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WorkLeo Tolstoy

What Is Art?

Art as the passing of a feeling from one person to another: a test that Beethoven's Ninth and most of Tolstoy's own fiction fail.

by Leo Tolstoy541 passages held

  • Russian, the original language
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Original title
Что такое искусство?
First published
(aged 69)
Original language
Russian

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Overview

The book opens backstage at the rehearsal of an ordinary new opera. Tolstoy is led past exhausted stagehands in the dark, then watches, through a rehearsal that lasts six hours, a director shouting at a chorus of costumed Indians bringing on a bride, and asks what all that labour and humiliation is for. He had been thinking about art, he says at the end, for fifteen years. The philosophers of beauty from Baumgarten and Kant onward could not tell him, because in his view beauty was the wrong place to start. Art, he argues, is a way people communicate: someone who has felt something passes the feeling on through words, sounds, lines or movements, and others are infected by it. What matters is whether the infection happens and how sincere it is, and the best art carries the feelings that unite people, which for Tolstoy meant the religious understanding of his own time, the brotherhood of all people. Measured that way, most of what Europe's upper classes called art was counterfeit, and Tolstoy said so by name: the French poets Baudelaire, Verlaine and Mallarmé; Wagner, whose Siegfried he describes scene by scene; the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven. His own fiction went into the same class, all but two short stories, "God Sees the Truth, but Waits" and "A Prisoner of the Caucasus". The Moscow journal Voprosy filosofii i psikhologii (Questions of Philosophy and Psychology) printed it across the turn of 1897 and 1898, after the censors, including the church censor, had struck out passages and whole chapters. At the same time his English translator, Aylmer Maude, published it complete in England. The painter Isaac Levitan said it had caused a real uproar, and a long argument followed in the Russian press.

Key concepts

How does Tolstoy define art in What Is Art?

As the passing of a feeling from one person to others. Someone who has felt something transmits it through words, sounds, lines or movements, and those who receive it are infected by the same feeling. The definition makes art a form of communication between people, not a class of beautiful objects. What matters is whether the infection happens, and how sincere it is.

Why does Tolstoy reject beauty as the basis of art?

Because it could not tell him what art is. The philosophers of beauty from Baumgarten and Kant onward had built aesthetics on it, and Tolstoy found their answers useless for the question he was asking: what all that labour and humiliation at an opera rehearsal was for. Starting instead from communication, he could ask of any work whether a feeling actually passed between people.

What is counterfeit art, according to Tolstoy?

Work that has the look of art without doing what art does. Measured by whether a sincere feeling is actually passed on, most of what Europe's upper classes admired fails, and Tolstoy named Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarmé, Wagner's Siegfried and Beethoven's Ninth. Counterfeit art may be skilled, costly and applauded; what it lacks is the genuine infection that makes something art at all.

What makes art good, and not merely art, in What Is Art?

The feelings it carries. Infection decides whether something is art; the quality of the feeling decides its worth. The best art, for Tolstoy, carries the feelings that unite people, and he took these from the religious understanding of his own time: the brotherhood of all people. Art that carries feelings which divide people may still infect, but it cannot be the best.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Art as a Feeling Passed From One Person to Another

What is art, if beauty is the wrong place to start? Tolstoy's answer is a feeling passed on by one person and caught by others, and the whole book follows from it.

The philosophers of beauty from Baumgarten and Kant onward could not tell Tolstoy what art was, because in his view beauty was the wrong place to start. Art is a way people communicate: someone who has felt something passes the feeling on through words, sounds, lines or movements, and others are infected by it. Two questions then decide everything, whether the infection happens and how sincere it is. Pleasure and polish drop out of the definition, and that is what lets the test cut so deep.

  • definition of art
  • artistic communication
  • emotional contagion
  • emotion
  • aesthetics
  • beauty
  • pleasure
  • aesthetic experience
  • authenticity
  • artistic authenticity

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Counterfeit Art and the Upper Classes

How much of what Europe's educated classes called art would survive an honest test? Most of it fails, Tolstoy argues, Beethoven's Ninth and his own novels included.

