Stare at something long enough, and it blurs into mere shape. Listen to something again and again, and it withers into meaningless sound. Do something repeatedly, and it weans into unconscious sleepwalking. This is what Viktor Shklovsky warned of in his 1917 essay, “Art as Technique”: the automatization of objects and of our experiences reduces life into nothingness, scraping away our wonder, creativity, and critical thinking. However, he offers the concept of defamiliarization [ostranenie] to save ourselves from the deadening sickness of automatized cognition. Shklovsky highlights the Russian writer Lev Tolstoy in particular, whose “several hundred examples… [applied] the device of estrangement to his [descriptions] of the dogmas and rituals” of the Orthodox Church and Russian life in general. And although the Russian Formalist movement and its formally coined theory of defamiliarization emerged after his time, Tolstoy may indeed be labeled the great defamiliarizer of society and culture. In this essay, I will analyze instances of defamiliarization in two of Tolstoy’s works, and show how he employed this concept as a tool specifically for social criticism.
The disease which plagues man’s perception of the world is automatization. According to Shklovsky, the economy of mental effort demands that art “[deliver] the greatest number of ideas in the fewest number of words.” The practical and easy reign superior over the poetic and difficult, thereby flattening art to an algebraic equation of energy expenditure. Shklovsky contends that this diminishes the capacity for deep engagement with the world– eventually, “all of our skills and experiences function unconsciously.” After being perceived many times, these objects and actions acquire a status of habitualized recognition. We ‘hear’ the sounds of a language but not the language itself; we ‘see’ an object but not the object itself. Hence, the remedy of defamiliarization is to make the familiar seem unfamiliar and the ordinary extraordinary; to reawaken our senses and engagement; and ultimately to enhance the aesthetic experience and prevent the world from fading into the mundane and unremarkable. (The prefix ‘de-’ denotes a negation or removal, while ‘familiarized’ refers to having an understanding of something.) It is a device that leads us to a knowledge of objects through the laborious process of art– Shklovsky claims that to experience the process of creativity is the most important, and not so much the artifact subject itself. Through defamiliarization, objects and experiences are removed from the sphere of automatized perception, complicated and estranged; the audience is compelled to engage more actively with the work, and perception is thus restored to an active and conscious action.
Lev Tolstoy regularly criticized the aristocracy, believing that the rapid modernization and adoption of secular Western values in Russia were leading to a decay of spiritual and moral integrity, and saw the pursuit of wealth and luxury among the upper classes as antithetical to true Christian principles. He criticized the nobility for their materialism, accusing them of reckless behavior and accumulating wealth and power only at the expense of the common people. As a result, Tolstoy made use of defamiliarization as a means of reaching his audience’s conscience and forcing them to reassess the habitualized normalities of the Russian elite– the actions of the increasingly modernized upper class that otherwise persisted unconsciously unquestioned by the rest of society. First, Shklovsky notes that Tolstoy altered the form of words without changing their underlying essence, which disrupts the audience’s automatic and routine perception of language. The familiar object is made momentarily unfamiliar, prompting a conscious effort to interpret and understand its meaning. This deliberate alteration of language required readers to reassess the language and its relationship to the subject matter, a heightened cognitive engagement that was central to Tolstoy’s criticisms of the Russian upper class. Through estrangement, he created a cognitive dissonance in which readers were compelled to view the aristocracy and its behaviors in a new light.
