Deep-read & keystone map — On Shakespeare and the Drama

Source extract: v35_216_272_O_Shekspire_i_o_drame.txt (PSS Tom 35, pp. 216–272; 18,208 words; 8 chapters I–VIII). Variants: v35_557_577_Varianty.txt (Tom 35, pp. 557–577; drafts № 1–28). Genesis: _diaries_1903-1904.txt, _letters_window.txt, commentary (Grossman, pp. 680–685). Working-English translations below are mine (labelled), pending the published Tchertkoff & Mayo (1906).

Structure note. The PSS text is 8 chapters and ends at the “seek life’s teaching in other sources” conclusion (p. 272). The essay is the standalone attack; Crosby’s companion piece Shakespeare and the Working Classes (bound alongside in the English/combined editions) is the dedicated working-class treatment. Tolstoy names Crosby only at the opening (the article that prompted him); the working-class theme runs in Tolstoy’s own voice (Ch VI–VII).

The essay’s argument, chapter by chapter

• I — Statement. Crosby’s article prompted him to state his own view, “completely opposite” to all Europe’s. A 50-year struggle: re-read all Shakespeare “in every possible form” (RU/EN/German Schlegel); felt only “отвращение, скуку и недоумение” (revulsion, boredom, bewilderment) — “am I mad, or is the significance ascribed to these works mad?” As a 75-year-old, re-read everything again before writing → “твердого, несомненного убеждения” that Shakespeare’s fame “есть великое зло, как и всякая неправда” (is a great evil, like every untruth). Chooses King Lear as the test case, quoting the praise of Johnson, Hazlitt, Hallam, Shelley, Swinburne, Hugo, Brandes.
• II — The long scene-by-scene retelling of King Lear, deflating it act by act (the centrepiece set-piece; ~lines 43–193 of extract). Method: neutral paraphrase that makes the play’s machinery look absurd (arbitrary abdication, unrecognised Kent, the fool’s unfunny jokes, Gloucester’s “leap,” the pile of corpses).
• III — Why it fails the conditions of drama: the situations are arbitrary (don’t flow from character/events), anachronistic, and dressed in crude effects. Goethe quoted against Shakespeare: “Man sieht die Absicht und man wird verstimmt” (one sees the intention and is put off).
• IV — No characters / no language. Every figure speaks the one artificial “Shakespearean” tongue; characters are borrowed (from the old King Leir, from the Italian novella for Othello) and weakened. The old anonymous King Leir is “without any comparison… better” — esp. its natural reconciliation scene (Lear & Cordelia both kneel), which Shakespeare replaced with Cordelia’s needless death. Hamlet = “the king is naked” (царь голый): no character at all, a “phonograph of Shakespeare”; critics invented “characterlessness as a profound character.” Falstaff the one natural figure (because Shakespeare’s own jokey idiom fits a braggart drunkard).
• V — The “deep sayings” defence rebutted. Thoughts/aphorisms belong in a treatise, not a drama, whose job is illusion. Shakespeare lacks “чувство меры” (sense of proportion) — “без чувства меры никогда не было и не может быть художника.” Homer contrast: Homer “верит в то, что говорит… никогда не преувеличивает”; Shakespeare exaggerates, doesn’t believe, writes for stage effect.
• VI — The worldview. Long summary of Gervinus’s reading of Shakespeare as supreme ethical teacher (activity = good; the golden mean; rejecting Christian morality’s “exaggerated demands”; no fixed moral laws; property/family/state sacred; equality = madness) + Brandes (no absolute commandments; the end justifies the means). Then the THREE criteria of any poetic work: (1) content (the more significant for human life, the higher); (2) external beauty / technique; (3) sincerity — “сущность искусства состоит в заражении воспринимающего… чувством автора” (the essence of art is the infection of the perceiver with the author’s feeling). Shakespeare fails all three: content = “самое низменное, пошлое миросозерцание… презирающее толпу, т. е. рабочий класс”; technique absent except scene-handling; sincerity wholly absent (“he is not in earnest… балуется словами”).
• VII — Why the fame, then? = epidemic suggestion. The fame “есть одно из тех эпидемических внушений, которым всегда подвергались… люди” — like the medieval Crusades (incl. children’s), witch-belief, torture-for-truth, the philosopher’s stone, the Dutch tulip mania. The press magnifies these like a snowball (press↔public feedback). Worked example: the Dreyfus affair. Literary fashions rise and fall (Sue, Sand, Fourier, Comte, Hegel, Darwin → now Nietzsche). “pro capite lectoris habent sua fata libelli.” Until the late 18th c. Shakespeare was ranked below Jonson, Fletcher, Beaumont; the fame “началась в Германии.” Genealogy: drama was always religious (clarifying man’s relation to God); with coarsening it drifted to entertainment for the “толпа”; in Christianity liturgy→mysteries→moralities→(allegory insufficient)→Renaissance imitation of newly-recovered Greek models, stripped of religious content.
• VIII — Goethe canonised him; the harm. Goethe — “диктатор общественного мнения в вопросах эстетических” — proclaimed Shakespeare a great poet (partly to break the false French art, mainly because their worldviews coincided); the German aesthetic critics, “как вороны на падаль,” pounced and built the theory of “objective art” (indifferent to good and evil; no religious content needed) out of Shakespeare, so he came out the summit. “Внушение же всегда есть ложь, а всякая ложь есть зло.” The harm is twofold: (1) the fall of drama into “пошлой и безнравственной забавой” (named imitators: Goethe, Schiller, Hugo, Pushkin, Ostrovsky, A. K. Tolstoy); (2) direct corruption — a young person taught Shakespeare is the supreme moral teacher loses “способность различения доброго от злого.” Conclusion: the sooner people free themselves of this “гипноз,” the better — then they will seek the new religious form of drama, and seek “учение о жизни… в других источниках.”

