What Is Art?Leo Tolstoy
About What Is Art?
Tolstoy published in 1897, after fifteen years of the moral crisis that followed . The book is an attack on the entire aesthetic tradition from Plato through Hegel, and a demand that art justify itself by a single criterion: the transmission of feeling from artist to audience.
Art is not beauty. Tolstoy rejects this identification with blunt force, arguing that "beauty" has meant whatever each philosopher needed it to mean, and that the pursuit of beauty has produced an art that serves the pleasures of the wealthy while remaining unintelligible to ordinary people. Real art is defined by its function: it infects the receiver with the feeling the artist experienced. If the infection occurs, the work is art, regardless of its technical sophistication. If it does not, the work fails, no matter how celebrated.
From this criterion Tolstoy derives a harsh verdict on most of what the cultivated world admires. Beethoven's late works, Wagner's operas, his own earlier novels: all are condemned as exclusive, obscure, or counterfeit. The highest art, he argues, is that which transmits the feeling of universal brotherhood, the religious consciousness of the age. Peasant songs, simple stories, parables. The book alienated nearly every literary ally Tolstoy had. It remains the most uncompromising case that art is answerable to moral life, not autonomous from it.