In his words, 'it is difficult to say what is meant by art, and especially what is good, useful art, art for the sake of which we might condone such sacrifices as are being offered at its shrine'. Tolstoy cites the time, effort, public funds, and public respect spent on art and artists as well as the imprecision of general opinions on art as reason for writing the book. It was completed in Russian in 1897 but first published in English due to difficulties with the Russian censors. His ideas on nonviolent resistance, expressed in such works as The Kingdom of God Is Within You, were to have a profound impact on such pivotal twentieth-century figures as Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. His literal interpretation of the ethical teachings of Jesus, centering on the Sermon on the Mount, caused him in later life to become a fervent Christian anarchist and anarcho-pacifist.

Tolstoy is equally known for his complicated and paradoxical persona and for his extreme moralistic and ascetic views, which he adopted after a moral crisis and spiritual awakening in the 1870s, after which he also became noted as a moral thinker and social reformer. Many consider Tolstoy to have been one of the world's greatest novelists. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist fiction. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (Russian: Лев Николаевич Толстой most appropriately used Liev Tolstoy commonly Leo Tolstoy in Anglophone countries) was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories.

What Is Art? by Leo Tolstoy