What Is Art?
In this scandalous 1897 treatise, the author of War and Peace commits artistic regicide. Tolstoy rejects the entire Western canon's definition of art as beauty, instead arguing that true art transmits genuine emotion from artist to audience, whether through a child's joke or a church service. The real controversy lies in what follows: he systematically dismantles the giants, Beethoven, Wagner, Shakespeare, Dante, Baudelaire, before turning his gun on himself, condemning Anna Karenina and War and Peace as failed art. His criteria are ruthless yet compelling: authentic art must unite humanity and foster moral goodness, not obscure meaning behind elite complexity. Though his Christian moralism saturates every page, the book endures because it asks a question we still grapple with: what is art actually for? For readers who want their assumptions about culture disturbed.
