Where you burn books, you end up burning men as well. So wrote the German poet Heinrich Heine. In 2022, after Sheikh Omar in the seventh century with the library of Alexandria, the summa of ancient wisdom, in ideal continuity with the Nazi burnings in 1933, the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture (???) ordered the destruction of one hundred million copies of books. These are texts in Russian, or translated from Russian, the (forbidden) mother tongue of millions of Ukrainians. The decree sought by Volodymir Zelensky will not spare Alexsandr Puskin, Leo Tolstoy, Fedor Dostoevsky, and, in the field of art, it will expel Vassili Kandinsky, innovator of 20th-century painting.
We do not know if Gogol and Bulgakov, Ukrainians who wrote in Russian, will be saved. So much for the cancel culture! Ukrainian leaders turn into patrons of an attitude that Vittorio Sgarbi calls “dethinking”. On the other hand, there is little to be expected from a professional comedian president whose warhorse was a gag in which he pretended to play the piano with his penis.
In contrast to the spread of a painful Russophobia, a sign of ethical regression before ignorance, we like to react to the burning of books by recalling a work considered minor, but not uninteresting, by Leo Tolstoy, the great, visionary Russian and Christian novelist of “War and Peace”, “Resurrection”, “Anna Karenina”, author of short stories of the intensity of “The Death of Ivan Ilic” and “Sonata to Kreuzer”. In 1897 saw the light of “What is Art?” philosophical treatise that engaged Tolstoy for fifteen “years, a long process of spiritual rearmament, expressed in works such as “Confession, “What is My Faith” or “The Kingdom of God is in You”.
For Tolstoy, a man of the highest moral conscience who exerted a strong influence on the Russia of his time, ethics must take precedence over aesthetics, and his idea of art is that creation should correspond to the religious consciousness of a people. The basic thesis is that “art is a moral organ of human life, a means of perfecting humanity, but only if it is good and truthful”.
Leo Tolstoy analyzes the aesthetic theories of a large number of authors, all centered on the concepts of beauty, truth and goodness, pointing out that the connection between these concepts is confusing. His long journey as a Christian moralist leads him to reject a classical concept, namely, that beauty is associated with truth or goodness:
“Beauty is only what we like, and, consequently, the notion of beauty not only does not coincide with that of goodness, but rather differs from it; for goodness often coincides with a victory over our passions, while beauty is at the root of all of them. With beauty truth has not the slightest relation and is very often in contradiction with it; for truth generally produces delusion and destroys illusion, which is one of the main conditions of beauty.”
A position that aligns him with Aristotle for whom art must have a moral influence and with the founder of aesthetics, Alexander G. Baumgartner. Opposite is the belief of idealists such as Johann J. Winckelmann, who denies that art should aim at any moral end other than beauty or Hegel for whom “beauty is the sensitive expression of truth”.
Tolstoy reflects on the difficulty of recognizing truth:
“I know very well that the majority of men, even the most intelligent, hardly recognize a truth, even the simplest and most obvious, if this truth forces them to consider false ideas which they have formed with great effort, ideas to which they cling, which they have taught others and on which they have based their lives.”
He also affirmed, that “sincerity is an essential condition of art”. The same thesis of the Spaniard Miguel Unamuno, for whom sincerity is the main virtue and hallmark of true art.
Many of the Russian writer’s remarks about the Symbolist poets of the late 19th century (Verlaine, Mallarmé, Rimbaud) are similar to his later criticisms of the more famous avant-gardes. Tolstoy states:
“Not only have affectation, confusion, obscurity been elevated to a category of quality, and even to a condition of all poetry, but they are about to establish the incorrect, the indefinite, the non-eloquent as a place for artistic virtues.”
An unappealing judgment against the dehumanization of art that would become the most eloquent trait of the twentieth century. He denounced “darkness erected as artistic dogma”. This is how Tolstoy expressed himself regarding Baudelaire: “the author is concerned with appearing eccentric and obscure. This desire for darkness is even more evident in his prose, in which, if he wished, he could speak clearly”. Of Verlaine, “a drunkard who wrote incomprehensible verse”, he says that his poetic productions are no less false and incomprehensible than those of Baudelaire.
We may disagree, but we cannot fail to note that his compass is clarity in exposition, accessibility, and the ability of art to touch the sensitive races of the human soul, with intentions of moral and spiritual elevation. Another element that draws our attention, in light of the stifling censorship of the current politically correct fashion, is the language; stark, without complexes:
“My inability to understand the works of the new schools stems from the fact that there is nothing comprehensible in them.”
And often not even human, but this Tolstoy, who died in 1910, could not yet know.
“We are told that to understand these works we must see them, read them and listen to them many times. This cannot be called explaining them, but getting used to them. We can get used to bad food, brandy, tobacco and opium; in the same way we get used to bad art. This is exactly what happens.”
This is what is happening today -though no one dares to say so- when right from school the false comparison between virtuous and false art is inculcated, in which a Velázquez and the latest abstract expressionist are absurdly equated. Tolstoy confronts educational conditioning without complexes by questioning even an unquestionable work, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony:
“I do not see how the sentiments expressed by that symphony can unite men who have neither been educated nor are willing to undergo that artificial hypnotization.”
