Category: Tolstoy

Shortly after turning fifty, Leo Tolstoy (September 9, 1828–November 10, 1910) succumbed to a profound spiritual crisis. With his greatest works behind him, he found his sense of purpose dwindling as his celebrity and public acclaim billowed, sinking into a state of deep depression and melancholia despite having a large estate, good health for his age, a wife who had born him fourteen children, and the promise of eternal literary fame. On the brink of suicide, he made one last grasp at light amidst the darkness of his existence, turning to the world’s great religious and philosophical traditions for answers to the age-old question regarding the meaning of life. In 1879, a decade after War and Peace and two years after Anna Karenina, and a decade before he set out to synthesize these philosophical findings in his Calendar of Wisdom, Tolstoy channeled the existential catastrophe of his inner life in A Confession (public library) — an autobiographical memoir of extraordinary candor and emotional intensity, which also gave us Tolstoy’s prescient meditation on money, fame, and writing for the wrong reasons.

He likens the progression of his depression to a serious physical illness — a parallel modern science is rendering increasingly appropriate. Tolstoy writes: Then occurred what happens to everyone sickening with a mortal internal disease. At first trivial signs of indisposition appear to which the sick man pays no attention; then these signs reappear more and more often and merge into one uninterrupted period of suffering. The suffering increases, and before the sick man can look round, what he took for a mere indisposition has already become more important to him than anything else in the world — it is death!

The classic symptoms of anhedonia engulfed him — he lost passion for his work and came to dismiss as meaningless the eternal fame he had once dreamt of. He even ceased to go out shooting with his gun in fear that he might be too tempted to take his own life. Though he didn’t acknowledge a “someone” in the sense of a creator, he came to feel that his life was a joke that someone had played on him — a joke all the grimmer for the awareness of our inescapable impermanence, and all the more despairing:

Today or tomorrow sickness and death will come (they had come already) to those I love or to me; nothing will remain but stench and worms. Sooner or later my affairs, whatever they may be, will be forgotten, and I shall not exist. Then why go on making any effort? . . . How can man fail to see this? And how go on living? That is what is surprising! One can only live while one is intoxicated with life; as soon as one is sober it is impossible not to see that it is all a mere fraud and a stupid fraud! That is precisely what it is: there is nothing either amusing or witty about it, it is simply cruel and stupid.

Had I simply understood that life had no meaning I could have borne it quietly, knowing that that was my lot. But I could not satisfy myself with that. Had I been like a man living in a wood from which he knows there is no exit, I could have lived; but I was like one lost in a wood who, horrified at having lost his way, rushes about wishing to find the road. He knows that each step he takes confuses him more and more, but still he cannot help rushing about. It was indeed terrible. And to rid myself of the terror I wished to kill myself.

And yet he recognized that the inquiry at the heart of his spiritual malady was neither unique nor complicated:

My question … was the simplest of questions, lying in the soul of every man from the foolish child to the wisest elder: it was a question without an answer to which one cannot live, as I had found by experience. It was: “What will come of what I am doing today or shall do tomorrow? What will come of my whole life?” Differently expressed, the question is: “Why should I live, why wish for anything, or do anything?” It can also be expressed thus: “Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy?”

Seeking to answer this seemingly simple yet paralyzingly profound question, Tolstoy first turned to science, but found that rather than recognizing and answering the question, science circumvented it and instead asked its own questions, then answered those. Most of all, he found it incapable of illuminating the infinite and instead reducing its questions and answers to finite. He writes:

These are all words with no meaning, for in the infinite there is neither complex nor simple, neither forward nor backward, nor better or worse. One who sincerely inquires how he is to live cannot be satisfied with the reply — “Study in endless space the mutations, infinite in time and in complexity, of innumerable atoms, and then you will understand your life” — so also a sincere man cannot be satisfied with the reply: “Study the whole life of humanity of which we cannot know either the beginning or the end, of which we do not even know a small part, and then you will understand your own life.”

A century and a half before Alan Lightman tussled, elegantly, with the same paradox, Tolstoy captured the Catch-22 of the predicament:

The problem of experimental science is the sequence of cause and effect in material phenomena. It is only necessary for experimental science to introduce the question of a final cause for it to become nonsensical. The problem of abstract science is the recognition of the primordial essence of life. It is only necessary to introduce the investigation of consequential phenomena (such as social and historical phenomena) and it also becomes nonsensical. Experimental science only then gives positive knowledge and displays the greatness of the human mind when it does not introduce into its investigations the question of an ultimate cause. And, on the contrary, abstract science is only then science and displays the greatness of the human mind when it puts quite aside questions relating to the consequential causes of phenomena and regards man solely in relation to an ultimate cause.

He then turned to philosophy, but found himself equally disillusioned: Philosophy not merely does not reply, but is itself only asking that question. And if it is real philosophy all its labour lies merely in trying to put that question clearly.

