What is art?

Following upwards of fifteen years of profound spiritual travail and philosophical contemplation, Leo Tolstoy sets forth in What is Art? a most devastating and revolutionary critique of modern aesthetics. Defying centuries of academic tradition, the Russian author categorically repudiates the notion that the chief end of art is the production of "beauty," or the mere purveyance of pleasure for a cultivated elite.

In its stead, Tolstoy redefines art as a vital instrument of communication and human fellowship. To his mind, a work is only true in so far as it effects an "infection of feeling": the artist must have experienced a genuine emotion and be capable of transmitting it with such lucidity and earnestness that any man—irrespective of his station or schooling—may partake in that selfsame feeling.

Beneath the measure of this strict and unyielding moral doctrine, Tolstoy brings the entirety of the Western canon to judgment. He casts down from their pedestals such hitherto untouchable luminaries as Shakespeare, Dante, Beethoven, Baudelaire, and Wagner, condemning their works as exclusive, incomprehensible, and wholly artificial. In an act of radical consistency, Tolstoy himself foreswears well-nigh the whole of his former literary output—not excepting War and Peace nor Anna Karenina—pleading rather for an art that is universal, pure, religious in its broadest conception, and wholly consecrated to the promotion of a universal brotherhood among all mankind.