_What is Art?_ offered the more interest in Russia because the defenders of pure Art and the haters of the “nihilists in Art” had been accustomed to quote Tolstóy as of their camp. In his youth indeed he seems not to have had very definite ideas about Art. At any rate, when, in 1859, he was received as a member of the Society of Friends of Russian Literature, he pronounced a speech on the necessity of _not_ dragging Art into the smaller disputes of the day, to which the Slavophile Homyakóff replied in a fiery speech, contesting his ideas with great energy. “There are moments--great historic moments”--Homyakóff said--“when self-denunciation (he meant on the part of Society) has especial, incontestable rights.... The ‘accidental’ and the ‘temporary’ in the historical development of a nation’s life acquire then the meaning of the universal and the broadly human, because all generations and all nations can understand, and do understand, the painful moans and the painful confessions of a given generation or a given nation.” ... “An artist”--he continued--“is not a theory; he is not a mere domain of thought and cerebral activity. He is a man--always a man of his own time--usually one of its best representatives.... Owing to the very impressionability of his organism, without which he would not have been an artist, he, more than the others, receives both the painful and the pleasant impressions of the Society in the midst of which he was born.” Showing that Tolstóy had already taken just this standpoint in some of his works; for example, in describing the death of the horse-driver in _Three Deaths_, Homyakóff concluded by saying: “Yes, you have been, and you will be one of those who denounce the evils of Society. Continue to follow the excellent way you have chosen.”[25]