Instead of an answer, he finds in philosophy “the same question, only in a complex form.” He bemoans the inability of either science or philosophy to offer a real answer: One kind of knowledge did not reply to life’s question, the other kind replied directly confirming my despair, indicating not that the result at which I had arrived was the fruit of error or of a diseased state of my mind, but on the contrary that I had thought correctly, and that my thoughts coincided with the conclusions of the most powerful of human minds.

Frustrated, Tolstoy answers his own question: Why does everything exist that exists, and why do I exist?” “Because it exists.”

It’s a sentiment that John Cage would second a century later (“No why. Just here.”) and George Lucas would also echo (“There is no why. We are. Life is beyond reason.”) — a proposition that comes closest to the spiritual tradition of Buddhism. And, indeed, Tolstoy turns to spirituality in one final and desperate attempt at an answer — first by surveying how those in his social circle lived with this all-consuming inquiry. He found among them four strategies for managing the existential despair, but none that resolved it:

I found that for people of my circle there were four ways out of the terrible position in which we are all placed. The first was that of ignorance. It consists in not knowing, not understanding, that life is an evil and an absurdity. From [people of this sort] I had nothing to learn — one cannot cease to know what one does know.

The second way out is epicureanism. It consists, while knowing the hopelessness of life, in making use meanwhile of the advantages one has, disregarding the dragon and the mice, and licking the honey in the best way, especially if there is much of it within reach… That is the way in which the majority of people of our circle make life possible for themselves. Their circumstances furnish them with more of welfare than of hardship, and their moral dullness makes it possible for them to forget that the advantage of their position is accidental … and that the accident that has today made me a Solomon may tomorrow make me a Solomon’s slave. The dullness of these people’s imagination enables them to forget the things that gave Buddha no peace — the inevitability of sickness, old age, and death, which today or tomorrow will destroy all these pleasures.

The third escape is that of strength and energy. It consists in destroying life, when one has understood that it is an evil and an absurdity. A few exceptionally strong and consistent people act so. Having understood the stupidity of the joke that has been played on them, and having understood that it is better to be dead than to be alive, and that it is best of all not to exist, they act accordingly and promptly end this stupid joke, since there are means: a rope round one’s neck, water, a knife to stick into one’s heart, or the trains on the railways; and the number of those of our circle who act in this way becomes greater and greater, and for the most part they act so at the best time of their life, when the strength of their mind is in full bloom and few habits degrading to the mind have as yet been acquired…

The fourth way out is that of weakness. It consists in seeing the truth of the situation and yet clinging to life, knowing in advance that nothing can come of it. People of this kind know that death is better than life, but not having the strength to act rationally — to end the deception quickly and kill themselves — they seem to wait for something. This is the escape of weakness, for if I know what is best and it is within my power, why not yield to what is best? … The fourth way was to live like Solomon and Schopenhauer — knowing that life is a stupid joke played upon us, and still to go on living, washing oneself, dressing, dining, talking, and even writing books. This was to me repulsive and tormenting, but I remained in that position.

Finding himself in the fourth category, Tolstoy begins to question why he hadn’t killed himself. Suddenly, he realizes that a part of him was questioning the very validity of his depressive thoughts, presenting “a vague doubt” as to the certainty of his conclusions about the senselessness of life. Humbled by the awareness that the mind is both puppet and puppet-master, he writes:

It was like this: I, my reason, have acknowledged that life is senseless. If there is nothing higher than reason (and there is not: nothing can prove that there is), then reason is the creator of life for me. If reason did not exist there would be for me no life. How can reason deny life when it is the creator of life? Or to put it the other way: were there no life, my reason would not exist; therefore reason is life’s son. Life is all. Reason is its fruit yet reason rejects life itself! I felt that there was something wrong here.

And he discovers the solution not in science or philosophy or the life of hedonism, but in those living life in its simplest and purest form:

The reasoning showing the vanity of life is not so difficult, and has long been familiar to the very simplest folk; yet they have lived and still live. How is it they all live and never think of doubting the reasonableness of life?

My knowledge, confirmed by the wisdom of the sages, has shown me that everything on earth — organic and inorganic — is all most cleverly arranged — only my own position is stupid. And those fools — the enormous masses of people — know nothing about how everything organic and inorganic in the world is arranged; but they live, and it seems to them that their life is very wisely arranged! . . .

And it struck me: “But what if there is something I do not yet know? Ignorance behaves just in that way. Ignorance always says just what I am saying. When it does not know something, it says that what it does not know is stupid. Indeed, it appears that there is a whole humanity that lived and lives as if it understood the meaning of its life, for without understanding it could not live; but I say that all this life is senseless and that I cannot live.

Awake to what Stuart Firestein would call “thoroughly conscious ignorance” some 130 years later, Tolstoy sees his own blinders with new eyes:

In the delusion of my pride of intellect it seemed to me so indubitable that I and Solomon and Schopenhauer had stated the question so truly and exactly that nothing else was possible — so indubitable did it seem that all those milliards consisted of men who had not yet arrived at an apprehension of all the profundity of the question — that I sought for the meaning of my life without it once occurring to me to ask: “But what meaning is and has been given to their lives by all the milliards of common folk who live and have lived in the world?”

