What is Art? (Penguin Classics) - Softcover

Tolstoy, Leo

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140446427 ISBN 13: 9780140446425

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 1995

Synopsis

During the decades of his world fame, Tolstoy wrote this series of essays and polemics on issues of morality, social justice and religion. He considered and rejected the idea that art reveals and reinvents through beauty, although he perceived the question of art to be a religious one.

About this title

About the Author:

Count Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy was born in 1828 and educated privately. He studied Oriental languages and Law at the University of Kazan, then led a life of pleasure until he joined an artillery regiment in the Caucasus in 1851. He served during the Crimean War and after the defence of Sebastopol wrote The Sebastopol Sketches, which established his reputation. He continued to write while developing educational projects, writing War and Peace and Anna Karenina between 1865 and 1876. A Confession marked an outward change in his life and works: he became an extreme rationalist and moralist, and his theories led to his excommunication from the Russian Holy Synod in 1901. He died in 1910.

Richard Pevear has published translations of Alain, Yves Bonnefoy and Alberto Savinio, as well as two books of poetry. He and his wife, Larissa Volokhonsky, have translated works by Pavel Florensky, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Nikolai Gogol, among others. Their translation of The Brothers Karamazov received the PEN translation award in 1991. They live in France.

From the Back Cover:

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0140446427
• ISBN 13: 9780140446425
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240