No More Horsing Around: Sex, Love, and Motherhood in Tolstoi’s Kholstomer
Abstract
By giving us a horse’s perspective on human life, Lev Tolstoi’s Kholstomer (1886) has usually been recognized in the west as a stellar example of the author’s use of “defamiliarization.” Most of the critical attention the story has received in Russia, by contrast, consists of Soviet-era studies that examine the creative history of the text and/or remark on its satiric elements. In this article, Ronald D. LeBlanc examines instead the treatment of the themes of sex, love, and motherhood in Tolstoi’s story about a castrated horse. In particular, he explores the significance that castration—with its accompanying cessation of sexual desire—appears to have in this story about a selfless gelding, a tale that may be read as the expression of a desire on the author’s part to be unburdened of the affliction of sexual lust and thus to be freed to pursue a more spiritual, less carnal existence on earth.
Department
Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
Publication Date
Fall 2011
Journal Title
Slavic Review
Publisher
Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
10.5612/slavicreview.70.3.0545
Document Type
Article
Recommended Citation
Leblanc, Ronald D., “No More Horsing Around:” Slavic Review V. 70, No. 3 (2011): 545.
Rights
Copyright 2011 Association for Slavic East European and Eurasian Studies