Recommendations
Books Like What Is Art?
Tolstoy condemns Shakespeare and Beethoven — the most polemical work of aesthetic criticism
What Is Art? (1897) argues that genuine art communicates feeling between all human beings — and that most of what Western culture calls great art (Shakespeare, Beethoven, Wagner, Tolstoy's own Anna Karenina) fails this test. The most controversial critical work in Russian literature.
- 1Buy on Amazon
A Confession
by Leo Tolstoy
The essential companion — the spiritual conversion that underlies What Is Art?'s aesthetic framework
- 2Buy on Amazon
The Death of Ivan Ilyich
by Leo Tolstoy
The essential companion in fiction — written under the same moral framework; the aesthetic principle applied
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The Kreutzer Sonata
by Leo Tolstoy
The essential companion in late fiction — including the explicit critique of music that drives men to violence
- 4Buy on Amazon
Hadji Murat
by Leo Tolstoy
His final novella — the essential companion showing what his late aesthetic principles produced when applied freely
- 5Buy on Amazon
The Seagull
by Anton Chekhov
The essential companion — Konstantin's argument for new art against the old; the theatrical response to the same questions Tolstoy raises
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Buy on AmazonThe Birth of Tragedy
by Friedrich Nietzsche
The essential European companion in aesthetic argument — representing the aesthetic philosophy Tolstoy most directly opposed
- 7
Buy on AmazonA Room of One's Own
by Virginia Woolf
The essential twentieth-century companion in the tradition of the sustained essay on art and its conditions
- 8Buy on Amazon
A Diary of a Writer
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The essential companion from the Russian tradition — Dostoevsky's own aesthetic views as the necessary contrast to Tolstoy's
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