Sparking the Pacifist Imagination by Depicting the Familiar as New: The Subversive Potential of Leo Tolstoy’s ‘Defamiliarisation’

In the last thirty years of his life, Leo Tolstoy wrote countless books, essays and pamphlets expounding his newly-articulated views on violence, the state, the church, and on how to improve the human condition. Since then, these ‘Christian anarchist’ views have often been forgotten, ignored, or dismissed as utopian or naive. Nonetheless, his writings on themes such as the cycle of violence, the continuity between means and ends, and state violence have inspired many, including Gandhi and later pacifists, numerous Tolstoyan communities, and Christian anarchists. One of the reasons Tolstoy inspired so many was his application his literary skills – in particular the technique of ‘defamiliarisation’, or looking at the familiar as if new – to shake his readers into noticing the absurdity and incoherence of hegemonic justifications for violence, admitting their implicit complicity in such violence, and recognising the process which had numbed them into accepting that complicity. The aim of this paper is to consider the appeal of Tolstoy’s anarcho-pacifist writings and in particular his use of ‘defamiliarisation’, by illustrating his deployment of that device, by discussing its political potential as an activist tool, and by reflecting on the wider influence of Tolstoy’s political thought.