I long lived in this state of lunacy, which, in fact if not in words, is particularly characteristic of us very liberal and learned people. But thanks either to the strange physical affection I have for the real laboring people, which compelled me to understand them and to see that they are not so stupid as we suppose, or thanks to the sincerity of my conviction that I could know nothing beyond the fact that the best I could do was to hang myself, at any rate I instinctively felt that if I wished to live and understand the meaning of life, I must seek this meaning not among those who have lost it and wish to kill themselves, but among those milliards of the past and the present who make life and who support the burden of their own lives and of ours also. And I considered the enormous masses of those simple, unlearned, and poor people who have lived and are living and I saw something quite different. I saw that, with rare exceptions, all those milliards who have lived and are living do not fit into my divisions, and that I could not class them as not understanding the question, for they themselves state it and reply to it with extraordinary clearness. Nor could I consider them epicureans, for their life consists more of privations and sufferings than of enjoyments. Still less could I consider them as irrationally dragging on a meaningless existence, for every act of their life, as well as death itself, is explained by them. To kill themselves they consider the greatest evil. It appeared that all mankind had a knowledge, unacknowledged and despised by me, of the meaning of life. It appeared that reasonable knowledge does not give the meaning of life, but excludes life: while the meaning attributed to life by milliards of people, by all humanity, rests on some despised pseudo-knowledge.

He considers the necessary irrationality of faith and contemplates its unfair ask of forsaking reason:

Rational knowledge presented by the learned and wise, denies the meaning of life, but the enormous masses of men, the whole of mankind receive that meaning in irrational knowledge. And that irrational knowledge is faith, that very thing which I could not but reject. It is God, One in Three; the creation in six days; the devils and angels, and all the rest that I cannot accept as long as I retain my reason.

My position was terrible. I knew I could find nothing along the path of reasonable knowledge except a denial of life; and there — in faith — was nothing but a denial of reason, which was yet more impossible for me than a denial of life. From rational knowledge it appeared that life is an evil, people know this and it is in their power to end life; yet they lived and still live, and I myself live, though I have long known that life is senseless and an evil. By faith it appears that in order to understand the meaning of life I must renounce my reason, the very thing for which alone a meaning is required…

A contradiction arose from which there were two exits. Either that which I called reason was not so rational as I supposed, or that which seemed to me irrational was not so irrational as I supposed.

And therein he finds the error in all of his prior reasoning, the root of his melancholia about life’s meaninglessness:

Verifying the line of argument of rational knowledge I found it quite correct. The conclusion that life is nothing was inevitable; but I noticed a mistake. The mistake lay in this, that my reasoning was not in accord with the question I had put. The question was: “Why should I live, that is to say, what real, permanent result will come out of my illusory transitory life — what meaning has my finite existence in this infinite world?” And to reply to that question I had studied life.

The solution of all the possible questions of life could evidently not satisfy me, for my question, simple as it at first appeared, included a demand for an explanation of the finite in terms of the infinite, and vice versa.

I asked: “What is the meaning of my life, beyond time, cause, and space?” And I replied to quite another question: “What is the meaning of my life within time, cause, and space?” With the result that, after long efforts of thought, the answer I reached was: “None.”

In my reasonings I constantly compared (nor could I do otherwise) the finite with the finite, and the infinite with the infinite; but for that reason I reached the inevitable result: force is force, matter is matter, will is will, the infinite is the infinite, nothing is nothing — and that was all that could result.

Philosophic knowledge denies nothing, but only replies that the question cannot be solved by it — that for it the solution remains indefinite.

Having understood this, I understood that it was not possible to seek in rational knowledge for a reply to my question, and that the reply given by rational knowledge is a mere indication that a reply can only be obtained by a different statement of the question and only when the relation of the finite to the infinite is included in the question. And I understood that, however irrational and distorted might be the replies given by faith, they have this advantage, that they introduce into every answer a relation between the finite and the infinite, without which there can be no solution.

So that besides rational knowledge, which had seemed to me the only knowledge, I was inevitably brought to acknowledge that all live humanity has another irrational knowledge — faith which makes it possible to live. Faith still remained to me as irrational as it was before, but I could not but admit that it alone gives mankind a reply to the questions of life, and that consequently it makes life possible.

Tolstoy notes that, whatever the faith may be, it “gives to the finite existence of man an infinite meaning, a meaning not destroyed by sufferings, deprivations, or death,” and yet he is careful not to conflate faith with a specific religion. Like Flannery O’Connor, who so beautifully differentiated between religion and faith, Tolstoy writes: I understood that faith is not merely “the evidence of things not seen”, etc., and is not a revelation (that defines only one of the indications of faith, is not the relation of man to God (one has first to define faith and then God, and not define faith through God); it is not only agreement with what has been told one (as faith is most usually supposed to be), but faith is a knowledge of the meaning of human life in consequence of which man does not destroy himself but lives. Faith is the strength of life. If a man lives he believes in something. If he did not believe that one must live for something, he would not live. If he does not see and recognize the illusory nature of the finite, he believes in the finite; if he understands the illusory nature of the finite, he must believe in the infinite. Without faith he cannot live… For man to be able to live he must either not see the infinite, or have such an explanation of the meaning of life as will connect the finite with the infinite.

