe this after reading his analysis of approaches to the definition of art. I can't imagine how it was possible to stock up with so much patience to read - and, moreover, in the originals - all these French aestheticians and German philosophers?
Tolstoy first showed that understanding beauty must be taken beyond the definition of art as a subjective characteristic of an object of art, and there is no dispute about tastes. Thus, he deprived the vast majority of the definitions of art made before him - almost all of them were based on an attitude towards beauty. The rest, based on the fact that the purpose of art is the pleasure received from it, he rejected as devoid of vital pragmatism and proposed to consider art as one of the conditions of human life. Here he comes close to the foundation of his understanding of art - it is one of the means of communication between people.
Art is not, as metaphysicians say, a manifestation of some mysterious idea, beauty, God; it is not, as aesthetic physiologists say, a game in which a person releases an excess of accumulated energy; is not a manifestation of emotions by external signs; is not the production of pleasant objects, the main thing is not pleasure, but a means of communication between people, necessary for life and for moving towards the good of the individual and humanity, uniting them in the same feelings.
This is the most interesting thing - art is, firstly, a feeling, and secondly, its transfer to another.
Feelings are different, for example, base, they, of course, cannot form the basis of a work of art. And which ones can? Lev Nikolayevich figured it out:
Humanity is constantly moving from the lower, more particular and less clear to the higher, more general and clearer understanding of life. And as in any movement, in this movement there are advanced ones: there are people who understand the meaning of life more clearly than others, and of all these advanced people there is always one, more vividly, accessible, strongly - in word and life - expressing this meaning of life. The expression by this person of this meaning of life, together with those traditions and rituals that usually develop around the memory of this person, is called religion. Religions are indicators of that higher understanding of life, accessible at a given time and in a given society to the best advanced people, to which all other people of this society inevitably and invariably approach. And therefore only religions have always served and serve as the basis for assessing the feelings of people. If feelings bring people closer to the ideal that religion indicates, agree with it, do not contradict it, they are good; if they move away from it, do not agree with it, contradict it, they are bad.
However, not everything is so simple, and we still have to think in order not to put in the place of God what is not God (as happened in the Renaissance, for example). To begin, you need to check for the identity of the concepts of "church" and "true". Tolstoy advises Christians to strive for a religious consciousness based not on a religious cult, which is secondary, but on the essential provisions of the teachings of Christ - "the direct relationship of each person to the Father and arising from this brotherhood and equality of all people and therefore replacing any kind of violence with humility and love" . However, in comparison with barbarism, the church version also offers a higher moral standard, notes Tolstoy. It's like where to start for those who still believe in horoscopes, the difference between democrats and liberals, or work in gibedade.
However, not everything is so complicated - real art should be clear to everyone:
The point of art is precisely to make understandable and accessible what could be incomprehensible and inaccessible in the form of reasoning. Usually, when receiving a truly artistic impression, it seems to the recipient that he already knew this before, but he just did not know how to express it.
Good Christian art "transmits feelings arising from the religious consciousness of a person in the world, or the simplest worldly feelings available to all people of the whole world."
White and black
Fun post!Now I will list what Lev Nikolaevich attributed to real art, and what not.
Tolstoy himself stipulates that he does not attach much weight to his choice, since he belongs to the class "with a perverted false education of taste." Tolstoy refers to all his work as "bad" art, except for the story "God sees the truth" and "Prisoner of the Caucasus".
| G | Not G |
| Wild and often meaningless for us works of the ancient Greeks Sophocles, Euripides, Aeschylus, especially Aristophanes, or new ones: Dante, Tassa, Milton, Shakespeare Ibsen, Maeterlinck, Verlaine, Mallarm, Puvis de Chavannes, Klinger, Böcklin, Pieces, Scheider | The Iliad, the Odyssey, the history of Jacob, Isaac, Joseph, and the Jewish prophets, and the psalms, and the gospel parables, and the history of Sakia Muni, the hymns of the Vedas "Robbers" by Schiller "Uncle Tom's Cabin" Dostoevsky "Dead House" "Adam Bede" by George Eliot "Don Quixote" Molière's comedies Dickens' Copperfield and The Pickwick Club Tales of Gogol Pushkin's stories Some things Maupassant |
| Raphael Michelangelo with his ridiculous "Last Judgment" | Kramskoy Langley millet Ge Liezen Mayer |
| All Bach The whole Beethoven with his last period Wagner Sheet Berlioz Brahms Richard Strauss | Singing a large round dance of women Folk songs |
| The image of Vasnetsov in the Kiev Cathedral | Vasnetsov's drawing for Turgenev's story "The Quail" |
| "Hamlet" Rossi | The story of the theater among the wild people of the Voguls |
Briefly speaking
I am close to Tolstoy's idea that art is "an instrument of communication, which means progress,progress of mankind towards perfection". AndArt is not just a source of aesthetic pleasure, it has an important task in society. To quote Tolstoy himself:
The task of art is enormous: art, real art, guided by religion with the help of science, must ensure that the peaceful coexistence of people, which is now observed by external measures - courts, police, charitable institutions, work inspections, etc. - is achieved freely. and joyful activities of people. Art must eliminate violence. And only art can do that.
