What Is Art? 1998

Tolstoy is not consistent during his lifetime about what purpose art should serve in society. The final version of What is Art? is not as adamant about his belief that art has to be useful, than an entry made in his diary at around the time the essay was published. “Yesterday I glanced through Fet’s books (AA Fet, a friend and fellow writer) – novels, short stories and poetry. I recalled the time we spent together at Yasnaya Polyana, our interminable four-handed sessions at the piano, and I plainly saw that all this music and fiction and poetry is not art, that men do not have the slightest need for it, that it is nothing but a distraction for profiteers and idlers, that it has nothing to do with life. Novels and short stories describe the revolting manner in which two creatures become infatuated with each other; poems explain and glorify how to die of boredom; and music does the same. And all the while life, all of life, is eating at us with urgent questions – food, the distribution of property, labour, religion, human relations! It’s a shame! It is ignoble! Help me, Father, to serve you by destroying falsehood” (p.556, Tolstoy, Troyat).