_scholarship.md — Secondary layer: *What Is Art?* (1897–1898)

Scholarly context and reception for the corpus-dive on Tolstoy’s Что такое искусство? Generated 2026-06-07. Primary-source layer: see _deepread.md, _witness_sweep.md.

1. Received view

The dominant scholarly verdict treats What Is Art? as philosophically serious but seriously flawed. The treatise is classified in philosophy of art handbooks as a version of the expression theory (or, more precisely, a transmission theory), distinct from Collingwood’s and Croce’s variants. Where Collingwood’s artist discovers feeling through the act of making, and Croce locates expression entirely in inward intuition, Tolstoy insists the completed outer transmission to an audience is constitutive of art itself. This distinction is noted by Goodyear (as summarised in the philosophical literature) and is a standard teaching example in aesthetics courses because it makes Tolstoy’s theory unusually strong on the communal function of art and unusually weak on the internal process of creation.

Aylmer Maude — Tolstoy’s authorised English translator, close friend, and first biographer — is the most unreservedly positive major voice. In his 1925 compilation Tolstoy on Art and Its Critics, Maude calls the treatise “probably the most masterly of all Tolstoy’s works,” citing the difficulty of the subject and the lucidity of Tolstoy’s treatment. Shaw’s endorsement, quoted in Maude’s preface, is: “This book is a most effective booby trap… Whoever is really conversant with art recognizes in it the voice of the master” — a qualified enthusiasm Shaw later tempered, reportedly calling the treatise “the inevitable obsolescence of an old man’s taste in art.”

G. Wilson Knight praised Tolstoy’s aesthetic writings as “a massive collection of some of the most masculine, incisive, and important criticism that exists” with “rock-like integrity” (cited in Simmons / ourcivilisation.com source). G. R. Jahn, in a 1975 Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism article (vol. 34, pp. 59–65), provides the most technically detailed analytical critique: he identifies an “often confusing use of categorisation” involving at least three antinomial axes and notes that the key concept — emotion — is never adequately defined, leaving the theory’s central mechanism unclear.

John Bayley (1986) offers the influential negative-but-respectful formulation: “the effectiveness of What is Art? lies not so much in its positive assertions as in its rejection of much that was taken for granted in the aesthetic theories of the time.” Ernest Simmons (1973) finds the text a mixture of “occasional brilliant passages” alongside “repetition, awkward language, and loose terminology.”

The early American scholar G. R. Noyes criticised Tolstoy’s rejection of beauty as the criterion of art but conceded that, despite its shortcomings, What is Art? “may be pronounced the most stimulating critical work of our time.”

Rimvydas Šilbajoris (Tolstoy’s Aesthetics and His Art, Slavica Publishers, 1991) mounts the most sustained sympathetic scholarly analysis. He argues that Tolstoy’s aesthetic views “have been thoroughly consistent from the very beginning” — contradicting the received notion that the 1897 treatise marks an old-age rupture — and that the same values are embodied in the great novels. Šilbajoris’s work was described by reviewers as “successfully corrective, astutely synthetic and a welcome new appreciation of the power of Tolstoi’s aesthetics and his art.” (Canadian-American Slavic Studies, 27/1–4, 1993.)

H. O. Mounce’s Tolstoy on Aesthetics: What Is Art? (Routledge, first published c. 2001/2016 reprint) provides a book-length philosophical examination from an analytic aesthetics perspective; the book’s argument is that Tolstoy, “like Plato, denies the autonomy of art, the uniqueness of aesthetic experience” — a framing that places the treatise in the anti-formalist, moralist tradition rather than dismissing it as naïve.

The most common charge in modern aesthetics handbooks and surveys is that Tolstoy caricatures the philosophers he surveys in Chapters 2–5 — reducing Kant’s disinterested pleasure to mere sensory enjoyment, collapsing Schopenhauer’s contemplation theory into a variant of the same, and treating Hegel’s objective definition as simply mystical. This charge circulates widely in course materials but, as of this writing, no single scholarly monograph has been identified that makes it the central thesis; the claim is attributed to multiple anonymous course-note traditions and to the analytic aesthetics literature generally. Needs review: a targeted search for a named scholar who specifically and at length rebuts or defends Tolstoy’s readings of Kant and Schopenhauer has not yet yielded a single authoritative source.

