About
Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) was a Russian novelist best known for War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1878), works often ranked among the greatest novels ever written. Following a moral and spiritual crisis in the 1870s, he turned toward Christian anarchism and pacifism, renouncing much of his earlier fiction as morally hollow. In the treatise What Is Art? (1897), he rejected definitions of art built on beauty or pleasure, arguing instead that art is the transmission of feeling: an artist calls up an emotion once experienced and communicates it to others through external signs so that they, too, come to feel it. He judged art's value by its 'infectiousness' and universality — its capacity to convey genuine, shared human feeling across class and culture — a standard by which he controversially dismissed even Shakespeare and Beethoven. His late writing on nonviolence, including correspondence with a young Gandhi, influenced 20th-century movements of nonviolent resistance.
Key Contributions
- Wrote War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1878), landmark works of world literature
- Argued in What Is Art? (1897) that art is the transmission of feeling from one person to another, not the pursuit of beauty
- Proposed 'infectiousness' and universality as the tests of genuine art, rejecting much celebrated art as insincere
- Developed a Christian anarchist and pacifist philosophy following his 1870s spiritual crisis
- Corresponded with a young Mohandas Gandhi, influencing the development of 20th-century nonviolent resistance
Questions they sharpened View the streams
Books
Connections
Ludwig Wittgenstein
InfluencedPhilosopher of Language & Logic
As a soldier in the First World War, Wittgenstein found Tolstoy's The Gospel in Brief in a bookshop in Tarnów and carried it everywhere, pressing it on anyone in distress until his fellow soldiers called him 'the man with the gospels.' The Tractatus, drafted in those same years, numbers its sentences in the book's peculiar way. The most austere work of logic of the century was written beside a novelist's account of what a life is for — and ends by pointing at what logic cannot say.
en.wikipedia.org
Ted Chiang
KindredScience Fiction Author
A resonance across a century rather than a citation. Tolstoy defined art as a feeling someone once lived and deliberately passes on to others; Chiang's 2024 essay 'Why A.I. Isn't Going to Make Art' argues that language requires an intention to communicate and that art is the sum of many such choices. Both put art on the sending side, in someone who meant it, which is why their answer to generated art is the same and is not settled by how good the output looks.
en.wikipedia.org · Ted Chiang, "Why A.I. Isn't Going to Make Art", The New Yorker, 31 Aug 2024
Arthur Danto
In contrastPhilosopher of Art & Critic
Tolstoy located art in feeling: an artist recalls an emotion once lived and passes it on through outward signs, so that others are infected with it, and the sincerity of the feeling is the measure. Danto, facing a Warhol Brillo Box no eye could tell from a supermarket carton, concluded that no perceptible property, and so no felt effect on the viewer, can decide what is art; a work is a meaning embodied within an artworld of theory and history. Asked of an AI image, Tolstoy wants to know whether anyone felt anything; Danto wants to know what it is about, and who it is saying that to.
en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org
