Leo Tolstoy

關於

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.