During the decades of his world fame as sage and preacher as well as author of War & Peace & Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy wrote prolifically in a series of essays and polemics on issues of morality, social justice & 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 improvement of humankind.