What Is Art? is an 1897 philosophical treatise by Leo Tolstoy that lays out his philosophy of aesthetics. Rejecting notions of aesthetics that center around beauty, Tolstoy instead posits that art is defined by its role in transmitting feelings between human beings, and that its quality should be judged by whether those feelings align with a society's highest moral and religious ideals.
Tolstoy makes a number of unconventional aesthetic judgments in the course of the book, dismissing works like Wagner's operas, Romeo and Juliet, and even his own War and Peace and Anna Karenina as "bad art," while praising Dickens' A Christmas Carol and Hugo's Les Miserables as examples of the highest art.
Readers who love Tolstoy's fiction will find this a fascinating, sometimes contrarian look at the mind behind it, and a bracing challenge to anyone's assumptions about what makes art good.
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