톨스토이의 『홀스토메르』에 나타난 생태학적 전망

Abstract

“Xolstomer” (1885), a medium-length story of L. N. Tolstoy, is a novel work that reflects his life ideology and ecological sense in line with biological egalitarianism of deep ecology. This work deserves taking ecological approaches in that its author Tolstoy focused on the life of horse with a view to highlighting the issue of conflict and disharmony between human world and living organisms in natural world. One purpose of this study is to examine how “Xolstomer”, the medium-length story of Tolstoy, depicts human being's destruction of ecosystem, so that it may analyze fundamental reasons of broken and disharmonized relations between mankind and non-human living creatures. The other purpose of this study is to compare social ecology of human being with that of horse, and also compare human being and horse as representative entities of two different species, so that it may discover what would be the ecological ethics pursued by Tolstoy. Finally, this study is also intended to discuss any possible philosophical implications of the death of human and horse, which has even different aspects from each other. In Tolstoy's “Xolstomer”, human-driven destruction of animal ecosystem is depicted in form of habitual violence and castration. Here, we can point out the following 4 fundamental reasons why people have irrational awareness and take absurd actions toward living creatures in nature, so that mankind and non-human living creatures have broken relations and disharmony with each other:First, there are errors of judgment between appearance and actual being of mankind. Secondly, the errors of human being's awareness are associated with an action of castration. Castration is an anti-ecological action that cuts off any possibility of natural living creatures to preserve their own species. Thirdly, there is an issue of absurdity arising from human being's sense of private ownership and their possessiveness. Fourthly, there is an issue of absurdity in close associations with a great gap between words and deeds of human being. That is why modern literature would need to candidly uncover any human-driven mechanism and valuelessness of human language, but create a new and alternative language that may interconnect anything with one another, not any language of destruction and breakup. To this end, Tolstoy adopts horse, a non-human living creature, as a positive subject and discourse maker of new language for communication between mankind and other living creatures in nature. In this novel, Xolstomer goes beyond a being of horse as personified animal, but takes a higher position as symbolic being of personalized nature. As a result, the comparison between social ecology of horse and human being and the comparison of horse versus human being as individual entity suggest a new language - ecological ethics - that Tolstoy desired to deliver by means of Xolstomer. It is about nature that is ethical in itself and pursues the ultimate virtue, and it also gives human being a lesson that we have to learn from nature how we could live well and right, although we live under the control of instinctive desire and destruction. In Xolstomer, two different aspects of death between horse and human being reveal Tolstoi's ecological senses. The horse Xolstomer gasped for last ‘breath’ in this earth and came to death, laying down ‘all the burden’, implying a possibility to enter the world of soul. And even after the death, it gave away its flesh as feed for other living creatures, leaving a symbolic meaning of precious sacrifice to us. However, the selfish and dissipated life of human being is viewed as meaningless and vain life. Xolstomer makes a connection of life with other living creatures in nature at the sacrifice of its flesh, and also connects with other horses as same species by way of ‘inhalation’ and ‘exhalation’, so its life runs again in living cycle of ecosystem without disconnection.