And yet the closer he examines faith, the more glaring he finds the disconnect between it and religion, particularly the teachings of the Christian church and the practices of the wealthy. Once again, he returns to the peasants as a paragon of spiritual salvation, of bridging the finite with the infinite, and once again seeing in their ways an ethos most closely resembling the Buddhist philosophy of acceptance:

In contrast with what I had seen in our circle, where the whole of life is passed in idleness, amusement, and dissatisfaction, I saw that the whole life of these people was passed in heavy labour, and that they were content with life. In contradistinction to the way in which people of our circle oppose fate and complain of it on account of deprivations and sufferings, these people accepted illness and sorrow without any perplexity or opposition, and with a quiet and firm conviction that all is good. In contradistinction to us, who the wiser we are the less we understand the meaning of life, and see some evil irony in the fact that we suffer and die, these folk live and suffer, and they approach death and suffering with tranquility and in most cases gladly…

In complete contrast to my ignorance, knew the meaning of life and death, labored quietly, endured deprivations and sufferings, and lived and died seeing therein not vanity but good…

I understood that if I wish to understand life and its meaning, I must not live the life of a parasite, but must live a real life, and — taking the meaning given to live by real humanity and merging myself in that life — verify it.

A Confession is a remarkable read in its entirety. Complement it with Tolstoy’s subsequent opus of philosophical inquiry, A Calendar of Wisdom, and this rare recording of him reading from the latter, exploring the object of life shortly before his death.

In Kholstomer – The Story of a Horse, Leo Tolstoy uses an animal’s point of view as a method to increase the exquisiteness of the piece wherein Kholstomer suffered an unfortunate life as a horse because he was being physically and emotionally tormented. This approach is known as defamiliarization which tends to defamiliarize the familiar settings, or words to either hide something or the author wants his/her readers to give a wide range of perspective about the different angles or corners of a certain story or piece.

Tolstoy describes Kholstomer (Strider the horse) by uplifting his morally good traits which gives him an edge with the other horses as the story started.

“Of all the horses in the enclosure (there were about a hundred of them), a piebald gelding, standing by himself in a corner under the penthouse and licking an oak post with half-closed eyes, displayed least impatience.”

Early morning is actually the beginning and for the other horses to get the man’s attention, they kept on pushing the gate which oppositely irritates the man. On the other side, Tolstoy presented the horse with a simple yet intelligent act. Instead of using patient as an adjective, the author uses least impatient to add up a bit of reality to be explored.

This trait of Kholstomer is being addressed also when the horse once says “Suffering for the pleasure of others is nothing new to me. I have even begun to find a certain equine pleasure in it.” This is how Tolstoy tries to elevate the attribute of the horse however produces a sense of empathy to the readers. With this, the existence of defamiliarized texts strengthens.

The text above is a scene that points out Nester riding on the horse’s back. It’s tough but he’s used to it. This saddle and Nester is like a heavy clump of pains and problems torturing him, to give up. But the horse who’s familiar and usually suffering it, seems to play the game this pain had prepared for him.

“Nester scratched him under the neck, in response to which the gelding expressed his gratitude and satisfaction by closing his eyes. ‘He likes it, the old dog!’ muttered Nester. The gelding however did not really care for the scratching at all and pretended that it was agreeable merely out of courtesy.” Oddly supported the horse’s statement that he’s used to support the satisfaction of others but oppositely is not significant for him because “The whole world was changed in my eyes. Nothing mattered any more” he once says.

This exhibits the changes made by the horse’s stormy days, which molded him in the way he is now and not before. This is Toltoy’s way to forward his message through defamiliarized things, to burst out emotions, to make an art of it as he supported Viktor Shklovsky, a 20th Century Russian literary critic, “defamiliarization is, more or less, the point of all art. Art makes language strange, as well as the world that the language presents.”

“But suddenly Nester, quite unexpectedly and without any reason, perhaps imagining that too much familiarity might give the gelding a wrong idea of his importance…” means that Nester stopped from what his doing with the horse (scratching his lower neck) because the horse might see his importance to the men so he “pushed the gelding’s head away from himself without any warning and, swinging the bridle, struck him painfully with the buckle on his lean leg, and then without saying a word went up the hillock to a tree-stump beside which he generally seated himself” which he did to divert and change the horse’s perceptions.

As the story continues, several struggles was being faced by Khlostomer, being belittled by other horses and being teased ; “The filly wheeled round as if to kick him.” The fillies in the story were acknowledged as famous horses with proud pedigrees. “The gelding opened his eyes and stepped aside. He did not want to sleep any more and began to graze. The mischief-maker, followed by her companions, again approached the gelding. A very stupid two-year-old white-spotted filly who always imitated the chestnut in everything went up with her and, as imitators always do, went to greater lengths than the instigator. The chestnut always went up as if intent on business of her own and passed by the gelding’s nose without looking at him, so that he really did not know whether to be angry or not, and that was really funny.” In this part, a clear vision of comparison between Kholstomer and the fillies, the young. The privileged and unprivileged. The biased ideologies imbedded on the horses’ society reflect on the human’s society as well.

