What is Art? - Couverture souple

Tolstoy, Leo

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1500556548 ISBN 13 : 9781500556549

Editeur : CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2014

Synopsis

2014 paperback edition of Leo Tolstoy's controversial indictment of æsthetic theory. Tolstoy contends that much of European art since the Renaissance is not "true" art but "counterfeit" art, marked by being mannered, imitative, sensationalist, and overly intellectual. Few of the most highly regarded masters in the canon of art history are spared Tolstoy’s scathing criticisms — Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Bach, Beethoven, Wagner, Baudelaire, Zola, and many others, are derided as insincere, decadent, and obsessed with erotic mania. Even the concept of beauty is exposed as a manipulative, calculating, and perverse obsession of the upper class, largely produced at the expense of the laboring class. The cover is a portrait of Tolstoy painted by Ilya Repin.

A propos du livre

Book Description :

A major and provocative work of criticism by the author of Anna Karenina and War and Peace.

From the Back Cover :

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.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Date d'édition: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1500556548
• ISBN 13: 9781500556549
• Reliure: Paperback
• Nombre de pages: 174
• Éditeur: Diederichsen Mark