What Is Art‪?‬

What Is Art? (1897) is the most ambitious late work of Tolstoy's religious-aesthetic period — a sustained attempt by the author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina to answer the apparently simple question of his title and to draw out its uncomfortable consequences for the art of his own time.

Tolstoy's answer is severe. Art, he argues, is the conscious transmission of feeling from one person to another by external signs. What makes art good is the quality of the feeling transmitted, the clarity of the transmission, and the moral worth of what the feeling unites people in. By that standard, most of the celebrated art of his own century — including Shakespeare, Beethoven's late quartets, and Tolstoy's own War and Peace and Anna Karenina — falls short, while the folk songs of Russian peasants exemplify true art.