It opens backstage at an opera rehearsal, where exhausted stagehands work in the dark and a director shouts at a costumed chorus for six hours, and asks what all that labour and humiliation is for. Measured by infection and sincerity, most of what Europe's upper classes called art was counterfeit, and Tolstoy named names: Baudelaire, Verlaine and Mallarmé; Wagner, whose Siegfried he describes scene by scene; the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven. His own novels went into the same class, except for two short stories.

  • art criticism
  • aesthetic judgment
  • taste
  • social class
  • class
  • opera
  • music
  • poetry
  • literature
  • labor
  • audience
  • imitation

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The Feelings That Unite People

Once any sincere feeling can make something art, which feelings should art carry? The best, for Tolstoy, are those that bind people together in the brotherhood of all.

Infection alone makes something art; it does not make it good. The best art, Tolstoy argues, carries the feelings that unite people, and for him that meant the religious understanding of his own time, the brotherhood of all people. Here the book parts most sharply from the aesthetics it attacks. Art answers not to taste or to the approval of connoisseurs but to the religious understanding of its age, and its worth is measured by whether it draws people together or keeps them apart.

  • art and morality
  • art and society
  • social unity
  • universality
  • religion
  • christianity

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Within this work

passages held
541
distinct concepts
551
by passages held, corpus-wide
#135

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “aesthetics” and “beauty”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 22 pairings. 87 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
aestheticsbeauty61
aestheticsart20
aestheticsreligion19
artbeauty18
artemotion17
artreligion16
aesthetic judgmentart10
aesthetic judgmentart criticism10
aestheticsart criticism6
aestheticsemotion6
emotionmusic6
art criticismmusic5
artmusic4
aesthetic judgmentmusic3
aestheticsmusic2
art criticismreligion2
beautyreligion2
emotionreligion2
aesthetic judgmentbeauty1
aesthetic judgmentemotion1
art criticismemotion1
beautyemotion1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1884 A Confession (Исповедь)

    Tolstoy submitted it as an introduction to a larger, then-unpublished work, his critique of church theology and his own reading of the Gospels, and it stands at the door of everything he wrote after his conversion.

     RU
  2. 1885 What I Believe (В чём моя вера?)

    A statement of positive faith, written between 1882 and 1884: where A Confession ends at the threshold of belief, this book sets out what the belief is.

     RU
  3. 1886 What Then Must We Do? (Так что же нам делать?)

    Of all Tolstoy's post-conversion books, this is the one that starts in the street: it turns the religious conclusions of What I Believe onto money, work and the city he was living in.

     RU
  4. 1888 On Life (О жизни)

    After the social criticism of What Then Must We Do?, it gives Tolstoy's religious turn the form of a philosophical treatise, tried out first on Moscow's university philosophers.

     RU
  5. 1892 The Four Gospels Harmonized and Translated (Соединение и перевод четырёх Евангелий)

    The workshop behind What I Believe and everything after it, and the long study that A Confession was written to introduce: a work of translation and commentary rather than argument.

     RU
  6. 1893 Religion and Morality (Религия и нравственность)

    In the same year he finished The Kingdom of God Is Within You, Tolstoy set down here, in compact form, what he meant by religion.

     RU
  7. 1893 The Kingdom of God Is Within You (Царство Божие внутри вас)

    The doctrine of non-resistance that What I Believe set out as a personal faith is here turned against the state itself.

     RU
  8. 1897 What Is Art? (Что такое искусство?) you are here RU
  9. 1900 Patriotism and Government (Патриотизм и правительство)

    It follows "Christianity and Patriotism" (1894) and "Patriotism or Peace?" (1896), and goes further than either, from the feeling itself to the governments that live by it.

     RU
  10. 1908 I Cannot Be Silent (Не могу молчать!)

    Two years before his death, Tolstoy turned from the treatise to the newspaper page: a signed article addressed to everyone who ordered, carried out or lived by the executions of 1908.

     RU
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