Tolstoy questions

Is it enough for art to invoke sympathy, or should it really put the person in the artist's shoes and cause empathy?    

I wondered about this a lot after reading Tolstoy. 

em·pa·thy

1.
the intellectual identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another.

sym·pa·thy

1.
harmony of or agreement in feeling, as between persons or on the part of one person with respect to another.
2.
the harmony of feeling naturally existing between persons of like tastes or opinion or of congenial dispositions.
3.
the fact or power of sharing the feelings of another,especially in sorrow or trouble; fellow feeling, compassion,or commiseration.

In common usage, sympathy refers to feeling "for" someone, whereas empathy is more like feeling "with" someone. If your friend just went through a breakup and is very upset, you may be upset that she feels so sad and try to make her feel better. If you were feeling empathic towards her, though, you wouldn't be upset that she was sad, but angry at her boyfriend alongside her due to some understanding of why she felt that way. I feel that this difference is vital to Tolstoy's differentiation between what is and is not art. Sympathy is fairly easy to evoke because it really only involves understanding that something bad is happening to someone and you probably wouldn't want it to happen to you. Empathy is a much more complicated concept because it is very difficult to make someone truly understand an issue from your perspective. In the parable Tolstoy includes about the boy who is afraid of wolves, it would be possible to understand from an outside perspective that this person fears wolves and probably does not like to be around them or think about them while walking through a dark wood. This is sympathy -- feeling bad for his misfortune in fearing wolves. If the boy can tell a story that makes his audience fear wolves just as much as he does -- if he tells it so that when they go to sleep they can see eyes glowing in the darkest corner of the room and jump when they hear the neighbor's dog -- then they have truly absorbed his perspective, fully empathized, and the story is therefore art.