Marquee keystones (verbatim RU anchors — copy quotes into dossier from the extract file, do not retype)

• MQ-suggestion (Ch VII, extract ~line 375): “Объяснение этой удивительной славы есть только одно: слава эта есть одно из тех эпидемических внушений, которым всегда подвергались и подвергаются люди.” → Working EN: “There is only one explanation of this astonishing fame: this fame is one of those epidemic suggestions to which people have always been, and still are, subject.”
• MQ-sincerity (Ch VI, ~line 353): the third criterion — “Искренностью, т. е. тем, чтобы автор сам живо чувствовал изображаемое им. Без этого условия не может быть никакого произведения искусства, так как сущность искусства состоит в заражении воспринимающего произведение искусства чувством автора.” → Working EN: “Sincerity, i.e. that the author himself vividly feel what he depicts. Without this condition there can be no work of art, since the essence of art consists in infecting the perceiver with the author’s feeling.” [This is the What Is Art? infection theory, named as the criterion Shakespeare fails.]
• MQ-great-evil (Ch I, ~line 19): “та непререкаемая слава великого, гениального писателя, которой пользуется Шекспир… есть великое зло, как и всякая неправда.” → “the indisputable fame of a great, genius writer that Shakespeare enjoys… is a great evil, like every untruth.”
• MQ-lie (Ch VIII, ~line 435): “Внушение же всегда есть ложь, а всякая ложь есть зло.” → “Suggestion is always a lie, and every lie is evil.”
• MQ-content (Ch VI, ~line 355): Shakespeare’s content = “самое низменное, пошлое миросозерцание, считающее внешнюю высоту сильных мира действительным преимуществом людей, презирающее толпу, т. е. рабочий класс.”

Genesis keystones (copy from _letters_window.txt / _diaries_1903-1904.txt)

• G-stasov (Stasov, 9 Oct 1903, letters line 47): “Я всё копаюсь с Шекспиром et je ne démords pas de mon idée. Думаю на днях кончить. Дело не в аристократизме Шекспира, а в извращении, посредством восхваления нехудожественных произведений, эстетического вкуса. Ну да пускай бранят. Может быть, и вы, но мне нужно было высказать то, что сидело во мне полстолетия.” → “I keep digging at Shakespeare, and I won’t give up my idea. I think I’ll finish in a few days. It’s not about Shakespeare’s aristocratism, but about the perversion of aesthetic taste through the praise of non-artistic works. Well, let them scold — perhaps you too — but I needed to express what has been sitting in me for half a century.”
• G-chertkov (Chertkov, 6 Oct 1903, letters line 109): “Это начатое мною предисловие к статье Crosby об отношении Шекспира к рабочему народу, которое переросло статью Crosby и стоило мне большого труда… Мне хотелось высказать мое много раз и очень добросовестно проверенное впечатление о Шекспире, совершенно противоположное установившемуся.” → “This is the preface I began to Crosby’s article on Shakespeare’s relation to the working people, which has outgrown Crosby’s article and cost me much labour… I wanted to express my many-times and very conscientiously verified impression of Shakespeare, completely opposite to the established one.”
• G-diary-22sep (22 Sept 1903): “Пишу несколько дней (больше недели) предисловие о Шекспире.”
• G-diary-19dec (19 Dec 1903): “Кончил заниматься Шекспиром и начал о значении религии.”
• G-distraction — the recurring self-reproach: he kept calling it a distraction from “более нужных работ” (Chertkov 6 Oct) and “копаюсь / вожусь с Шекспиром” (diary 24 Nov, 2 Dec); finished 19 Dec, but added to it as late as 18 Jan 1904 (diary) — last MS date 19 Jan 1904.