The great Russian novelist is a powerful thinker who dismantles the verbal contortions and fumblings of bad artists and their coryphaeus in justification of an obscure art:
“If the artist had been able to explain in words what he wants to convey to us, he would have expressed himself in words.”
The condemnation is without appeal: a language indecipherable except to a minority of initiates (real or self-styled) is contrary to the communicative mission of the arts. For Tolstoy there is a profound moral reason why artistic work must be accessible to the majority:
“Perverted art may not appeal to the majority of men, but good art must necessarily appeal to everyone.”
Or at least arouse a strong impression, the same impression produced in the writer by the sudden vision, in London’s National Gallery, of Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus, or the one felt by a nineteenth-century Russian before the political force and moral outrage of Ilya Repin’s Volga boatmen.
Tolstoy comes into head-on collision with the intellectualistic pretension of the few who claim exclusivity and the right to define art:
“Great works of art are great because everyone can understand them perfectly. If an art fails to move men, it is not because these men lack taste and intelligence; it is because the art is bad or not art at all.”
Quality art produces in the viewer the vivid feeling “that the feelings it conveys come not from another person, but from himself and that what the artist expresses, he himself has long thought of expressing”. A powerful insight: art brings to light feelings, concepts, ideas that each person has within himself, it is maieutic, midwife of what is latent in the soul.
Tolstoy was not afraid to question the dogmas of his time. For example, the obsession with originality at any cost, glorified by the avant-garde as the highest quality of art, which often results in bizarreness, gratuitous gut punch. “È del poeta il fin la meraviglia” [Wonder is the poet’s purpose] argued Giovan Battista Marino, but all that remains of him is the formula. Tolstoy dismisses much of the art contemporary with him:
“Its scope, by dint of becoming more and more limited, narrows to such an extent that it seems to the artists of the upper classes that everything has been said and nothing new can be said. Hence, in order to renew their art, they constantly seek new forms.”
The unreasonableness, degeneration and negative function of art are the result of irresponsible and boring elites:
“Because the upper classes, having lost faith in the doctrines of the Church, remained without any faith at all, there is nothing that can be called European or national art. Henceforth the art of the upper classes became separated from that professed by the people, and there were two arts: that of the people and that of the delicate, the men who, having power and wealth, paid and directed the artists. Unable to embrace the true Christianity that condemned their way of life, the rich and powerful had to return to the pagan conception that made the meaning of life consist in personal pleasure.”
A prophetic cry we listen to with astonishment, heirs of a non-art that has become commerce, wonder, wordplay, abuse of the credulity of a miseducated public. “From the moment the upper classes of society lost faith in Christianity, artistic pleasure gave them the norm of good and bad art”. Not even that today: it is art what critics and service intellectuals decry as such, in the silence of a public that does not understand but is ashamed to express puzzlement or rejection.
Tolstoy adds an acute observation – perfectly valid today – to explain the empire of the will of the few over the majority thanks to the lazy conformism of a mass that renounces the autonomous elaboration of its own criteria and ideas:
“Men who were indifferent to art, in whom the faculty of emotion was perverted and partly atrophied, slavishly welcomed the opinion of princes, financiers and other amateurs who, in turn, welcomed the opinion of those who expressed their idea more loudly or in a more confident tone.”
The Russian count is corrosive toward artists who, transformed into “minstrels of the rich”, contribute not only to bad art but to a pernicious dynamic. Nothing that we do not also observe in the taste of the ruling classes, in the power of the merchants, in the logorrhoea of critics “sotto il velame de li versi strani” [under the veil of the strange verses] (Dante). The truth that Tolstoy delivers to us is that “whatever new madness is manifested in art, as soon as the upper classes of our society adopt it, a theory is invented to explain and sanction it”, however false, deformed, empty of meaning.
No hesitation to condemn “useless or harmful art”, its “pernicious consequences”, rejecting much of the art of his time. Thus, he writes:
“It is preferable to give up all the arts than to support the art that exists today and depraved men. The artist will understand that to produce a fable, so long as it amuses, or a song, or a farce, so long as it distracts, or a picture, so long as it pleases thousands, is more important than to compose a novel, a drama or a picture which for a time will amuse a small number of rich people and then be forgotten.”
From a point of view that may appear Manichean, though sincere in its defense of a moral art, Tolstoy points out something that had already been forgotten in his day: “the science that distinguishes good from evil bears the name of religion”. A timely reflection especially today, in times when all reference to good is buried, and ignorant and unscrupulous ruling classes, backed by dishonest intellectuals, stand as priests of a new morality against God, man, nature and its law.
Leo Tolstoy’s ideas on art may be debatable, but they remain the legacy of a great spirit, whose wrong is to have been Russian, as in different times other origins were denied. Ukrainians will no longer be able to read him. Ray Bradbury’s prophecy in Fahernheit 451, the time of incendiary firemen, charged with burning books to erase history, memory, truth, comes true. In the dystopian novel, one man, Guy Montag, becomes the guardian of knowledge, while a few willing ones memorize whole books to pass them on to those who will come after them. This is what we wish for the Ukrainian people, the cradle of complex Russian identity, who cannot erase or consider giants like Leo Tolstoy as strangers.
Translation by Costantino Ceoldo