| What Is Art? Revised Edition Contributor(s): Tolstoy, Leo (Author), Pevear, Richard (Translator), Volokhonsky, Larissa (Translator) |
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ISBN: 0140446427 ISBN-13: 9780140446425 Publisher: Penguin Group OUR PRICE: $13.50 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: January 1996 Annotation: During the decades of his world fame as sage and preacher as well as author of War and Peace and Anna Karenin, Tolstoy wrote prolifically in a series of essays and polemics on issues of morality, social justice and religion. These culminated in What is Art?, published in 1898. Although Tolstoy perceived the question of art to be a religious one, he considered and rejected the idea that art reveals and reinvents through beauty. The works of Dante, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Beethoven, Baudelaire and even his own novels are condemned in the course of Tolstoy's impassioned and iconoclastic redefinition of art as a force for good, for the progress and improvement of mankind. In his illuminating preface Richard Pevear considers What is Art? in relation to the problems of faith and doubt, and the spiritual anguish and fear of death which preoccupied Tolstoy in the last decades of his life. |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Literary Collections | Essays - Philosophy | Aesthetics - Art | Criticism & Theory |
| Dewey: 700.1 |
| LCCN: 96140922 |
| Series: Penguin Classics |
| Physical Information: 0.56" H x 5.01" W x 7.7" (0.41 lbs) 240 pages |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: This profound analysis of the nature of art is the culmination of a series of essays and polemics on issues of morality, social justice, and religion. Considering and rejecting the idea that art reveals and reinvents through beauty, Tolstoy perceives the question of the nature of art to be a religious one. Ultimately, he concludes, art must be a force for good, for the progress and improvement of mankind. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators. |