What Is Art? + Wherein Is Truth in Art?

Description

In What Is Art? and the companion inquiry Wherein Is Truth in Art? , Leo Tolstoy mounts one of the nineteenth century’s most uncompromising attacks on aestheticism. Rejecting beauty, pleasure, and technical refinement as sufficient measures of artistic value, he defines art as the sincere transmission of feeling from creator to audience. Written in a lucid, polemical style rather than a systematic academic idiom, the work intervenes in debates shaped by Romantic genius, realism, religious ethics, and fin-de-siècle decadence, judging art by its moral intelligibility and human fellowship. Tolstoy wrote these essays after the spiritual crisis that transformed the author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina into a radical Christian moralist. His later life was marked by distrust of institutions, wealth, violence, and elite culture; accordingly, he scrutinizes Shakespeare, Wagner, church art, and fashionable criticism with the severity of a prophet. His own artistic greatness gives the argument its peculiar force: it is a master novelist questioning the civilization that canonized him. This volume is indispensable for readers interested in aesthetics, ethics, Russian literature, and the social purpose of art. Even where Tolstoy’s judgments provoke resistance, his demand that art matter to ordinary human beings remains bracing and urgent.