- Project Runeberg -  Impressions of Russia /
344

(1889) [MARC] Author: Georg Brandes Translator: Samuel Coffin Eastman - Tema: Russia
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man without hope. The pessimism of the latter consists
in his being tired of life and disgusted with it. All
that he has seen and experienced was to an intolerable
degree vulgar and low. He suffers and is wounded by
everything which there presents itself to his view, and
it is very significant that he has created a character in a
novel, who retires to a solitary life, to whom the reality
is so hateful that he replaces the natural by the
artificial, even natural by artificial light, and who from the
simple classics, which are not spicy enough and which he
despises, resorts to the very unnatural writers.

With this radical pessimism the pessimism of Tolstoï
has one point of contact: the dislike of what is plain
and rational. But for the typical French pessimist life
is a worthless thing, whose enigma is not worth
pondering over. The only thing which the pessimists of this
literature honor and love is art. And the same thing
which they loathe in real life, they honor when they find
it in art. For only where the work of art almost
exclusively represents that which in itself is purely
commonplace and ungraceful are they sure that what they love in
the work is the art itself. The lover of art indeed often
prefers the low and the sordid as the subject in order to
be able to the full extent to enjoy the art in the manner
of its treatment.

For Tolstoï, on the other hand, life is so serious and
inexhaustible a thing that his interest for art was from
the first infinitesimal, in comparison with the interest
which he bestows upon the questions of life and
happiness. Upon the whole, art has never had an
independent value for him, and in his last period he looks down
upon his earlier works as far too artistic. He is wholly
absorbed in a kind of Christian socialism of a wholly personal
and eccentric nature, and it is evident that, so far

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