The meeting was followed by an evening of chamber music put on in Tolstoy’s honour, which included a performance of Tchaikovsky’s First Quartet, op. 11, written in 1871. The fabled andante cantabile of its second movement is based on a Russian folk tune which Tchaikovsky had heard a carpenter sing while he was composing at his sister’s house in Ukraine, and it brought tears to Tolstoy’s eyes. That, at least, Tchaikovsky found touching.79
Tolstoy went to very few public musical performances, so his knowledge of, say, Mozart’s symphonies mostly came from four-hand piano arrangements. His antipathy to the artificial conventions of opera, meanwhile, was developed at an early age (and expressed through his faux-naive account of Natasha’s night at the opera in War and Peace, which is seen as if through her eyes). Tolstoy even exhorted Tchaikovsky to abandon writing operas,80 so his response to the performance of Wagner’s Siegfried that he went to at the Bolshoi Theatre in 1896 was perhaps entirely predictable. Tolstoy writes more about Wagner than any other artist in What is Art? Criticism of the performance of Siegfried, and of Wagnerian opera, takes up an entire chapter. Taneyev shared a box with the Tolstoys at the performance they attended on 18 April 1896, and although he liked Wagner no more than Tolstoy, he was heartily ridiculed for following with a score and listening seriously.81 Tolstoy arrived late, and walked out before the end.
As with his analysis of Metropolitan Makary’s Orthodox Dogmatic Theology back in 1880, Tolstoy was very parti pris when it came to analysing Wagner’s Siegfried – in both cases he took two isolated works out of context as exemplary of the whole, the easier to demolish them. Siegfried is the third part of a tetralogy, and by common consent the least engaging part of The Ring, so was a surprising repertoire choice for the sleepy Bolshoi Theatre in 1894, several years before even the Mariinsky, Imperial Russia’s premier opera house, had staged any of Wagner’s music dramas – works which place special demands both on singers and orchestra. The Mariinsky would finally complete a distinguished Ring cycle in 1907, but this Bolshoi Siegfried, sung in Russian, while a valiant effort, left a lot to be desired. Attendance at one of the two isolated revival performances in April 1896 was hardly the appropriate basis for a general assessment of Wagnerian art.82
Tolstoy had more or less built an entire artistic and religious edifice on the foundation of one aspect of Christianity (the Sermon on the Mount), and although he can be forgiven for not reading Wagner’s ponderous aesthetic writings, here was a classic case of him wilfully refusing to consider all the dimensions of a structure in his path that did not conform to his specifications in the rush to tear it down. Although Wagner and Tolstoy were in certain important respects poles apart (the composer’s bombast and love of luxury spring to mind), there are also some intriguing parallels between them. Under the influence of Schopenhauer both formulated a religious vision based on a highly idiosyncratic theology of redemptive love which had little in common with traditional Christianity.83 Redemption can be attained only by renouncing eros and practising compassion or agape, the word for love used in the New Testament: such are the lessons of Wagner’s last work Parsifal and all of Tolstoy’s late works from The Death of Ivan Ilyich onwards. Only love can redeem mankind and bring about a state where human beings can be at peace with themselves and with each other. Thomas Mann was quite correct when he wrote in 1933 that the pattern of Tolstoy’s artistic career was identical to that of Wagner, for in both cases, everything in their later oeuvre was prefigured in their earlier works.84 For all its enthralling narrative, for example, War and Peace is ultimately about sin (separation from God, and the absence of human relatedness) and redemption (the restoration of love), as can be seen by following Natasha Rostova’s spiritual journey.
Mann’s comparison of the consistency of Wagner’s artistic evolution with that of Tolstoy is instructive, for both Wagner and Tolstoy came to distinguish the simple religion of love and compassion for the poor and oppressed that Jesus Christ had founded from the deforming edifice of the Christian church (it is striking that they both made a serious study of Renan’s Life of Jesus in 1878). They both wished to revive the spiritual essence of Christianity by removing its superstitious elements and the Old Testament notion of a vengeful God in order to create a purer and more practical religion. And the pacifism and vegetarianism both espoused in their final years went hand in hand with their views on the regeneration of society and a corresponding desire to simplify their aesthetic style. Before he died in 1883, Wagner came to see vegetarians and anti-vivisectionists as the harbingers of cultural renewal, and, ever the Romantic idealist, he hoped that through the medium of religious art (specifically music, his kind of music) a culture of compassion would replace the contemporary ‘civilisation’ of power and aggression. Tolstoy came to the same conclusions, but naturally the religious art he had in mind was primarily of the verbal kind. Both Wagner and Tolstoy were anxious for the rest of the world to gain insight into Jesus’ radical idea that responding to violence with more violence can only lead to the further desecration of nature.
Tolstoy’s deliberations in What is Art? were the fruit of long reflection and characteristically intense study, but were not at all objective, and out of step with the age in which he lived. As the age of modernism dawned, Tolstoy himself was now an anomaly as an artist. It was in 1896, after all, that Chekhov’s Seagull was first performed, a play which Tolstoy thought was complete rubbish. In his pointed comparison of ‘new’ and ‘old’ art in the play, Chekhov offers subtle comments of his own on the question of ‘What is art?’, but typically refuses to be partisan. Like his stories, his great plays stand on the cusp of a new aesthetic sensibility, indebted on the one hand to the legacy of Tolstoy’s generation, but also heralding things to come. Tolstoy was still alive as Russian artists began to become leaders of the European avant-garde, and he died only three years before the Futurists declared in their manifesto A Slap in the Face of Public Taste that they wished to throw ‘Pushkin, dostoyevsky, Tolstoy etc. etc.’ overboard from the ship of modernity.
Tolstoy’s chaotic publishing habits had not improved over the course of his career; indeed, they became more chaotic in his last years when different versions of his works appeared in Russia and England. Apart from the problems with negotiating censors, Tolstoy continually revised his manuscripts, and then his proofs, and he also continually changed his mind about where and how he wanted his works to appear in print. This did not make it easy for his editors and translators, and that was certainly the case with What is Art?, the first English edition of which was prepared by Aylmer Maude, an important figure in anglophone Tolstoy studies. Maude was the son of an Ipswich vicar and a Quaker mother, and had moved to Moscow in the early 1870s when he was sixteen years old. While he was working as a manager of the Russian Carpet Company, he married Louise Shanks, who was also English but born in Russia, and later they pooled their considerable linguistic resources to become distinguished translators of Tolstoy’s writings. Maude had fallen under Tolstoy’s spell after first meeting him in 1888, and their conversations in the 1890s led him to the conclusion that he could not spend his life selling carpets. In 1897, when the Maudes moved back to London, they stayed first at the Brotherhood Church in Croydon, as Chertkov’s family had done earlier that year, and then followed them to Purleigh, near Maldon in Essex, where the first English Tolstoyan colony had been set up the year before.