TY  - BOOK
AU  - Tolstoy,Leo
TI  - What is art?
T2  - Penguin classics
SN  - 0140446427 (pbk.)
AV  - BH39 .T62413 1995
U1  - 700/.1 21
PY  - 1995///
CY  - London, New York
PB  - Penguin Books
KW  - Arts
KW  - Philosophy
KW  - Arts and morals
KW  - Visual arts
N1  - Includes bibliographical references (p. xxv-[xxvi])
N2  - 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
ER  -