This passage had degraded the olds so much but Tolstoy returned it back leaving “Old age is sometimes majestic, sometimes ugly, and sometimes pathetic. But old age can be both ugly and majestic, and the gelding’s old age was just of that kind.” To still up lifts the underestimated old, which doesn’t only pertains to the age of the horse but in a general aspects or issue.

After this line, the author had highlighted again the condition of the horse, “His forelegs were crooked to a bow at the knees, there were swellings over both hoofs, and on one leg, on which the piebald spot reached half-way down, there was a swelling at the knee as big as a fist” showed how far this horse had been, either good or bad because of its marks and scars left, which still appeared on the horse’s physical attributes.

Toltoy’s also added a descriptive passage for the gelding :

“ His spots were black, or rather they had been black, but had now turned a dirty brown. He had three spots, one on his head, starting from a crooked bald patch on the side of his nose and reaching half-way down his neck. His long mane, filled with burrs, was white in some places and brownish in others. Another spot extended down his off side to the middle of his belly; the third, on his croup, touched part of his tail and went half-way down his quarters. The rest of the tail was whitish and speckled.” The author’s intent is to highlight spots because it is one of the most distinct traits of the piebald.

“…when one saw him, and an expert would have said at once that he had been a remarkably fine horse in his day. The expert would even have said that there was only one breed in Russia that could furnish such breadth of bone, such immense knees, such hoofs, such slender cannons, such a well-shaped neck, and above all such a skull, such eyes – large, black, and clear – and such a thoroughbred network of veins on head and neck, and such delicate skin and hair.”

The one telling this tries to present the attractive qualities of a horse in the views of an expert. But the author once raised a question : “But was it the old gelding’s fault that he was old, poor, and ugly?” And the answers followed as well;

“One might think not, but in equine ethics it was, and only those were right who were strong, young, and happy – those who had life still before them, whose every muscle quivered with superfluous energy, and whose tails stood erect. Maybe the piebald gelding himself understood this and in his quiet moments was ready to agree that it was his fault that he had already lived his life, and that he had to pay for that life, but after all he was a horse and often could not suppress a sense of resentment, sadness, and indignation when he looked at those youngsters who tormented him for what would befall them all at the end of their lives.”

But this kind of praises and description changed when the horse started to have a continuous passage of his points and perceptions. Tolstoy gives way for the horse to clear things out, on why he’s suffering such grief and pain. And what’s actually the root of everything. This stage presents the Romanticism after the breakage of the gelding’s life on the previous texts.

On the first night, other horses had lean their ears to the gelding as the horse is trying to share something that is full of bitter-sweet-bitter stories of his.

He tells everything from his birth up to his energy-losing battles. The unknown pedigree of him was answered as he said “Yes, I am the son of Affable I and of Baba. My pedigree name is Muzhik.”

At the very beginning of his life, he already suffered humiliation from men.

‘Look at him – the little devil!’ but doesn’t understand everything because he’s innocent. Afterward, after living in a separation the brood mares with his mother, Baba, he saw the different mares and their foals. In contradictory with men’s treatment of him, the gelding had received admiration from others but started to lose the love of his mother for sexual reasons. In this case, another problem arises.

A mother was defined as “a person who protects and nourishes her child” but Baba (gelding’s mother) jumps over this responsibility to have another child. That is the manifestation of the gelding, “And it’s all because I am piebald!” blaming everything to himself without knowing the reasons, but maybe the factor that makes this is the gelding’s innocence that still needs maturation.

But when the mother and the son had truly separated from each other, the gelding was then transferred in a place with another female horse which was named as Darling, which the he fell infatuated at. But he had this “unfortunate period of love” because they castrate him as the emperor ordered his men. He realized that everything around him are fools, but still can’t explain it to himself because of his state.

“My being piebald, which aroused such curious contempt in men, my terrible and unexpected misfortune, and also my peculiar position in the stud farm which I felt but was unable to explain made me retire into myself. I pondered over the injustice of men, who blamed me for being piebald; I pondered on the inconstancy of mother-love and feminine love in general and on its dependence on physical conditions; and above all I pondered on the characteristics of that strange race of animals with whom we are so closely connected, and whom we call men – those characteristics which were the source of my own peculiar position in the stud farm, which I felt but could not understand.”

On the next paragraphs, Toltoys had left this good short passage which can be seen before until now : “ men are guided in life not by deeds but by words.” The horse of course cannot understand this, but he’s sure about one thing, that them (horses) are quite better than men in terms of deeds. This line simply means that men give importance to something they own, a property rather, but it’s hard for them to take actions or to take good care of it as if it’s their responsibility to keep it, because it’s something that they own. They only

give significance to the word “my” or “mine” but not with the obligations woven in it.

