What is Art?

Born into the highest echelons of Russian nobility, Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (1828–1910) became one of the undisputed masters of realist fiction. After witnessing the brutal realities of combat firsthand as an artillery officer during the Crimean War, he turned his penetrating intellect toward dissecting the vast, intricate mechanics of Russian society. His prose is celebrated for its breathtaking dual capacity: he could seamlessly orchestrate the sweeping, panoramic chaos of a battlefield while simultaneously capturing the quietest, most intimate tremors of the human heart.

In his later years, Tolstoy experienced a profound spiritual and existential crisis. He publicly rejected his aristocratic wealth, his copyrights, and the Russian Orthodox Church, developing a radical, ascetic philosophy of Christian anarchism and strict pacifism. His later philosophical essays on nonviolent resistance would eventually exert a massive influence on global leaders like Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. While his rigid ideological shifts alienated him from his family and contemporaries, his immense literary achievements continue to stand as towering pillars of world literature.

Essential Reading

• War and Peace (1869): An epic, sprawling masterpiece that masterfully interweaves the personal lives of several aristocratic families against the terrifying, world-altering backdrop of Napoleon's invasion of Russia.
• Anna Karenina (1877): A tragic, psychologically devastating exploration of a doomed extramarital affair and the suffocating hypocrisy of high society, famously declared by William Faulkner as the best novel ever written.
• The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886): A profound, deeply unsettling novella that relentlessly examines the nature of mortality and the terrifying realization of having lived an empty, superficial life.
• Resurrection (1899): His final major novel, a fierce, highly political condemnation of the Russian justice system and the institutional church, driven by a wealthy nobleman's desperate quest for spiritual redemption.