| COUNT LEV NIKOLAYEVICH TOLSTOY |
If I had a double portion of Leo Tolstoy’s dynamic facility in prose, I would ferment an urgent revolution in contemporary art.
The grand prodigy of world literature, who soars above his peers in both literary prowess and spiritual devotion, was lauded in life and honoured in posterity but his ideas are still to provoke notable consideration on the modern arena.
Tolstoy was a lone genius. Aside being the most famous Russian of the 19th century and, far and away, the greatest writer of his time, Tolstoy stands out as a man of conviction who refused to erase the lead-frame between conscience and convenience, against the example of his contemporaries who were banking on the downgrade of moral standards to buy popularity.
Although he is best known for his universally renowned novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, it is Tolstoy’s latter works which merit closer recognition because of their direct proximity to mankind’s quest for the meaning of life.
Prefatory remarks to his Confession are a masterly homage to the wealth of the Tolstoyan legacy, as the elderly writer who had achieved everything but contentment for all his certified exploits, probed the definitive problem of human existence with imposing clarity and authority evocative of Ecclesiastes:
“Here unfolds the drama of a soul who has sought from his earliest years the path to truth or, as the author refers to it, the meaning of life. This is a soul striving with all the strength of his inner energy toward the light which shapes him and his edification; he strives no less by means of a scientifically cold, rational, abstract investigation that ultimately leads to God and divine truth.
“It is truly a magnificent drama for anyone whose living soul has the power to understand and perceive its inner meaning; it is written by the hand of one who himself lived through all its internal collisions, torments and agonies, by the hand of our ingenious writer.”
The foregoing appraisal can be safely extended to a comprehensive postscript to the older and wiser Tolstoy. Devotional sensibility became the framing point of his work after a midlife spiritual crisis which led him to renounce his early secular undertakings as wasted years and chart new trails in the elucidation of the ultimate existential question.
UP IN ARMS
Contrariwise his seminal masterpiece, the legendary sage of Yesnaya Polyana’s own life was not a cyclic alternation of war and peace. Tolstoy, whose career concurred with a growing tide of perversion in the arts, spent the latter segment of his life a bitter man in a relentless duel against authorities in art, learning, religion and media for the counterfeit discharge of responsibility which had come to taint these social engines.
Always the military man, having manned the front in some of Russia’s most gruelling battles as a young man, Tolstoy particularly devoted prolific efforts fighting his contemporaries in art and the media for on ushering society on a fatal downward spiral.
Perhaps, one of the famous literary combats is Tolstoy’s prolonged feud with Emile Zola, a pseudo-scientific exponent of the crass secularisation of literature whose work commanded fanfare in post-revolutionary France.
Tolstoy had been complicit in the compromise and owed his early acclaim to it, before his work took a Christian slant after his midlife crisis. Looking back in disillusioned hindsight, he regretted having been subject to a pathological pride and insane conviction by presuming to teach people without knowing what he was teaching them.
Detached from the crazed quest of monetary acquisition and popular appeal which had come to deal a death-knell on the didactic function of art as the language of social cohesion, Tolstoy could recount with nauseated revulsion the perils of this diversion:
“In order to acquire the fame and the money I was writing for, it was necessary to conceal what was good and to flaunt what was bad. And that is what I did.
“Time after time I would scheme in my writings to conceal under the mask of indifference and even pleasantry those yearnings for something good which gave meaning to my life. And I succeeded in this and was praised,” Tolstoy confessed.
These malfunctioning hitches in the social engines of Tolstoy’s time still claim widescale distribution because so few are still manning the fort to foil the tide of perdition. There is a rabid infection of these pillar institutions by moral bankruptcy and only faint resistance is in place.
BASE ELEMENTS
Inordinate accent is lent to the base elements of human nature while virtue is deliberately shrouded by amoral complacency.
What goes in bad taste commands affinity of both the writers and the audience while decency is now synonymous with primitivism.
The credit to be accorded what is right and the condemnation to be accorded what is wrong is missing in art’s ostensible appraisal of life.
Moral relativism, the new normal in the arena, pursues precisely what it is poised to accomplish, viz, unhinging the floodgate to every form of vice.
Tabloids, which are the chief hit in on news stalls, daily labour to flaunt skimpily dressed women for public perusal, something unthinkable when conservatism was still the radar in the progress of civilisation.
