Creative Writing: Humourous Tolstoy Review

I'm currently reading a marvellous book called What is Art?, which is a series of essays written by Leo Tolstoy (yes, that Tolstoy). It does a wonderful, nuanced examination of that behemoth of a queation, and when I finish the work, I will write a more serious review. But for now, I want to focus on one of my favourite things in art: petty, caustic feuds, rants, and disses between famous artists.

These are the things that make me laugh out loud because no matter your genius, you will always have opponents - often people in your own peer group that also happen to be geniuses. And I just get a kick out of the fact that artists from long ago could be just as funny, sarcastic, critical, and satirical as those of us now. For all their fancy artistry and respect they have (both then and now), none of them were above a (hilariously well written) rant.

Here are some choice quotes from Tolstoy's 11 page rant about Wagner (yes, that Wagner) and his production of "Nibelungen" (spoiler alert: Tolstoy hates it):

1. [In a rant about the first act] "The gist of this conversation, which can be learned only from the libretto, is that Siegfried was brought up by the dwarf, and for some reason hates him on account of that, and keeps wanting to kill him" and "He tells all this not simply, but in the form of riddles which he orders them to ask him, betting his head, God knows why, that he will unriddle them."

2. "...one sees and hears not Siegfried or the birds, but only the limited, self-confident bad tone and bad taste of a German, whose ideas of poetry are absolutely false, and who wants, in the most crude and primitive fashion, to convey these false notions of poetry to me."

3. "Everyone knows the feeling of distrust and resistance evoked by the obviousness of an author's intentions....the result is a heavy, tormenting feeling, similar to what anyone would experience if an ugly old woman, dressed up in a ballgown and smiling, twirled in front of you, certain of sympathy. This impression was reinforced because I saw around me a crowd of three thousand people who not only listened obediently to this totally incoherent gibberish, but considered it their duty to admire it.

4. "Somehow I managed to sit through the next scene....but more I could not endure, and I rushed from the theatre with a feeling of revulsion that I still cannot forget."

5. "It is the same when listening to Wagner's operas. Try sitting in the dark for four days in the company of not quite normal people, subjecting your brain to the strongest influence of sounds calculated to excite the brain by strongly affecting the nerves of hearing, and you are certain to arrive at an abnormal state and come to admire the absurdity. That does not even take four days; the five hours of a single day's performance...is enough."

6. "Even if there are people who are insulted by the senselessness and falseness [of Wagner], they keep timidly silent, as sober people keep timidly silent among the drunk."

7. "And so, owing to its masterful counterfeiting of art, a senseless, crude, false work, which has nothing to do with art, goes around the world, its production costing millions, and perverts more and more the tastes of upper-class people and their notion of what art is."