What Is Art? by Leo Tolstoy

How hard is What Is Art? to read?

What Is Art? scores 57 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 68 out of 100

The text regularly quotes aesthetic philosophers in untranslated German and French — Kralik's Weltschönheit passages, Véron's French preface, Mallarmé's Divagations, Verhaeren and Moréas poems — without translation for several paragraphs at a stretch. Greek philosophical terms (τὸ ἀγαθόν, τὸ καλόν, καλο-κἀγαθία, κάθαρσις) appear in the original. The English prose itself, a late-Victorian translation, deploys a formal literary vocabulary well above everyday register, though most individual English sentences remain parseable without a dictionary.

Sentence structure: 62 out of 100

Tolstoy writes in the nineteenth-century essayistic mode: sentences routinely exceed 80 words, stacking subordinate clauses in sequences like 'it was not only...but also...and therefore...'. The Aylmer Maude introduction adds a second layer of dense discursive prose before Tolstoy's own text begins. Complexity is real but falls well short of Proustian or Jamesian extremes — the argumentative logic provides a navigational thread through even the longest sentences.

Abstraction: 82 out of 100

This is sustained philosophical argument from the first page to the last. Tolstoy constructs abstract hierarchies — religious perception, universal art, infectious feeling, brotherhood — and tests each against a taxonomy of historical aesthetics from Baumgarten through Schopenhauer. Concrete examples (the opera rehearsal, Romeo and Juliet, Beethoven's Ninth) appear, but they serve as brief illustrations within passages of extended abstraction, never anchoring the text in sustained narrative. The abstraction level resembles Brothers Karamazov's Grand Inquisitor chapter extended to full-book length.

Information density: 74 out of 100

Chapters III through VII rapid-survey sixty-plus aesthetic philosophers, each compressed to a paragraph: Baumgarten, Sulzer, Mendelssohn, Moritz, Kant, Schiller, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Hartmann, Schasler, Spencer, Grant Allen, Guyau, Véron, Kralik, and many more. Tolstoy then pivots to art-historical argument spanning Greek antiquity through the Renaissance to the 1890s Symbolist movement. Every chapter introduces a new conceptual framework while building on the previous. The appendices add untranslated primary texts in French, German, and a detailed plot summary of Wagner's Ring cycle.

Narrative indirection: 12 out of 100

Tolstoy announces his argument, develops it, and states his conclusions with maximum directness. Art is the transmission of feeling; good art transmits feelings that unite men in brotherhood; current upper-class art is bad because it serves only a privileged minority. None of this requires inference. The Maude introduction makes the argument even more explicit by summarizing Tolstoy's positions before the reader encounters them in the main text.

Symbolic density: 100 out of 100

As a philosophical essay, the text employs no symbolic structure. The opera rehearsal scene is vivid social observation, not allegory. Tolstoy's conceptual terms — 'religious perception,' 'infection,' 'brotherhood' — are defined explicitly and used consistently as technical vocabulary, not symbols with layered or ambiguous meanings. The appendices reproducing Symbolist poetry are included precisely as negative examples of obscurantism.

Ironic distance: 80 out of 100

Tolstoy writes with zero ironic distance. His condemnations of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, and Goethe are delivered as literal critical judgments he expects the reader to accept as correct. The Aylmer Maude preface reinforces this earnestness by framing Tolstoy's argument as a moral revelation: 'whereas I was blind, now I see.' No gap exists between what the text says and what the author means.

Resolution withholding: 100 out of 100

The book ends with an unambiguous prescription stated twice in near-identical language: art's task is to transmit the consciousness of human brotherhood from reason to feeling, replacing the reign of force with the kingdom of love. Chapter XVII provides explicit closure, and the appendices serve as supporting evidence for already-stated conclusions. No interpretive ambiguity remains at the final page.

Structural complexity: 15 out of 100

The text follows a classical essay structure: introduction by translator Maude, preface by Tolstoy, then seventeen numbered chapters in linear argumentative sequence, followed by appendices. Two prefatory voices (Maude and Tolstoy) add mild complexity. The appendices, which include untranslated French poetry and a Wagner plot summary, are formally separated from the main argument. No timeline jumps, no unreliable narrators, no structural experimentation.

How What Is Art? is regarded

What Is Art? holds a literary regard score of 65 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

About the author

Leo Tolstoy