Shakespeare in Europe
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
|
Tolstoy's Shakespeare and the Drama (1906) is easily the most vexing document in the long history of European Shakespeare criticism. Admittedly, it is unjust, wrongheaded, and wholly negative. But it cannot be ignored, as it has been by some critics, or dismissed lightly, as it has been by others. That such a document could be written by the man whom many critics would rank beside the object of his attack, and that it could be written in the twentieth century, are themselves of great interest. But of greater interest are the possible causes of Tolstoy's attitude. "--Shakespeare in Europe (1963) by Oswald LeWinter |
|
Related e |
|
Featured: |
Shakespeare in Europe (1963) is a book by Oswald LeWinter.
Chapter on Tolstoy
Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy
1828-1910
Tolstoy's Shakespeare and the Drama (1906) is easily the most vexing document in the long history of European Shakespeare criticism. Admittedly, it is unjust, wrongheaded, and wholly negative. But it cannot be ignored, as it has been by some critics, or dismissed lightly, as it has been by others. That such a document could be written by the man whom many critics would rank beside the object of his attack, and that it could be written in the twentieth century, are themselves of great in- terest. But of greater interest are the possible causes of Tolstoy's attitude.
After 1880 Tolstoy became more and more dissatisfied with the growing alienation of art from the "masses" And with the zeal of a reformer and the natural messianic strain of the Slav, Tolstoy launched on a program of polemical works culminat- ing in What Is Art? (1898) and the present essay. The flaws of these works are only too obvious. The reformer's passion has intimidated the critic's judgment. But the impulse is honest. Its motivation lies in Tolstoy's rationalist Christianity, his visio pacis the eventual establishment of a classless Christian society based on brotherhood. In What Is Art? Tolstoy had promulgated his doctrine of "infection" a doctrine which sup- poses that anything which does not "infect" one with sympathy is not art. Tolstoy's elevation of folk art to the highest level, and his equation of simplicity with artistic virtue are all of a piece with the doctrine.
We must remember that Tolstoy's humanism was one of re- ligious orientation. He was dismayed by the decay of tradi- tional values, the growing religion of "art" with its concomitant the refusal to judge literary works from an ethical basis, and the rise of science with its growing moral relativism. Against such a background Tolstoy's attack on Shakespeare, whom the Romantics he blamed for the above-mentioned tendencies had all but canonized, becomes intelligible. And given Tolstoy's maximalist personality, a passionate strain he never quite sub- dued, even the vitttperativene$$ of the essay can be under- stood. Thus, injudicious as the essay is it must be seen as one of the great attempts at stemming the tide of aestheticism and decadence, directed less against Shakespeare than against that tradition which had used him as the exemplum of its own pre- dilections. Had Tolstoy made this more explicit than he was able to do, the essay, today, would have mare currency.