“For instance, many of those who called me their horse did not ride me, quite other people rode me; nor did they feed me – quite other people did that. Again it was not those who called me *their* horse who treated me kindly, but coachmen, veterinaries, and in general quite other people. Later on, having widened my field of observation, I became convinced that not only as applied to us horses, but in regard to other things, the idea of mine has no other basis than a low, mercenary instinct in men, which they call the feeling or right of property. A man who never lives in it says ‘my house’ but only concerns himself with its building and maintenance; and a tradesman talks of ‘my cloth business’ but has none of his clothes made of the best cloth that is in his shop.”

The author revealed a comparison through the experience of the horse itself. In such cases wherein the horse, doesn’t even feel importance from the people who acknowledge the horse as theirs.

On the fourth night of the horse’s story, an unjust treatment between him and other horses are being tackled and on how found a love, with a man who does not possess love at all, this sentence seems ironic.

“The happiest years of my life I spent with the officer of hussars. Though he was the cause of my ruin, and though he never loved anything or anyone, I loved and still love him for that very reason.” The fifth night showed the blue conclusion of his story as described by the author ;

The gelding joins a race and luckily win, group of men asks the prince of bucks but the prince resisted. But after all of these, the horse was being tormented:

“For the first time I fell out of step and felt ashamed and wished to correct it, but suddenly I heard the prince shout in an unnatural voice: ‘Get on!’ The whip whistled through the air and cut me, and I galloped, striking my foot against the iron front of the sledge. We overtook her after going sixteen miles. I got him there but trembled all night long and could not eat anything. In the morning they gave me water. I drank it and after that was never again the horse that I had been. I was ill, and they tormented me and maimed me – doctoring me, as people call it. My hoofs came off, I had swellings and my legs grew bent; my chest sank in and I became altogether limp and weak. I was sold to a horse-dealer who fed me on carrots and something else and made something of me quite unlike myself, though good enough to deceive one who did not know. My strength and my pace were gone.”

The horse only suffered torture after everything. He become weaker and his flesh are already bad. Until he ended up his story.

After that, the horse’s point of view was cut down, and someone take the responsibility, the mood already changes which already presented an angle of a conversation of the host, his guest and the hostess. The guest was the Prince (Mr. Serpukhovskoy) and was recognized by Strider.

This part of the story depicts the old and unfavorable changes the prince had taken.

“Nikita Serpukhovskoy, their guest, was a man of over forty, tall, stout, bald-headed, with heavy moustaches and whiskers. He must once have been very handsome but had now evidently sunk physically, morally, and financially.”

However, the Gelding and the old prince’s ending are partly the same but extreme different endings.

The horse was killed by the knackers after slitting his neck, but his skin was being used up, and his flesh was being shared by a family wolves. At this part, the mother fox let the youngest cub to eat first, ‘til everyone get their part. Which is absolutely a contrasting scenarios between Baba, who was labeled as a mother, but then her hearts beats for not a parent to the gelding. Latly, the bones of this horse are being collected by the bones collector outside the barn. In simple words, this horse live and died, benefiting others. On the other scenario where Nikita, the prince died, he live to wander the earth, died being covered with earth which pertains to the land or soil.

In conclusion, the story focuses more on the struggle of the protagonist, Strider or Kholstomer, but ended with the death of Nikita Serpukhovskoy. But still, Leo Tolstoy, as an advocate of Defamiliarization, uses the horse’s points and perceptions to hide his real purpose. The reason why the author uses defamiliarized words using the horse’s view is that, appreciating something but faces the one side only isn’t appreciating at all. To have a new perception about something, taking it from the other side will balance your views and opinions. Such like in this case, seeing a horse is such a normal thing, but livin’ like a horse is actually a hard thing.

There were indeed a great number of things that made Leo Tolstoy such a relevant figure in the literary tradition. He was deeply interested in politics and social issues of 19th-century Russia, including class struggles and issues regarding the rights and freedoms of the serfs. Later in his life, Tolstoy partially renounced his luxurious lifestyle, naming his wife as keeper of the state and thus proclaiming his deep commitment and support for the social reform he so viewed as necessary. Many of his later short stories are then influenced by his ideas regarding social justice, focusing on the correction of society as a whole.

In stories such as Strider, The Story of A Horse, Tolstoy achieves this through the representation of various problems inherent to human nature (namely people’s wastefulness of resources and the absurdity of notions of property) through the experience of a horse. Leo Tolstoy’s technique is later categorized by Viktor Shklovsky in his renowned Art as Device as a form of ‘ostranenie’, suggesting that Tolstoy makes use of this literary device through the description of things and events as if “seen for the first time, as if happening for the first time” (Shklovsky 163). Thus, Tolstoy uses the innate naiveness and ignorance of Striver to successfully use defamiliarization for the representation and acknowledgment of critical social issues of 19th-century Russian society. In his text, Shklovksy highlights a number of occasions in Tolstoy’s story in which enstrangement is used to focus the audience’s attention toward these social issues, such as his mention of Striver’s analysis on human notions of property and the text’s emphasis on humanity’s incessant destruction of nature.

