What Is Art?
Translated by Aylmer Maude
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This book challenges readers to rethink the purpose of art, offering a radical moral framework that connects creativity to human unity and social justice.
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Book Summary
Tolstoy argues that true art is the sincere transmission of feeling that unites people, guided by religious perception. He condemns counterfeit art—elite, pleasure-driven, and professional—as a perversion that corrupts society. The book calls for a future art accessible to all, fostering universal brotherhood.
Tolstoy begins by exposing the confusion in defining art, critiquing aesthetic theories that equate art with beauty or pleasure. He surveys philosophers from Kant to Hegel, showing their definitions are circular and class-biased. His central thesis is the infection theory: art transmits feelings from artist to audience, and its value depends on its moral and religious quality. He traces how upper-class art lost its way after abandoning early Christian ideals, adopting beauty as a false standard. This counterfeit art—driven by professionalism, profit, and exclusivity—is unintelligible to working people and corrupts society. Tolstoy contrasts it with true art, which arises from an inner need to express feelings that unite all humanity. He envisions a future art based on universal religious perception, produced by all gifted individuals, not just professionals. The book concludes that art, guided by true science and religion, can transform brotherhood into an instinct, replacing coercion with free unity. Appendices include sarcastic summaries of Wagner's Ring cycle and translations of decadent French poetry, illustrating the perversions he condemns.
Reading guide
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Character guides, themes, chapter companions — plus Character Web, narrative arc, and theme heatmap teasers that unlock fully beside the text in BetterReads.
Narrative arc
Story tension across the book.
- Setup
- Escalation
- Breaking point
Leo Tolstoy
Tolstoy writes as both insider and prosecutor: a novelist of genius who now insists that most celebrated art is counterfeit, and that only sincere feeling, accessible to the uneducated, counts. His argument draws on his own crisis of faith, his readings of Plato and Aristotle, and his contempt for the leisured classes who consume art they did not earn. The treatise's early chapters dismantle beauty-based theories, setting up the moral test he will apply to Wagner, the decadents, and his own past work.
Richard Wagner
Wagner is the living test case for Tolstoy's charge that modern art has lost the capacity to transmit real feeling, substituting technical ambition and borrowed emotion. Tolstoy grants Wagner's fame and the devotion of his admirers, then argues that his attempt to fuse music and drama violates the separate realms of each art, producing effects that imitate sincerity without possessing it. Wagner's prestige makes him the pivot of the treatise's middle chapters, where Tolstoy turns from theory to the damning evidence of celebrated works.
Siegfried
Hero of Wagner's Ring cycle, discussed as a mythical figure.
Brünnhilda
Valkyrie in Wagner's Ring, central to the opera's plot.
Ludwig van Beethoven
Composer cited as an example of true art by Tolstoy.
Charles Baudelaire
French poet criticized for decadent and obscure art.
True Art vs. Counterfeit Art
Tolstoy distinguishes genuine art, which transmits sincere feelings and unites people, from counterfeit art, which is produced for profit, relies on imitation, effect, or borrowing, and fails to infect the audience with a genuine emotion.
Art and Morality
The book argues that art is inseparable from morality and religious perception; art that serves only pleasure or sensuality is harmful, while true art transmits feelings that advance human brotherhood and spiritual progress.
Social Class and Exclusivity in Art
Tolstoy critiques the art of the upper classes as exclusive, inaccessible to the common people, and dependent on the labor of the masses, arguing that this art is perverted and disconnected from universal human experience.
Religious Perception as the Guide for Art
The author asserts that true art must be guided by the highest religious perception of its time, which in the modern era is the ideal of universal brotherhood and unity, rather than by doctrines of any particular church.