The comparison with R. G. Collingwood (Principles of Art, 1938) is now standard in aesthetics pedagogy: both are expression theorists, but Collingwood’s theory is typically rated philosophically tighter on the problem of how art clarifies rather than merely expresses pre-formed feelings. The philosophical literature (as summarised in multiple open-access aesthetics texts) treats Tolstoy as the weaker but historically prior version of the tradition, credited for forcefully raising the question of art’s communal and moral function but faulted for his moralism and for the doctrine’s inability to handle cases where emotional sincerity and artistic quality come apart.

2. Triangulation against primary findings

1. Art as transmission of feeling (заражение), not beauty. — Confirms. This is the single most agreed-upon characterisation in the scholarship (Jahn 1975; Šilbajoris 1991; Mounce 2001; Noyes; aesthetics handbooks). No scholarly source dissents from the description, though Jahn argues the term “emotion” is under-defined. Maude (the translator) confirms the beauty-rejection is the treatise’s polemical spine.

2. Good art = highest religious consciousness; two kinds; the rest are counterfeits. — Complicates. Jahn (1975) flags that the three-way categorisation (religious art / universal everyday art / counterfeit art) is “often confusing” and uses “good” and “bad” in a way that conflates aesthetic and moral senses, making the classificatory scheme internally inconsistent. Šilbajoris (1991) defends the system as coherent once read in light of Tolstoy’s fiction, where analogous distinctions operate. Mounce’s Platonic framing extends this: the denial of aesthetic autonomy is the point, not a flaw. The primary-source layer’s finding that the religious-consciousness criterion is precisely what the Spiritual Censor altered is confirmed by Tolstoy’s own Author’s Preface (v.30 PSS) but not yet widely commented on in the scholarly literature retrieved.

3. Condemnation of European high culture and own earlier novels. — Confirms, with a complicating note. Every scholarly source registers the dismissals of Wagner, Beethoven, Shakespeare, Dante, and Tolstoy’s own War and Peace/Anna Karenina as the treatise’s most provocative feature. The received framing (Bayley 1986; Simmons 1973; Wikipedia consensus) tends to treat this as evidence of Tolstoy’s moralistic excess. Šilbajoris (1991) complicates this: the condemnation of his own earlier work is consistent with the formal logic of the theory, not a mere spasm of self-flagellation. Noyes calls it a “shortcoming” while still treating the treatise as the most stimulating critical work of its time. Caution: the mainstream framing risks inverting Tolstoy’s own position — his condemnations are not random but follow from the infection-criterion; the scholarship that calls this “arbitrary” is largely judging by beauty-criteria Tolstoy explicitly rejects.

4. Long gestation; ~70 sources; Stasov supplied Pan and bibliography. — Confirms, extends. Stasov’s role as bibliographer is confirmed by the PSS correspondence (v.69–v.71 letters in this dive): his August 1897 letter (v70_145) thanks Stasov for sending the German Decadent journal Pan and acknowledges receipt of the books. The September 1897 letter (v70_157) confirms the books are still in use and will be returned “very soon” on completion. The primary-source evidence confirms the collaboration at the composition stage, though Stasov’s reaction to the published and censored Russian text has not been recovered in the extracted letters and needs a separate archival check — his later correspondence with Tolstoy in 1898 (v71_025, v71_226) is brief and does not address the treatise. Scholarly sources do not discuss Stasov’s reaction to the published work.

5. Censorship: Grot’s softening + Spiritual Censor’s cuts; Maude’s 1898 English translation = first complete text. — Confirms. Tolstoy’s own Author’s Preface (PSS v.30; accessible via marxists.org) gives the fullest first-person account: Grot (“Professor Grote”) made “very unimportant alterations”; the Spiritual Censor (a priest) struck passages and substituted his own doctrines, including inserting the Redemption dogma Tolstoy rejected. The Wikipedia article on What Is Art? and Maude’s 1925 compilation both confirm Maude’s translation as the first unexpurgated version in any language. PhilPapers records Maude’s 1898/1899 translation. This finding is strongly confirmed and not contested by any scholarly source retrieved.

3. Reception

Russian society and Orthodox press

Russian publication was severely constrained. The treatise appeared in serialised censored form in Вопросы философии и психологии (ed. N. Ya. Grot) in 1897–1898; both secular and spiritual censors intervened. Tolstoy disowned the Russian edition publicly and directed readers to judge his views only by the uncensored (English) text. The PSS editorial apparatus (v.30, pp. 487–582) documents the full textual history of the censorship.

