“To evoke in oneself a feeling one has experienced, and having evoked it in oneself, then, by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others may experience this same feeling- this is the activity of art.Īrt is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by those feelings and also experience them.” The highlight of piece, as italicized by Tolstoy himself, is his definition of art and its aims: I should add that this definition, which I’m going to trash in this post of a few hundred or so words, took him nearly fifteen years to develop.Īfter writing Anna Karenina, Tolstoy went into an existential crisis of sorts that produced some very strange thoughts on writing and the purpose of art in general, and his treatise “ What is Art?”, published in 1896, highlights these odd opinions. And to my mind there could be no better way to do this than to posit that Leo Tolstoy, author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, manages to miss the entire point of art in his definition of the subject.
Since this marks my 50 th blog post, I decided that in honor of the occasion, I would join the time-honored blogging tradition of using this corner of web space as a soapbox.
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