Nevertheless, Shklovsky merely scratches the surface of both examples’ importance as prime examples of the use of enstrangement in literary art, and as a method of revolutionary change, thus falling in an ironic state of automatization. Furthermore, Shklovsky also fails to mention one of the most evident forms of defamiliarization presented in the story: the portrayal of the main character himself as a humanized horse. Through the thorough analysis of Tolstoy’s use of enstrangement in Strider The Story of A Horse as described in Shklovsky’s Art as Device, this essay will argue that, in his emphasis on the role of enstrangement in art forms, and the politics of enstrangement themselves, Shklovsky himself fails to ‘see’ Tolstoy’s clever use of defamiliarization as a method of revolutionary social change, forcing his audience to truly conceive the issue of their society and seek the correction of a faulty reality. To truly understand the importance of Shklovsky’s views on Tolstoy’s use of enstrangement, especially as presented in Striver, one must first understand what he means by ‘enstrangement’ itself, as well as the role of automatization on the matter of defamiliarization. Shklovsky defines automatization as the process of making active, daily operations reflexive. In other words, he describes automatization as the process through which an action becomes so familiar that its basic characteristics become immediately recognizable to the senses, but no longer carry the depth and the importance that they once did. Shklovsky then presents art as a solution to this fundamental issue, suggesting a method of forcing the audience to ‘see’ rather than only ‘recognize’ things through what he calls “the complication of the form”, presenting familiar things in an unfamiliar manner. This is, in essence, what Shklovsky defines as enstrangement.

Later in Art As Device, he brings forward three main politics or requirements for enstrangement in artistic representations, namely the distinction of poetic and everyday language in which poetic language reassembles previously established representations and traditions, the inherent reformative quality of literary history, and the role of poetic form in this historical system of revolutionary change. When discussing enstrangement in artistic representations and different forms of enstrangement, Shklovsky identifies a number of examples of this particular literary device in two of Tolstoy’s well-known works: War and Peace and Strider. Nevertheless, there is a number of qualities in the latter, including its portrayal of humane sentiments and social questions from the perspective of a horse, that makes it stand out from the other. There is evidently a point to be made about the symbolism of Strider himself and his role as a defamiliarizing figure in Tolstoy’s method of enstrangement, but since this point may be extensive, it would likely be more helpful to first discuss some of the other instances of enstrangement in the story pointed out by Shklovsky in his article. One of the first examples of enstrangement in Tolstoy’s Strider discussed by Shklovsky in Art as Device is the main character’s monologue regarding social practices and ideas of ownership. In the story, Strider spends some time wondering and explaining— to the best of his abilities— human notions of property, which he describes in the following manner, Men are guided in life not by deeds but by words. They like not so much the ability to do or not do something as, the ability to speak of various subjects in conventionally agreed upon words… They have agreed that of any given thing only one person may use the word mine, and he who in this game of theirs may use that conventional word about the greatest number of things is considered the happiest… And men strive in life not to do what they think right, but to call as many things as possible their own. I am now convinced that in this lie the essential difference between men and us.

This passage demonstrates, as pointed out by Shklovsky, the use of enstrangement through the description of notions of property as if encountered for the first time. Nevertheless, Shklovsky only focuses on enstrangement’s most basic qualities as found on the text, but fails to acknowledge and point out specific examples of the politics of enstrangement or its importance for in a greater issue. In matters of the previously mentioned politics of defamiliarization, and the reformative quality of literary history, Shklovsky spends some time explaining that, in enstrangement, the process does not rely so much on the creation of images as in their reorganization. In other words, the process of enstrangement is partly implemented by “accumulating verbal material and finding new ways of arranging it and handling it; it is much more about rearranging images than about creating them”.

Thus, in the example from Strider regarding notions of ownership, one can witness this same characteristic of defamiliarization. Concepts of property discussed in the story such as ‘mine’ or ‘my’ are, either directly or indirectly, present on the everyday life of the text’s main intended audience, as are images depicting notions of property such as the owning of a property in which one has never lived in, or the ownership of a pet. These concepts are familiar to the reader, automatized as part of a cycle of human ideas of proprietorship. However, their reorganization as unfamiliar, as new through their portrayal and analysis from the perspective of a horse is what produces a sense of true, in-depth recognition of greater social issues. In a historical context, this is important due to the meaning of the address in a broader social context. He was deeply concerned with class inequality in 19th-century Russiam and was a vocal advocator for the rights and freedoms of the peasant class. In his article Leo Tolstoy and Social Justice, John Randolph Fuller makes mention of Tolstoy’s involvement in controversial issues of Russian society, explaining that “what he did best was judge the government’s treatment of the poor and persecuted’.

