What is art? / Leo Tolstoy ; translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Tolstoy, Leo, graf, 1828-1910

Contributor:

Gotham Book Mart Collection (University of Pennsylvania)

Series:

Penguin classics

Standardized Title:

Chto takoe iskusstvo? English

Language:

English

Russian

Subjects (All):

Arts--Philosophy.

Arts.

Arts and morals.

Penn Provenance:

Gotham Book Mart (former owner) (Gotham Book Mart Collection copies 1 & 2)

Physical Description:

xxv pages, i unnumbered page, 201 pages ; 20 cm.

Place of Publication:

Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England ; New York : Penguin Books, 1995.

Summary:

During the decades of his world fame as sage and preacher as well as author of War and Peace and Anna Karenin, Tolstoy wrote prolifically in a series of essays and polemics on issues of morality, social justice and religion. These culminated in What is Art?, published in 1898. Although Tolstoy perceived the question of art to be a religious one, he considered and rejected the idea that art reveals and reinvents through beauty. The works of Dante, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Beethoven, Baudelaire and even his own novels are condemned in the course of Tolstoy's impassioned and iconoclastic redefinition of art as a force for good, for the progress and improvement of mankind. In his illuminating preface Richard Pevear considers What is Art? in relation to the problems of faith and doubt, and the spiritual anguish and fear of death which preoccupied Tolstoy in the last decades of his life.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages xxv-[xxvi]).

ISBN:

0140446427

OCLC:

162145550