One example that Shklovsky cites is Tolstoy’s “Kholstomer,” (1886) which is narrated by a horse named Strider and not a man. This immediately disrupts our usual human-centered perspective, changing the organ of sight to create a special perception of the artifact: man himself. Yet, like Shklovsky highlights, man himself as the object is quite unimportant here– it is the process of Strider’s thinking that takes precedence. Tolstoy prompts his audience to reflect on the irrationalities of human conventions from an outsider’s point of view, forcing readers to reevaluate their familiar instincts about what it means to experience and live in the world. For example, Strider observes that “people are guided in their life not by deeds but by words,” and that only man has such a “base and beastly instinct to claim property for himself.” This aligns with Tolstoy’s criticism of the widespread materialism cementing in modern Russian society, an excessive focus on acquiring and holding onto material possessions that led only to moral degradation and a distortion of true human values. Strider also observes hypocrisy and shallowness in the verbal expressions of man’s ethical values: he witnesses instances of human cruelty, exploitation, and callousness, which reflect a lack of empathy and ethical integrity among the privileged, landowning class. When his human master, Serpukhovsky, dies, the mere “dumping of [his] body seemed like another hardship to others. He was no longer of any use to anyone and could no longer cause anyone grief.” Yet nonetheless, Serpukhovsky’s rotting bloated body is dressed in a “dress uniform… with his good boots on,” and put in a “fine coffin adorned with new tassels.” Tolstoy himself parallelly observed a growing divide between the ideals of kindness and empathy, and the actual behavior of the Russian elite, particularly in their relentless obsession with outer appearance. This criticism is thus manifested in “Kholstomer” by the jarring juxtaposition between the gaudy coffin and the neglected corpse that decomposes inside. By presenting these condemnations of human indifference and materialism from the perspective of a voiceless and nonhuman character, Tolstoy’s defamiliarization technique challenges readers to confront their own role in perpetuating the unjust norms of their society and consider their responsibility in advocating for a more equitable society.
Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) also uses the defamiliarization of death and the funeral ritual to criticize the nobility’s self-preservationist denial of mortality, normalized greed for rationalism, and individualism. Through this, Tolstoy highlights the shallowness and superficiality of the nobility’s response to and reckoning with death. During Ivan Ilyich’s funeral, Pyotr Ivanovich is more concerned with social conventions than mourning his friend’s death– he thinks only of his outer appearance and doing what he “ought to do.” This subversion of expected emotional responses underscores the hollowness of the elite’s engagement with mortality; Tolstoy thus exposes the emptiness of their gestures, forcing readers to see the absurdity of prioritizing appearances over genuine human connection. The entire funeral ritual is absurdly reduced to automated repetitions of crossing and bowing, which continues almost unconsciously for Pyotr until he finally stops to examine Ivan’s corpse. As with all dead people, the face on Ivan’s corpse had been decorated to be more handsome and more significant than it had originally been on the living man. Tolstoy argues that this automatized equation for coping with death was so habituated in society that the aristocrats had begun dressing death up and putting an attractive veneer over it, so as to hide the true vulnerability and mortality of man. Although Ivan’s face is a sort of “reproach or a reminder to the living,” this reminder (which, in itself, may be a type of estrangement) “[seems] out of place to Pyotr Ivanovich, or at least of no concern to him.” Feeling uncomfortable, he promptly leaves– and even “too hastily, as it [seems] to him, to conform to decency.” Through Pyotr’s behavior, Tolstoy portrays a sense of individualism that is wholly disconnected from communal empathy. The focus on personal appearance and societal duties eclipses any authentic concern for Ivan or reflection on the transient nature of life, which highlights the self-centeredness that was prevalent among the modernizing Russian elite. Overall, Tolstoy’s defamiliarization technique in The Death of Ivan Ilyich encourages readers to question whether they, too, may be susceptible to rationalizing away the realities of mortality in favor of material good and social status.
This Tolstoyan device, coined decades after by Viktor Skhlovsky as ‘defamiliarization,’ brought light to the automatization of human behavior, specifically condemning the Russian elite’s materialism, moral bankruptcy, and detachment from the reality of human mortality. Through the eyes of narrators such as Strider in “Kholstomer” and Pyotr Ivanovich in The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Tolstoy estranged the seemingly familiar ‘object’ of man and the experience of death. Thus, he sought to save the modern Russian generation from the dogmatic slumber of rational egoism and materialism, compel people to actively engage with the world, challenge the established norms of society, and ultimately guide them back to natural spirituality and humanity.
