What Is Art? - Leo Tolstoy 1960 The Bobbs-Merrill Co vintage paperback

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Acceptable: Signs of wear and consistent use. Front cover has a small tear at bottom left side as well as the first page before the title page. Some notes and highlighting. There is some staining down the right side of the text block. See images for the condition of this book.

Blurb: During the decades of his world fame as sage & preacher as well as author of War & Peace & Anna Karenina, Tolstoy wrote prolifically in a series of essays & polemics on issues of morality, social justice & religion. These culminated in What is Art?, published in 1898. Although Tolstoy perceived the question of art to be a religious one, he considered & rejected the idea that art reveals & reinvents through beauty. The works of Dante, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Beethoven, Baudelaire & even his own novels are condemned in the course of Tolstoy's impassioned & iconoclastic redefinition of art as a force for good, for the improvement of humankind.