Redaction keystones (from v35_557_577_Varianty.txt)

• R-preface (№ 1, рук. № 1, var. line 15) — the FIRST draft, titled ПРЕДИСЛОВИЕ: “Печатая прекрасное основательное исследование г-на Э. Кросби об отношении Шекспира к рабочему народу, я считаю не лишним высказать и мое отношение к произведениям Шекспира… Верно или нет это мое мнение, мне бы не хотелось умереть, не высказав его.” → “In printing Mr. E. Crosby’s excellent thorough study of Shakespeare’s attitude to the working people, I think it not superfluous to express my own attitude to Shakespeare’s works… Right or wrong, I should not like to die without having expressed this opinion of mine.” [Keystone: the essay literally began as a preface; the final Ch I softens “Печатая… предисловие” to “навела меня на мысль.”]
• R-11points (№ 2, рук. № 6, var. line 21) — the analytic skeleton: an 11-point list of Shakespeare’s “defects” (confused plot, anachronism, inconsistent/absent characters, misplaced speeches, no individual language, bombast, exaggeration, false poeticality, indecent jokes, immorality). Dated “25 сент.” on the MS — i.e. the argument’s spine was fixed within ~2 weeks of starting. Point 11 cites Crosby by name.
• R-portrait (№ 10, рук. № 12, var. line 181) — a CUT frank portrait of Shakespeare-the-man: “Шекспир человек очень умный, но не в смысле способности самобытной мысли, а в смысле способности воспринимать чужие мысли… совершенно лишённый вкуса и чувства меры… с самым пошлым миросозерцанием служителя и забавника сильных мира сего.”
• R-infection (№ 24, рук. № 12, var. line 301) — a CUT passage giving the psychological mechanism (the direct What Is Art? bridge): “всякое художественно воспринимаемое впечатление есть заражение тем чувством, которое испытывает художник, и происходящее от этого чувства единение… Получая художественное впечатление, я сознаю своё духовное единение с людьми.” [The feeling of union with the many who praise Shakespeare counterfeits the genuine aesthetic feeling of union — explaining why even gifted readers (Goethe, Hugo, Turgenev) are deceived. Cut from the final text.]
• R-objectivity (№ 15, рук. № 11, var. line 227) — CUT critique of “objectivity in art”: “олимпийство Гёте и парение Шекспира над событиями жизни, есть только признак того, что они не серьёзны, are not in earnest… Шила в мешке не утаишь.” (objectivity survives only obliquely in the published Ch VIII.)
• R-turgenev (№ 17, рук. № 11, var. line 247) — the CUT Turgenev anecdote (Turgenev examines a young dramatist and opens Macbeth — the “He has no children / All my pretty ones?” passage; Tolstoy slips and writes “Дункан”). Turgenev = the type of the aesthetically-gifted-but-suggestible Shakespeare-worshipper. Also named with Fet in the published Ch VII.
• R-koran (№ 26, рук. № 8, var. line 317) — CUT analogy: Prof. A. Krymsky on the Koran — after hearing it chanted in the mosque many times he began to feel “нечто, похожее на эстетическое наслаждение.” Tolstoy’s model for how repetition manufactures a false aesthetic response.

People around the work (→ entities)

• Ernest Howard Crosby (1856–1907) — American Tolstoyan; his article Shakespeare and the Working Classes is the occasion. Acquaintance from 1894 (memoir v40_339_340); letters 1 Dec 1902 (warm), 30 Apr 1904 (after). → person.
• V. V. Stasov (1824–1906) — critic; supplied the Shakespeare scholarship (Brandes’s Shakespeare in Russian, 1901; via Storozhenko) and visited Yasnaya Polyana Sept 1903; recommended Nordau/Brandes (letter 23 Sept 1903, quoted in commentary). → person (vault?).
• V. G. Chertkov (1854–1936) — obtained Tolstoy’s consent to publish; arranged the English edition (Free Age Press). → person.
• Aylmer Maude / V. Tchertkoff & I. F. Mayo — English translation/publication (1906). → person(s).
• Nikolai Storozhenko (1836–1906) — Moscow Shakespeare scholar who lent Tolstoy Shakespeare books (Stasov letter 27 Oct 1903). → person (minor).
• Daughter-in-law (wife of son Mikhail L. Tolstoy) — translated Crosby’s article under Tolstoy’s supervision (commentary; Stasov’s letter). → needsReview (identify).
• Historical interlocutors named in the commentary (1850s Sovremennik): Turgenev, Druzhinin (translated King Lear), Botkin, Panaev; later Goldenveizer (1900). → context, mostly not entities.
• In-essay antagonists: Goethe, Gervinus, Brandes, Johnson, Hazlitt, Hallam, Shelley, Swinburne, Hugo (critics quoted/contested).