What Is Art?

Leo Tolstoy's What is Art? is a philosophical polemic that challenges the foundations of Western aesthetic theory and proposes a radically different understanding of art's purpose. The work proceeds by dismantling existing definitions of art, offering a new definition, and tracing the social and moral consequences of what Tolstoy considers a centuries-long corruption of artistic life.

Tolstoy opens by cataloguing the enormous resources modern society devotes to art: government subsidies for museums, conservatories, and theatres; hundreds of thousands of workers laboring to meet artistic demands; and people who from early childhood devote their lives to narrow physical training. He recounts attending a rehearsal of a new opera whose plot bears no resemblance to real life, where a conductor screams insults at musicians for hours. The scene raises the work's central question: Does art justify these sacrifices?

The common answer, that art manifests beauty, proves inadequate. Despite 150 years of aesthetic philosophy since Alexander Baumgarten founded the discipline in 1750, no consensus on beauty's meaning has emerged. Tolstoy surveys the major theorists, from Baumgarten through Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and finds irreconcilable contradictions. All definitions reduce to two views: the objective-mystical (beauty as a manifestation of God or the absolute) and the subjective-practical (beauty as disinterested pleasure). Both amount to the same thing: Beauty is what pleases without arousing lust. Defining art by pleasure, Tolstoy contends, is like defining food by the pleasure of eating, which would elevate cayenne pepper over nourishing bread.

Tolstoy proposes his own definition. Art is a means of communion among people, analogous to speech. Just as speech conveys thoughts, art conveys feelings. A person who has experienced a feeling expresses it through movements, lines, colors, sounds, or words so that others experience the same feeling, a process Tolstoy calls "infection." His central definition, stated in a standalone paragraph, reads: "Art is that human activity which consists in one man's consciously conveying to others, by certain external signs, the feelings he has experienced, and in others being infected by those feelings and also experiencing them" (40). Throughout history, the feelings society singled out as most significant were those arising from religious consciousness, the highest understanding of life's meaning shared by a given society.

Tolstoy then traces how Western art went wrong. Religious consciousness, he maintains, has always provided the standard for evaluating art. Early Christians valued art that conveyed love, humility, and self-denial. But wholesale conversions by rulers such as the Roman emperor Constantine and Prince Vladimir of Kievan Rus produced a Church Christianity closer to paganism than to Christ's actual teaching. After the Crusades, the European upper classes lost faith in Church doctrine yet could not embrace genuine Christianity, whose principles of brotherhood and equality would have undermined their privileges. Left without authentic faith, they returned to a pagan worldview locating meaning in personal pleasure. The so-called Renaissance, Tolstoy argues, was the replacement of religious consciousness with beauty understood as pleasure.

Tolstoy dismantles the aesthetic trinity of the Good, the Beautiful, and the True. The good, he maintains, is life's highest aim, undefinable by reason. Beauty is merely what pleases and is often opposed to the good. Truth is the correspondence between expression and essence, useful for attaining the good but not equivalent to it. This false unification obliterated the distinction between good and bad art.

The separation of upper-class art from popular art impoverished art's content. Pleasure-based feelings are limited and quickly exhausted, reducing upper-class art's emotional range to three subjects: vanity, sexual lust, and the tedium of living. Art also became increasingly obscure, addressed only to a small circle of initiates. Tolstoy quotes Paul Verlaine's "Art Poétique," which advocates vagueness, and Stéphane Mallarmé's declaration that poetry should always contain enigma. Against such claims, Tolstoy insists that truly great art, from the Bible and Homer to folk songs, has always been universally understood.

Genuine art, Tolstoy argues, was replaced by counterfeits. He identifies four methods of falsification: borrowing (reusing subjects from earlier works), imitation (minute reproduction of external details), effectfulness (shocking contrasts and physical stimulation), and diversion (intellectual puzzles or deliberate obscurity). Three institutional conditions promote counterfeiting: professionalism, which weakens sincerity; art criticism, which establishes false canons of excellence; and art schools, which can teach only earlier techniques. As the Russian painter Karl Briullov observed, "Art begins where that little bit begins" (99).

Tolstoy devotes an extended critique to Richard Wagner's operas as the supreme example of counterfeit art. He describes attending a Moscow performance of Siegfried, noting the absurd costumes, the leitmotiv system (recurring musical phrases assigned to characters and objects), and a stage dragon with an electric light in its mouth. Wagner's works lack organic wholeness, and their success results from a masterful combination of all four counterfeiting methods, producing a hypnotic effect comparable to a spiritualist séance.

To illustrate genuine art, Tolstoy offers a series of contrasts. The singing of peasant women spontaneously infected everyone with joy, while a Beethoven sonata produced only artificially cultivated excitement. An anonymous story about a widow's Easter preparations transmitted authentic feeling, while celebrated novels by Émile Zola and Joris-Karl Huysmans left no genuine impression. A performance by the Vogul people depicting a hunter pursuing a reindeer and her calf made spectators weep, while a famous actor's Hamlet produced only discomfort.

From these examples, Tolstoy establishes infectiousness as the sole reliable sign of genuine art, dependent on three conditions: the particularity of the feeling conveyed, the clarity of its expression, and, most important, the sincerity of the artist. Sincerity subsumes the other two because a sincere artist naturally expresses feeling in a particular and clear way.

Turning to content, Tolstoy argues that the religious consciousness of the present age demands the brotherhood and loving union of all people. Two kinds of art meet this standard: religious art conveying feelings of love and human solidarity, and universal art conveying the simplest everyday feelings accessible to everyone. He cites Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities and The Chimes, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Fyodor Dostoevsky's The House of the Dead as examples. He condemns Ludwig van Beethoven's Ninth Symphony as bad art because its music cannot unite people who have not been specially trained to respond to it.

Tolstoy enumerates five harmful consequences of art's perversion: the waste of labor and lives on useless production; art-as-amusement enabling the wealthy to avoid confronting their lives' emptiness; the glorification of artists confusing ordinary people about values; the elevation of beauty above morality; and, most damaging, art's direct corruption of people through patriotic superstition and pervasive sensuality.

In his vision of the future, Tolstoy predicts that artists will no longer be professionals but gifted people from the whole population, creating from inner need. Future art will favor clarity and simplicity, and its content will be far richer, since even the most familiar phenomena of life call up new feelings when regarded from a Christian point of view.

Tolstoy concludes by linking art's corruption to a parallel corruption in science. Art, he declares, is not pleasure or amusement but "an organ of mankind's life, which transmutes people's reasonable consciousness into feeling" (165). Its task is to make the feelings of brotherhood and love habitual for all people, replacing external coercion with free inner transformation.