Church and Orthodox press reaction — flag: evidence is thin for a specific Orthodox response to this treatise as distinct from Tolstoy’s religious writings generally. The 1901 Holy Synod decree that “excommunicated” Tolstoy (more precisely, declared that he had “fallen away” from the Church) was triggered primarily by Resurrection (1899) and the accumulated weight of his religious treatises (Confession, What I Believe, The Kingdom of God Is Within You). The decree itself, as preserved on Wikisource, does not name specific works — the list of offences is absent from the surviving version — and What Is Art? is not identified in any secondary source retrieved as a primary driver of the 1901 action. John of Kronstadt had been polemicising against Tolstoy as a heretic since the 1880s, but on religious grounds unconnected to the aesthetics treatise. Do not overstate Orthodox reaction to the aesthetics work. The censorship of the treatise by the Spiritual Censor is documented and significant, but that is a censorship bureaucracy story, not a mobilisation of the church against the aesthetic theory per se.

Russian Decadent and Symbolist reaction. Tolstoy’s treatise directly attacked the Symbolist/Decadent poets by name (Jean Moréas, Henri de Régnier, Maurice Maeterlinck, and by implication Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarmé). The Russian Symbolist milieu responded with its own aesthetic counter-positioning. Valery Bryusov’s essay “On Art” (1899, included in the Michigan volume Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in Russian Symbolist Criticism, trans. D. Brian Kim) defends Symbolism against Tolstoy’s condemnation by insisting on art’s autonomy from ethical imperatives. Dmitry Merezhkovsky’s L. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky (serialised 1900–01 in Mir Iskusstva, published 1902) develops a comparative framework that implicitly rejects Tolstoy’s moralistic reduction: Merezhkovsky reads Tolstoy as the artist of “earthly” and “external” truth while Dostoevsky embodies spiritual, invisible depths — a framing that validates aesthetic complexity rather than subordinating art to moral infection. The Mir Iskusstva movement (Diaghilev, Benois, 1898–1904) institutionalised the art-for-art’s-sake counter-position in the same years, though no direct documented response from Benois or Diaghilev to the specific treatise has been recovered in the sources searched. Needs review: a detailed account of the Russian aesthetic establishment’s debate with What Is Art? in 1898–1899 would require access to Russian-language periodical archives of the period.

Vladimir Stasov’s reaction. Stasov actively assisted with the treatise’s composition (supplied the German Decadent journal Pan and bibliography: confirmed in PSS correspondence, v70_145). His own aesthetic position — an ardent champion of the “Mighty Handful” (kuchka) and realist Russian art — was partly congruent with Tolstoy’s populist rejection of Western decadence but diverged sharply from Tolstoy’s condemnation of Beethoven and Wagner. The letters recovered in this dive (v71_025, v71_226, 1898) are brief courtesy notes and do not record Stasov’s reaction to the published treatise. Needs archival check: Stasov’s published critical writings of 1898–1900 would be the place to look for a documented response.

International/Western reception

Maude’s English translation (1898/1899) was the first complete, uncensored version in any language, and it became Tolstoy’s most-read aesthetics text in the West. The work “immediately sent reverberations across Europe” (search result summary citing William B. Edgerton’s 1978 article “The Critical Reception Abroad of Tolstoy’s What Is Art?”, Indiana University; full article not retrieved). Contemporary Western reviews were sharply divided:

• Émile Faguet (France, 1898): dismissed it as the work of “an opinionated, impassioned moralist and at the same time a narrow-minded man.”
• Rainer Maria Rilke (Germany/Austria): called it “a disgraceful and silly pamphlet.”
• George Bernard Shaw (Britain, Daily Chronicle, 1898): called it “a most effective booby trap” — qualified praise; later qualified it further as “the inevitable obsolescence of an old man’s taste in art.” Shaw and Maude jointly published Tolstoy on Art and Its Critics (1925).
• A. B. Walkley (British drama critic): called it “a literary event of the first importance.”
• G. R. Noyes (American Slavicist): despite reservations, “the most stimulating critical work of our time.”

The majority of Western critics, according to Maude’s own 1901 survey (Maude 1901b, referenced in the Wikipedia article; not retrieved in full), quickly “belabored it into an undeserved oblivion.” The work’s long-term Western influence was primarily through its adoption as a standard text in philosophy of art courses, where it provides the canonical example of a transmission/expression theory of art. Its critical legacy in the English-speaking world has been as a teaching text and polemical provocation rather than as a work whose positive thesis is widely defended.

4. Sources