L.N. Tolstoy: Enstrangement, Politics, Religion

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article describes the device of enstrangement in relation to L.N. Tolstoy’s religious–political ideas. We focus on discussing the connection between enstrangement as a literary device and Tolstoy’s use of it to criticize the social and political power structure. Our research shifts the optics from politics to life, to man’s spiritual and practical world. We direct our attention not to Tolstoy’s most self-evident critiques of the power structure, but to his religious anthropology, which is aimed at returning man to the space of life’s primordial meanings, including by use of enstrangement. This article shows how Tolstoy comes to an understanding of the false artificiality, of the illusory nature, of the world of culture and man’s cultured “Self” through representation of the cultural environment as symbolic and ideological, automatizing people’s lives and manipulating their consciousness. Having lost the living substratum of life in the secular, “cultured” world, Tolstoy finds it in the new Word of God, enstranged from automatization, and in a new practice of living “according to Christ.”