Leo Tolstoy
Translated by
Dmitry Fadeyev
Art is a human activity in which a person consciously uses certain external methods to transmit the feelings he experiences to other people, and other people are infected by these feelings and experience them in turn.
A true work of art breaks down in the mind of the beholder the barrier between him and the artist, and not only between him and the artist, but between him and all the people who behold the same work of art. It is this that liberates the individual from his separation from other people, from his solitude, it is this that merges the individual with others and constitutes the main attractive force and beneficial quality of art.
Just as a work of thought is only a work of thought when it transmits new ideas and thoughts, not when it repeats what is already known, so too a work of art is only a work of art when it introduces a new feeling into people’s everyday life.
Art is one of the two organs of human progress. A human being uses words to share his thoughts, and he uses forms of art to share his feelings, not just with all the people of the present, but with all those yet to come.
Just as perfection of knowledge happens when truer and more useful knowledge displaces and replaces knowledge that is erroneous and useless, so too perfection of feelings happens through art by displacing feelings that are base, less kind and less useful for the good of the people with those that are higher, kinder, and more useful for this good.
That is the purpose of art.
Emerson says that music reveals to a human being the potential greatness present in his soul. The same can be said about all true art.
Art is the flower of life of a society as a whole. The flower of a society such as that of the cruel parasites of the highest circles of our Christian world cannot be good. It will inevitably be depraved and hideous.
Such is the art of our society, which has recently reached the highest degree of depravity and hideousness.
If we were to ask the question of whether it is better for our Christian world to lose everything that is today considered art together with false art, or to lose only all the good art that exists today, then I think that any reasonable and moral person would answer again the same way that Plato did for his republic, and how it was answered by all Christian and Mohammedan teachers of humankind, that is, one would say: “It is better that there be no art at all than to allow depraved art, or its present day semblance, to continue.”
The figures of present day science and art have not fulfilled and cannot fulfill their calling because they have turned their duties into rights.
Our refined, depraved art could only have arisen upon the slavery of the masses and it can only continue as long as this slavery exists.