Through his writing, Tolstoy addressed these issues, calling the reader’s attention to the acknowledgment of society’s faults in the road for its correction and improvement. Strider’s questioning of the absurdity of human notions of property and wealth, and his emphasis on the distinctive negative qualities of people, all through the implementation of enstrangement, are ultimately used to force the reader to ‘see; these issues in their own societies and seek the correction of their situation. Shklovsky’s succumb into automatization in the search for examples of enstrangement in a number of literary texts is seen again as he briefly mentions the death of Strider and of Serpukhovskoy as portrayed in the text. Although he does highlight Tolstoy’s method of defamiliarization through the rearrangement of images, he does not specify details in the passage that use enstrangement to convey a deeper message. He even goes as far as to say that “the motif of the erotic pose in which a bear or another animal fails to recognize a human… is identical to the one used in ‘Strider’, this, I believe, is obvious to everyone”.

Shklovsky’s assumption of the clarity with which enstrangement can be recognized in Tolstoy’s story is fairly dangerous to his argument of enstrangement as a form of correcting automatization, especially considering that, in his mention of the passage regarding the death of Strider and Serpukhovskoy, Shklovsky seems to only focus on that of the latter subject, ignoring the great significance of the comparison of both deaths and their effects on nature as a whole over the use of enstrangement as a method of revolutionary change in the literary tradition. In this passage of Tolstoy’s story, the narrator emphasizes the fundamental distinction between both species, horse and human, in their contributions to nature. The narrator explains the way in which, even in death, Strider contributes to the ecosystem through his innate liberty of human absurd attachments, while Serpukhovskoy serves as a demonstration of the extent of human pollution and wastefulness, stating that, Just as for the last twenty years his body that had walked the earth had been a great burden to everybody, so the putting away of that body was again an additional trouble to people… the dead who bury their dead found it necessary to clothe that swollen body, which at once began to decompose, in a good uniform and good boots and put it into a new expensive coffin… to take it to Moscow and there dig up some long-buried human bones and right in that spot hide this decomposing maggoty body in its new uniform and polished boots and cover it all up with earth.

The narrator’s emphasis on humanity’s absurd practices for the establishment and maintenance of status and wealth even after death, and their lack of meaninful contributions to nature and to society serves to bring reader’s attention to the frequency with which they see such practices take place around them. The repetitive mention of burial clothing and coffins, reassembled with negative connotations of wastefulness rather than the traditional personal respect that is attached to them forces the reader to truly see and not merely recognize the depth of society’s issues from a global perspective. In this case, then, the politics of enstrangement (more specifically the reformative quality of literary history and the role of poetic form in this historical system of revolutionary change) hold a much more significant meaning than that presented by Shklovsky in Art as Device, through the use of poetic form to reassemble traditional images and ideas of burial practices in order to highlight their negativity rather than their positive aspects, thus emphasizing the issue of human wastefulness and calling for the correction of society. In regards to the first point made earlier about the symbolism of Strider himself as a fundamental method of enstrangement in the story, it is important to acknowledge Shklovsky’s negligence in ignoring the horse’s significance as a defamiliarizing object in the text.

Since he so emphasizes enstrangement’s quality of rearranging images for “the complication of the form”, as well as Tolstoy’s method of such by referring to things and events as if “seen for the first time, as if happening for the first time”, one may find it strange that he failed to acknowledge the horse as an altered image himself through his portrayal of humane sentiments, morals, and philosophies. The humanization of the horse and his ability to talk also cause in the audience a sense of defamiliarization, as well as his portrayal of feelings that are familiar to those of the readers. Early in the story, as Strider speaks about his experiences around humans, he begins to explain a number of struggles he has had to deal with throughout his life, “I was thrice unfortunate: I was piebald, I was a gelding, and people considered that I did not belong to God and to myself, as is natural to all living creatures, but that I belonged to the stud groom.” From an automatized perspective, people have become used to recognizing and dismissing the signs and struggles of less fortunate people and those who have been born in a disadvantageous position. Through the use of horse breeds and characteristics as a method of categorizing the status of a horse, the reader is forced to prolong their thinking about the issue, noticing patterns between the experiences of Strider and those of less fortunate members of society. Due to Tolstoy’s deep concern with social injustice issues in 19th-century Russia, and his strong advocacy for the rights of the peasant class, Shklovsky’s failure to recognize the significance of the use of enstrangement in Strider demonstrates an accidental (and ironic) fall on automatization, present even in his negligence to recognize the character of Strider himself as a demonstration of defamiliarization in the story.

Overall, the concept of enstrangement or defamiliarization as a form of combating automatization in everyday life through artistic representations emphasized by Shklovsky in Art as Device is highlighted and demonstrated through Leo Tolstoy’s Strider: The Story of a Horse in a number of occasions through the reassembling of images regarding notions of property, burial practices, and the life of other species as opposed to that of humans to bring out their negative connotations and force the reader to truly notice the social issues through the text. Nevertheless, Shklovsky falls into a cycle of automatization himself as he fails to acknowledge both the specific instances in which the politics of enstrangement are reflected in these passages, as well as the greater significance of defamiliarization in the case of Tolstoy’s Strider. In his emphasis on the role of enstrangement in art forms, and the politics of enstrangement themselves, Shklovsky himself fails to ‘see’ Tolstoy’s clever use of defamiliarization as a method of revolutionary social change, forcing his audience to truly conceive the issue of their society and seek the correction of a faulty reality.