What is Art?

Written by Leo Tolstoy

Narrated by Malk Williams and Stéphane Cornicard

During the decades of his world fame as sage and preacher as well as author of War & Peace & Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy wrote prolifically in a series of essays and 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 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 improvement of humankind. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: SNR Audio
• Release date: Oct 13, 2022
• ISBN: 9781915268655

Leo Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy was born in 1828 in Tula, near Moscow. His parents, who both died when he was young, belonged to the Russian nobility, and to the end of his life Tolstoy remained conscious of his aristocratic status. His novels, ‘War and Peace’ and ‘Anna Karenina’ are literary classics and he is revered as one of the greatest writers of the nineteenth century. He died in 1910 at the age of 82.