"What is Art?" by L.N. Tolstoy and the Problem of Politicization of Aesthetic Experience at the Beginning of the XX Century

The paper is devoted to the political and philosophical context of the treatise ‘What is Art?’ and analyses the relationship between political and aesthetic discourses in the aesthetic system of the late L. N. Tolstoy. The treatise on art was embedded in several polemical contexts: being a response to the challenge of decadent art, it simultaneously became a stage of an extensive aesthetic discussion on the axiological correlation of beauty, goodness and truth; in addition, the text developed a socially oriented line in art, resonating with revolutionary-democratic, psychological and anarchist aesthetics. The hypothesis of the study is that in the treatise Tolstoy is polemically orients towards all these contexts, but systematically builds his vision of art precisely with a reliance on the categories of anarchist thought. At the same time, the paper assumes that the sphere of art's influence according to Tolstoy appears to be political in the sense of modern philosophy of the political, i.e. aimed at achieving equality according to J. Rancière. The reconstruction of polemical contexts and the separation of the treatise's ideas from similar aesthetic programmes allows us to expose Tolstoy's political rhetoric; the study attempts to define Tolstoy's own way of talking about art in political coordinates, and also examines the relationship between political and aesthetic gestures on a conceptual level in the text of the treatise itself, in the accompanying articles on art, in his diaries and drafts.