Mercenary cross-aggrandisement among artists and media practitioners has taken the place of commitment to truth. There is a slant towards intertextuality, corresponding with preset frames of opinion rather than measuring up to reality that can be clinically corroborated. Reality is drowned out by the maddening unison of arrogance and ignorance.
The colossal flaw of artists apprehended by Tolstoy is assigning themselves an epistemological status as the central mediums in the generation of knowledge while deigning to justify their own ignorance as an operational necessity.
Tolstoy’s Confession lucidly captures this logical fallacy whose apparent import is the forestall criticism; whose perceptible effect is decimation of sensitivity and diffusion of sensuality:
“The theory adopted by these people, my fellow writers, was that life proceeds according to a general development and that we, the thinkers, play the primary role in that development; moreover, we, the artists and the poets, have the greatest influence on the thinkers.
“Our mission is to educate people. In order to avoid the obvious question – “What do I know and what can I teach?” – the theory explained that it is not necessary to know anything and that the artist and the poet teach unconsciously.”
Satirist Jonathan Swift debunks the danger of this latent code of art, which commands universal ratification, owing to its mandate for artists to heap extreme claims on a deficient rational basis:
“Wit without knowledge being a sort of cream, which gathers in a night to the top, and by a skilful hand may be soon whipped into froth; but once scummed away, what appears underneath will be fit for nothing but to be thrown to the hogs,” Swift notes in the Battle of the Books.
While the industry is rife with mercenary cross-aggrandisement, ideas being trafficked around to the effect of condoning moral laxity appeal to the depravity of human nature but are of no value under the critical glare of truth and reason.
COUNTERFEIT ART
Tolstoy warns in his 1889 treatise What is Art: “The consequences of counterfeit art are the perversion of man, pleasure which never satisfies, and the weakening of man’s spiritual strength.”
“And this is what people of our day and of our circle should understand in order to avoid the filthy torrent of depraved and prostituted art with which we are deluged,” noted Tolstoy.
Even then, when the tide of yesteryear conservatism was yet to go obsolete across the arena of world literature, Tolstoy’s reservations about art were met with forthright derision by many his literary peers.
A circle of hostile contemporaries, chiefly Emile Zola, upbraided Tolstoy for being out of touch with the moral transition submerging the artistic and social terrain of the time.
Zola who had savagely attacked Tolstoy as having a “crack in the head” in a widely publicised newspaper interview gave cold shrift to Tolstoy’s standpoint:
“Tolstoy’s opinion will not make us stray from the path we are following: that is because as a thinker, he is detached from reality; as a creative force, people have exaggerated his worth.”
Had Tolstoy conveyed his opinion to the artists and media practitioners of this age, he would doubtlessly come across as a hardwired extremist; perhaps the sort of writer which Shimmer Chinodya says must be dragged to the marketplace and flogged in public.
But Tolstoy is in high company. Billy Graham concurs in his Jesus Generation that if we put lids on our sewer holes, it follows that we must urgently rein in the immorality filtering into our society through the media?
Offhand, I can recite a fistful of publishers who will not furrow their brows to go through what they call a preachy or overtly fanatic manuscript. Yet from their stables, they industriously churn out religious packages; religious in the sense that God features in their work sub-theme of stale jokes.
Just what is the reason for the depreciating value of art from a clean and conscious vehicle of meaning to a festering sewer? Art is commonly perceived to be a medium of self-expression. This has been taken for an open-ended licence for artists to be accountable to no one but themselves.
While this is necessary for observing the inherent and inalienable liberty endued in every person, artists have overstretched their mandate and mutated into a cheap conduit for the deluge of immorality overturning society today.
THE MEANING OF FREEDOM
Freedom as a cardinal value must elude all inhibition, yet it is mortal compromise to confuse freedom of responsibility with freedom from responsibility. It must not be conveniently played down that artists express themselves not to inanimate carbon copies of their imagination but to living societies whose patterns of life oscillate around ideas.
Judging the ethical vitality of art based on popularity is overestimating the base instincts which inhere in man, yet it is for this reason that moral education was instituted through the varied social engines to tame what is ignoble and maximise what is positive.
Media outlets in a country with saddled with challenges that need to be appraised in the public sphere have decided to take escapism in splashing the decadent images and amplifying vulgar stories out of proportion. Objectivity is exploited to demobilise the necessary categorisation of right and wrong.
