Leo Tolstoy,Aylmer Maude
During the decades of his world fame as sage & preacher as well as author of War & Peace & Anna Karenina, Tolstoy wrote prolifically in a series of essays & polemics on issues of morality, social justice & religion. These culminated in What is Art?, published in 1898. Although Tolstoy perceived the question of art to be a religious one, he considered & rejected the idea that art reveals & reinvents through beauty. The works of Dante, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Beethoven, Baudelaire & even his own novels are condemned in the course of Tolstoy's impassioned & iconoclastic redefinition of art as a force for good, for the improvement of humankind.
Philosophy,Art,Nonfiction,Cultural,Russia,Classics,Literature,Russian Literature,Literature,Writing,Essays,Criticism,Literary Criticism,Literature,19th Century
What Is Art?