Tolstoy and Hens

The figure of Leo Tolstoy, a Russian writer, museumified through guano (chicken feces) was planned to be a literal realization of Tolstoy's idea of "simplification", i.e. of a radical rejection of the sophisticated cultural tool kit to use simple, artless means that seem to have come from reality. It is a well-known fact that Count Tolstoy beat his own hands after piano playing sessions and persecuted the minimum of metaphors in his late short stories "for children and the people". The original Tolstoy's idea of leaving the conventionality of art to reach absolute reality, to depict reality with the means of reality proper conceals both the great potential of Russian culture, and its great utopianism.