Historia de un caballo: “Jolstomer” de Tolstoi sobre la “naturaleza” y la “verdad”

Abstract

This essay first discusses how nature in “Kholstomer” is articulated through Rousseauian themes such as human division and alienation from nature and how to live as a natural being in modern society. Yet, Tolstoy’s text also launches a powerful critique of truth as a phenomenon based on language and rationality analogous, mutatis mutandis, to Nietzsche’s understanding of truth in “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense”. Finally, this essay discusses how the Rousseauian and the Nietzschean dimensions of “Kholstomer” converge and diverge in a creative tension as they are channeled from an aesthetic point of view through the two literary modes that they represent, satire and irony.