Newspapers that have tapped into a lax moral mode and have no qualms with terrorising readers with virtual nudity and there is no visible bastion of the exercise of moderation. The erstwhile custodians of conservatism have been cowered into submission and occasional protests are met head-on with rapid fire commentary.
Just what are the conditions precipitating the downgrade of art and media into base conduits for wickedness? Money is the vice that has had a large share in turning our social engines fickle and haywire.When the downward spiral started to take its toll on U.S media, owing to a corporate conspiracy, the editor for New York Tribune had this to confess:
“The business of the New York journalist is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell his race and his country for his daily bread.
“We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping-jacks; they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.”
This indictment is true in the case of leading regional papers. A recent survey shows that two thirds of people in South Africans, the outright majority, are opposed to homosexuality yet these papers propagate sodomy like gospel truth in their columns. Whose views are being upheld? The highest bidder, precisely.
Media texts are bound to degenerate when they renege into a mere commercial enterprise. While financial considerations are present in all media operations the dynamic is lost when the essence of art and the media is subjugated to the quest for profit.
“The art of our time and of our circle has become a prostitute. And this comparison holds good even in minute details. Like her it is not limited to certain times, like her it is always adorned, like her it is always saleable, and like her it is enticing and ruinous,” Tolstoy remarks in What is Art?
The magnification or mortification of an idea in contemporary media circle now inheres not on the merit of the idea but its corresponding business interest to the publishers or record labels.
FLIRTY STREET CONSPIRACY
Media corporations stand to be arraigned for the uncouth accumulation of money at the expense of responsibility. This has precipitated a torrent of media texts interlaced with tainted cosmetics calculated to appeal.
The acronym Fleet Street which used to characterise the Western media can as well be replaced by Flirty Street. The outlets are pandering in the corridors of power and mammon to pacify lasciviousness and pamper the cyclic futility of modern life.
The aggravated fervency with which writers and journalists are attacking family values and the traditional standards of upright living borders on sheer arrogance.
“One of the intentions of corporate-controlled media is to instil in people a sense of disempowerment, of immobilization and paralysis. Its outcome is to turn you into good consumers. It is to keep people isolated, to feel that there is no possibility for social change,” notes American writer David Barsamian.
Propaganda in the media oscillating around a world devoid of values and shorn of meaning is staplefare today. The conservative conception of art as a didactic medium can no longer enlist the traditional authenticity it had before the mass secularisation of society through globalisation and concerted judicial, civil, media activism against Christianity fermenting in much of the world.
The reformation of society and must begin with the media fraternity which is the tainted source, the polluted social engine, facilitating the demise of family values to rake in dirty money into its coffers.
The world must be reclaimed from the hovel of spiritual bankruptcy and moral decadence. The media is a strategic tool towards the accomplishment of this cause.
However, as a compendium of critiques without the media hastens rather than foil tragedy and ferments rather than still decadence. The incapacity of the media to combat vice consists in its subjugation to materialism and aversion to duty.
Renewed commitment to values is the transition by which the media will monitor not menace, make not mar, shape not shred, decipher not dismantle, conscientise not contaminate, raise not raze, effulge not efface, preserve not pervert, create not corrode the best society imaginable.
Leo Tolstoy mastered art into an interface where the world others could make meaning of their lives and endeavour for the ideal. Inseparable from the Christian sensibility which informed his latter body of work, Tolstoy advocates for a return to faith without which it is impossible to probe the universal human experience:
“The religious perception of our time – which consists in acknowledging that the aim which consists in both collective and individual is the union of mankind is already so sufficiently distinct of mankind that people have now only to reject the false theory of art according to which enjoyment is considered to be the purpose of art, and religious perception will naturally take its place as the guide of the art of our time.
“And as soon as the religious perception, which already unconsciously directs the life of man, is consciously acknowledged, then immediately and naturally the division of art into art for the lower and art for the upper classes will disappear.
“There will be one common, brotherly universal art, and first that art will, naturally, be rejected which transmits feelings incompatible with the religious perception of our time, feelings which do not but divide men, and then that insignificant, exclusive art will be rejected to which an importance is now attached to which it has not right.”
The contemporary arena has degenerated into a lunatic asylum in which morality is a remote sensibility. Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy’s foregoing prescription is an ethical imperative long overdue.
This blog is generally about Literature heroes or exactly wt
Literature, arts, media and scholarship from a Christian perspective.