One of the most famous moments in intellectual history is that January morning in Turin, 1889, when Friedrich Nietzsche is said to have embraced a horse that had been tormented by a coachman. This act of creaturely compassion, which Nietzsche’s landlord has handed down, is considered by many biographers to be the tipping point at which Nietzsche’s existence plunged into derangement. And didn’t that expressive gesture deny everything he had said in criticism of compassion and in celebration of the strong, beautiful, and merciless human being? The question must remain open because the authenticity of the incident is not undisputed.
Three years before Nietzsche’s collapse, a story by Leo Tolstoy, written two decades earlier, was published, which presents the complete life of a horse reflected from two perspectives, from the outside and from the inside. Yes, also from the inside: Because the eponymous horse “Linen Knife”, so called because of its wide stride, tells its own life in it, from birth to the threshold of death. At the same time, i.e. changing the narrative attitude, the novella also shows the animal from the outside, from the point of view of grooms, stable masters, buyers and owners.
Boysen’s pitch is creaky and disillusioned
“The Linen Knife” is a shocking, little-known text that unfolds Tolstoy’s psychologically refined and at the same time alienating view of primitive Christianity on creatures – humans and animals – and on modern society in a small space. Rolf Boysen’s reading brings the story to life with dramaturgical perfection that can hardly be surpassed, in a creaky, old, disillusioned, resigned, world-contemptuous, and ultimately bitterly mournful tone. Boysen phrased the sentences in Josef Hahn’s translation wonderfully, which are definitely worth such care. Boysen avoided the sometimes baroque pathos of his readings of the ancient epics of Homer and Virgil.
The juxtaposition of the perspectives of humans and animals shows the rift in creation. For the human animal, horses are commodities or luxury items, work slaves or artists, and last but not least valuables with changing price tags. The worldly animal, on the other hand, casts an uncomprehending gaze at a society in which the attributes “mine” or “yours” – the abstract institution of property – are separated from immediate use value and from the bodily relationship to the living being. An owner may call a horse “mine” that he has never ridden or even seen. The attribute alone gives him the right to determine his fate.
On the other hand, the story shows the cynical conversations of rich or indebted owners who trade in horses for prestige purposes or to earn money, that is, who objectify them and do not recognize them as living, suffering creatures. The animal story becomes a social novel. However, it does not become an allegory, as in the literary tradition, where lions are kings and foxes are oppositionists, and wolves enforce the law of the strongest, to which lambs fall victim. No, Tolstoy shows society as a union to which animals and humans belong together. This inevitably leads to a fundamental critique of the real aristocratic-bourgeois society, almost like a forerunner of today’s movement for animal rightsfor animal rights as a counterpart to human rights.
Leo Tolstoy: The Canvas Knife. Read by Rolf Boysen. 1 MP3 CD, 1 hour 51 minutes. Audio Verlag, Berlin 2022, 15 euros.
(Photo: Audio Verlag)
But how beautiful, how delicate Tolstoy does it. The life of the canvas knife is determined by a single characteristic: it is actually of the best, purest ancestry and is born piebald. Everything else about him is of exemplary perfection: health, physique, performance, elegance, speed. But the piebaldness makes the beautiful stallion an outsider, even among his fellow horses, who are no better than us humans. This one flaw makes him a gelding who can only be used as a workhorse. