This chapter examines Leo Tolstoy’s views on the visual arts and aesthetic debates of his time as expressed in his seminal publication What Is Art? (1897). It contextualizes the writer’s ideas about painting and representation within the principal controversies and prevalent issues of the Russian art world of 1870–90, and especially in relation to the theories and praxis of the Wanderers or Peredvizhniki. More specifically, it focuses on Tolstoy’s intellectual exchanges with and support for several of the most prominent and important artists of the day, such as Ivan Kramskoi, Ilya Repin, and Nikolai Ge, highlighting the discursive intersections between his writing and their paintings, and the broader politics of intermediality in nineteenth-century Russian realism.

With literacy rising but still low, it was through the visual arts that millions of nineteenth-century Russians encountered new thinking about personhood, social relations, and national identity. Artists had been locked into an official hierarchy determined by training and awards, and they enthusiastically joined the emerging free professions. The market heated up as incomes rose and advances in printing made images affordable. Visual culture responded at every level of society. A group of artists who became known as the Wanderers (Peredvizhniki) (because they traveled to exhibit their work) deviated from tradition and took as subjects Russia’s peasants. Illustrated magazines achieved great influence from the 1860s on and also departed from officially promoted traditions, although in ways that differed from those of the Wanderers. Cheap lubok prints brought contemporary themes to the villages and to the urban working poor. Social change irrevocably altered perceptions of the Self and the Other – the faces people saw in their mirrors and their neighbors, relatives, and random passers-by on the street - and innovations in visual culture validated those changing perceptions. The inclusion of the visual arts in the gathering cultural energy propelled further innovation and creative genius in the years ahead.