ABSTRACT
The power of infection, which L. Tolstoy takes as indispensable to genuine art, may work for good or ill. The point is important since, many critics assume that for Tolstoy it is the moral alone that gives value to art. The more important point, however, is that Wilkinson misinterprets Tolstoy’s view of the relation between morality and art. For Tolstoy art is not absolutely autonomous. Human experience is permeated with good and evil. Consequently, whether art fulfils its function for good in human life will depend on an active sense of good and evil in artists and their public. Tolstoy will consider how active is that sense in the art of his contemporaries. Tolstoy states, quite explicitly, that one may detect infectious power in a work, and therefore attribute it value without judging its moral content.
