Completed in 1897 and first issued in Aylmer Maude's English translation in 1898, Leo Tolstoy's What Is Art? is not a neutral survey of artistic theories. It is a sustained attempt to overturn the standards by which modern European culture identifies, values and supports art. Tolstoy writes as a celebrated novelist who has become deeply suspicious of the cultural world that praised him. He asks why societies devote immense labour and wealth to theatres, operas, galleries and literary institutions while many people endure poverty, exhausting work and exclusion from the very culture they help to maintain. The question in the title is therefore inseparable from moral and social questions: what is art, whom does it serve, what does it communicate, and what could justify its cost?
Tolstoy begins by rejecting the assumption that art is whatever produces beauty. Philosophers and critics have offered incompatible definitions of beauty, often treating pleasure, perfection, harmony or some metaphysical reality as though these terms explained one another. For Tolstoy, this confusion is not accidental. A theory centred on beauty allows cultivated audiences to call whatever pleases them "art" and then to treat their own trained preferences as authoritative. It protects established institutions without supplying a clear criterion by which artistic activity can be distinguished from entertainment, display or imitation.
His alternative begins from communication. Human beings use words to transmit thoughts; through art they transmit feelings. A person experiences an emotion and, by arranging movements, sounds, colours, forms or words, enables others to share it. Tolstoy calls this process "infection." The term is deliberately immediate: a work functions as art when the audience is drawn into the feeling expressed and experiences a bond with the artist and with others who receive the same expression. Art is therefore not defined by beauty, technical accomplishment, rarity, professional recognition or the social position of its maker. It is a fundamental form of human relationship.
This definition separates two questions that are frequently confused. First, is an object genuinely art: does it communicate a feeling? Second, is it good art: is the feeling worth communicating, and is it conveyed powerfully? Tolstoy judges the strength of artistic communication by individuality, clarity and sincerity. A feeling must bear the distinctive character of the person expressing it; the form must make that feeling accessible; and the artist must genuinely experience what is communicated rather than manufacture an effect for prestige or payment. Sincerity is the most important condition because it gives force to the other two.
Yet infectiousness alone does not establish moral value. A powerful work can spread pride, cruelty, sensuality or hostility. Tolstoy therefore evaluates the subject matter of art by what he calls the religious perception of an age: its deepest understanding of the meaning and direction of human life. His own standard is an uncompromising Christian ethic of universal fellowship. The best art either communicates feelings arising from humanity's movement towards loving union or expresses simple feelings of ordinary life that can be shared across classes and nations. Bad art intensifies separation, domination, luxury, patriotic hatred or exclusive pleasure.
Tolstoy's use of "religious" does not simply mean conformity to church doctrine. Indeed, he is sharply critical of institutional religion when it supports violence, hierarchy or empty ceremony. Religious perception refers to the governing moral orientation by which a society distinguishes what advances human life from what degrades it. Readers who do not share Tolstoy's Christianity can still recognise the philosophical structure of his claim: aesthetic judgement cannot finally be detached from an account of what human beings owe one another and what forms of life are worth sustaining.
Much of the book attacks the art of Europe's privileged classes. When upper-class society ceased to share a living moral outlook with the wider population, Tolstoy argues, its art narrowed into the pursuit of pleasure. It became expensive, professionally manufactured and increasingly unintelligible to ordinary people. Difficulty then acquired prestige. Critics, academies and specialists trained audiences to admire works that did not communicate directly, while claims about genius or the judgement of an elite insulated those works from ordinary testing. Tolstoy's extended criticism of Wagner is meant to show how borrowed myth, spectacle, repetition and technical effects can simulate artistic significance without transmitting a sincere feeling.
The polemic is intentionally severe. Tolstoy dismisses or criticises many writers, painters and composers whom readers continue to regard as major artists, and his examples sometimes depend too heavily on his personal responses. "Infection" can also be difficult to measure: audiences differ, unfamiliar forms may require patient attention, and challenging art can become intelligible without being counterfeit. His moral criterion risks narrowing art to approved feelings, while his account of universal accessibility may undervalue traditions whose meanings depend upon particular histories and communities. These are serious objections rather than minor qualifications.
Nevertheless, the book remains philosophically important because it refuses to let prestige substitute for explanation. It asks who performs the hidden labour behind cultural production, who is able to participate, and how institutions teach people what to admire. It distinguishes artistic communication from beauty and technical skill, treats accessibility as a matter of justice, and challenges the doctrine that art exists beyond moral evaluation. Its discussion anticipates continuing debates about public funding, cultural authority, popular and elite art, propaganda, commercial entertainment, appropriation and the social responsibilities of artists.
The argument develops across twenty chapters. Chapters I-IV expose the human cost of established art and the instability of beauty-centred aesthetics. Chapter V supplies Tolstoy's communicative definition. Chapters VI-X explain how elite culture lost a shared moral standard and became exclusive and obscure. Chapters XI-XIV identify counterfeits and the institutions that reproduce them. Chapters XV-XVI establish the formal and moral tests of good art. Chapters XVII-XX examine the damage caused by corrupted art and describe a future art directed towards fellowship, universality and cooperation with genuine science.
What Is Art? is best read neither as an infallible list of acceptable works nor as a curiosity produced by Tolstoy's religious conversion. Its lasting value lies in the pressure it places upon aesthetic judgement. If art is a human practice sustained by labour, education and institutions, then its value cannot be settled merely by saying that beauty is subjective or that experts have approved it. Tolstoy compels readers to ask what a work shares, what relationships it creates, what exclusions support it and what conception of human life it helps to make imaginable.