PECULIARITIES OF CONCEPTUALIZATION OF ART IN L.N.TOLSTOY'S PUBLICIST WRITING

The article deals with the conceptualization of art in the works of Tolstoy in his publicist writings. The conceptualization is a complex amalgam of ordinary and scholarly consciousness. Tolstoy presents his point of view on the basis of the extensive theoretical and empirical material, theories of love, non-resistance to evil by violence, the meaning of human life, the structure of society. The main means of explication of knowledge include synonymy, antonymy, comparison of related concepts, highlighting the key differential features, and metaphorization. Tolstoy understands art as an activity, a pastime, a spiritual entity. The thinker organically uses rational and emotional tactics of narration. The outcome of Tolstoy's thinking is a classification of art built on the principle of dichotomy: art is divided into true and false, and the true one, in turn, is divided into religious and common (worldly). The conceptualization of art is linked to the identification of its main features: expression of the law of universal love, uniqueness, contagiousness, clarity and simplicity, and its functions: to be a means of communication, to suppress low feelings and develop high ones, to make a person morally strong. The conceptualisation of art has been found to have an explicit vectorial marking, directed towards the future.