A Public Empire by Pravilova Ekaterina

Author:Pravilova, Ekaterina
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2014-12-24T16:00:00+00:00

Lev Tolstoy: Can the Public Be an Heir?

Perhaps the call of public enlightenment sounded attractive to populist politicians, but not to writers. Cases of voluntary surrender of copyright were rare113 and remained largely unknown, with the significant exception of Lev Tolstoy.114 Tolstoy thought private land ownership was a sin; similarly, he denied the right of authors to get income for “telling the truth.” The semantic parallel between land and literary work was ubiquitous: both were seen as the most unnatural forms of property, so that Tolstoy’s refusal of his rights to a land estate and literary income were closely connected and almost simultaneous.115 Yet it is nonetheless possible that the debates on literary property in Russia and the critique of the privatization of cultural heritage also played a role in the formation of Tolstoy’s attitude to literary “estates.”

On September 16, 1891, Tolstoy sent his open letter to the editors of two newspapers, The Russian Bulletin (Russkie vedomosti) and The New Time (Novoe vremia),116 declaring that anyone could publish in Russia and abroad, in Russian and in translations, and stage in theaters any of Tolstoy’s works written after 1881 and published in the twelfth and thirteenth volumes of the most recent edition. Many newspapers republished this announcement with comments. The reaction of most of them was rather cynical:117 newspapers presented Tolstoy’s initiative as falling short of its goal of making his works widely available. The Daily News (Novosti Dnia) sarcastically remarked: “Now to the free gifts of nature—air and water—the works of Lev Tolstoy have been added.”118 Indeed, the journalists jeered at the very principle of his partial denunciation: after all, Tolstoy’s most popular writings (War and Peace, Anna Karenina, and others) remained under the protection of copyright. The twelfth and the thirteenth volumes contained his philosophical writings, moralizing fairy tales for the people, “The Death of Ivan Ilych,” “The Kreutzer Sonata,” the play “The Power of Darkness,” and other recent works.119 In any case, observers regretted that the public would not benefit from such a benevolent act because the denunciation of copyright would enrich publishers instead of readers.120 The unwillingness to circumscribe the transfer of works into public domain by rules and conditions that could help avoid speculation turned out to be most disappointing: “What is the good in unselfishness if it results from insensibility, laxity and civil indifference,” wrote The Daily News. Why did Tolstoy not use the income from his works for hunger relief,121 or for the assistance of poor writers, as did the poet Semen Nadson (1862–1887), who had bequeathed the income from his posthumous publications to the Literary Fund?122 It turned out that it was not enough to grant literary works to the public: in the absence of the institutional embodiment of the public, such a move was thought to be useless. Critics of Tolstoy’s benevolent but clumsy act predicted that in the absence of any conditions and rules regarding the publication of works that entered the public domain, the quality of copyright-free editions would inevitably deteriorate.

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