by Jessica Schneider

Created on: July 20, 2009

Something to keep in mind whenever approaching a work by any writer is that just because someone has talent in one area does not necessarily mean that talent will transfer over into another. Such cannot be made clearer than in Leo Tolstoy's What Is Art?

Tolstoy is in fact a terrible essayist as well as terrible philosopher and, although some of his points are valid, he is nonetheless obsessed with art needing this moral structure attributed to it as he is incapable of pushing past his own biases. At times he comes across as condescending and spends much of these pages pontificating on what a particular work of art should be, rather than what it really is. (His descriptions on classical music are particularly amusing, albeit unintentionally so). So in other words, if the work at hand does not conform to his limited purview, old Leo dismisses it.

In Anna Karenina, for example, Tolstoy does spend many pages marveling over the lives of the serfs and peasants and, in fact, it is in these very moments when his fiction trails off into verbose weakness, notably because he is so focused on expressing his political and social opinions that this takes precedence over the art itself.

Yet in What Is Art?, he spends much time criticizing the poems of Mallarme, calling one poem in particular "not exceptional in its incomprehensibility. I have read several poems by Mallarme, and they have no meaning whatever." Try opening up your head, Leo.

Yet again, although Leo was good in one area (fiction, he sucked in understanding poetry and even logic, as shown in his mediocre essays. He does make good points about how one will favor the work over another simply because of the 'name' (and he uses Beethoven as an example, saying that many critics have claimed lesser works of his as 'genius' when they are not, though Leo offers no real insights into his defenses against those works).

However, while this is true, his off handed dismissal of something simply because it does not agree with his political/social beliefs is nothing more than bad criticism. It's like ripping on a poem because it's about orchids rather than about daises. And this is why Leo is a bad critic. (This is also likely why he is criticizing Mallarme, a 'name' poet of his day, to prove that Tolstoy, another 'name' can do it).

Even though it is good to not rely on blind faith when approaching the work of any artist, one must at least own the certain amount of necessary logic and emotional detachment in criticism if one wants to be taken seriously. As is, What Is Art? is not a book to be taken seriously, though it is a book that shows what a delimited view can offer,and, possibly, a glimpse into the reasons why many critics today suffer from many of the same ailments; though the reasons are different because the times are different. Though the causes, however, are still the same.

What Is Art? is nothing more than a shallow exploration on bias, and Leo comes across as old, pompous and out of touch. Ultimately he fails to answer even the basic question of the book, showing that he himself did not know, and that his fiction and why it succeeds is likely not something he understood himself.

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