What Is Art? — Themes and Context

The Bodkin Gallery Incident

Tolstoy recounts visiting the Bodkin Art Gallery in Moscow with a lady artist. On a table lay a Parisian book of coloured pictures, admirably executed, depicting scenes in the private cabinets of a restaurant: women extravagantly dressed and partly undressed, exposing legs and breasts, men and women taking liberties, dancing the can-can. Tolstoy could not let his attention dwell on them without ill effects—they made him restless and nervous. When he suggested the subject-matter was objectionable, his companion, who prided herself on being an artist, replied with conscious superiority that from an artist's point of view the subject did not matter.

This episode crystallizes a central tension: the divorce between technical skill and moral effect. The pictures were well made, yet they infected the viewer with base feeling. Tolstoy uses the anecdote to challenge the doctrine of art for art's sake, which he sees as a cover for depravity. The lady artist's response represents a professional deformation—the belief that artistic execution absolves any content. Tolstoy insists that the infection of feeling is the sole measure, and that infection can be harmful.

Four Counterfeit Measures

Tolstoy identifies four methods that produce a semblance of art but are not art itself. The first is borrowing—the poetic, which merely recalls impressions from previous works. A work like Goethe's Faust may be full of mind and every beauty, but because it lacks the chief characteristic—completeness, oneness, the inseparable unity of form and contents expressing the artist's own feeling—it cannot produce a really artistic impression. Borrowing is a reflection of art, a simulation, like a coin that resembles real money.

The second is imitation, or realism, which describes accessories but does not infect. The third is strikingness, achieved by contrasts, tempests, moonlight, madness, murders, or in music by crescendo and unexpected harmonies. The fourth is interestingness, which absorbs the mind through intricate plot or detailed description of historical periods or contemporary life—Egyptian or Roman life, miners, clerks in a large shop. The reader mistakes this interest for an artistic impression. Tolstoy argues that none of these supply a standard of excellence; they have nothing in common with art.

The Infection Theory of Art

For Tolstoy, the chief characteristic of art is the infection of others with the feelings the artist has experienced. This infection is not identical with description of accessories. A work founded on borrowed material, however well executed, cannot produce a truly artistic impression because it lacks the inseparable unity of form and contents expressing the artist's own feeling. The artist must transmit feeling he has himself experienced, not merely received from a previous work.

Tolstoy's criterion is radically democratic: art is good to the degree that it communicates sincere feeling and unites people in that feeling. He is equally hostile to elite refinement and to popular entertainment that debases. The book's structure is itself a performance of this theory—Tolstoy does not borrow from aesthetic philosophers but argues from concrete cases, from the Bodkin Gallery to Wagner's programme music. The reader is invited to test each claim against their own experience of being infected—or not—by a work.

Tolstoy's What Is Art? is best read as a provocation rather than a settled system. The reader should attend to the specific examples—the lady artist, the Parisian pictures, the list of stage effects—and ask whether the infection theory holds for them. Maude's translation preserves the blunt, conversational force of the original. The book rewards those who engage with its arguments on their own terms, not as a historical curiosity but as a living challenge to how we value art.

Reading Tolstoy’s insistence on sincerity, I remembered my grandfather’s quiet anger at a flashy painting we saw together—he called it a lie, not art. That same ache for feeling over cleverness surfaced years later, when The Philosophy of the Moral Feelings — Background and Themes whispered that our moral lives are built from the same honest, slow-burning transmission. Both books felt less like arguments and more like a hand on my shoulder.