In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

3 1 “It is widely accepted in contemporary Anglo-American aesthetics,” Saam Trivedi writes in the opening lines of his 2004 article on Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy’s 1898 aesthetic tract What Is Art?, “that, despite Tolstoy’s own literary achievements, his ‘moralism’ about art is a view without much merit. For the most part, I concur with this current consensus about Tolstoy. However, despite the many flaws in his view, I think Tolstoy was on to something, after all” (Trivedi, 38). Trivedi’s tone of voice can tell us a lot about the socioemotional complexities of a modern response to Tolstoy’s essay: Trivedi’s decent embarrassment about Tolstoy’s “moralism,” the awkward stress on “something ,” the carefully modulated defensiveness of that hedging “after all,” the nervous quantifiers in “without much merit” and “for the most part” and “the many flaws in his view.” “I believe a concept of artist-audience communication similar to what Tolstoy had in mind,” Trivedi adds, “can be fleshed out so as to avoid the problems that Tolstoy ran into, while reclaiming the insights in his view” (38). Would we need that grim stress on avoid if What Is Art? did not make us profoundly uneasy? The problem is, Tolstoy’s late work in aesthetics seems to leave admirers of War and Peace and Anna Karenina nowhere to put their eyes, or the rest of their body language, either. It’s not just that Tolstoy’s complex psychological understanding of the characters in his novels leads us to expect a better mind at work on the problem of art; it’s also that his condemnation of his own novels Tolstoy’s Infection 4 Zarazhenie: Tolstoy’s Infection Theory as bad art sets up a critical feedback loop that undermines Tolstoy’s credibility in both directions, as postconversion moral critic of his own novels and as preconversion author of those novels. Then, because he has just coached us to disapprove of him morally, and of his aesthetic treatise, his condemnation begins to leak moral discreditation in ever-widening circles, undermining our own moral credibility as well. Although most of this is unconscious—operating at the level of what I call somatic guidance—because we neither want our moral credibility undermined nor want our credibility thematized in moral terms, we work to suppress Tolstoy’s ideas as infamous or to find some carefully hedged way to praise them. What makes this leakage or seepage of moral (self-)condemnation from author to reader particularly disturbing in this case is that it is an instance, though not one Tolstoy himself theorized, of the central claim in his book: that art works by the moral infection of feeling from authors to readers. (The apparent problem that a treatise on aesthetics is not art in the strict sense and therefore should not be covered by his infection theory is itself covered by Tolstoy’s insistence that art be taken in the broadest possible sense, to include things like parades, jokes, and, presumably, aesthetic treatises.) Precisely because for him all artistic expression is infectious, and what is transferred from author to reader infectiously is feeling, and feeling is the primary channel of morality, Tolstoy must work hard to condemn art that he considers immoral, to prevent its infecting readers with its immoral (hedonistic) feelings—in effect , to quarantine it, to keep readers away from it. “We have the terrible probability to consider that while fearful sacrifices of the labour and lives of men and of morality itself are being made to art, that same art may be not only useless but even harmful” (What, 81–82). His moral condemnation of bad art in the book, including his own, is intended as a kind of one-man center for moral disease control, Tolstoy doing his part to stop the epidemic spread of emotional anesthesis or alienation in contemporary society—an epidemic of which he portrays himself too as a carrier, both as a reader and as a writer.1 Because the wrong kind of art made him morally sick in his youth, he wrote a string of famous novels that infected others and that, unfortunately, continued to infect others even when he was in his late sixties, despite his conversion to a particularly radical form of Rousseauistic Christian asceticism almost two decades before. And, as I try to show in chapter 2, at the writing of What Is Art? he was still vulnerable to that infection. He was, in fact, still sick—only...

Share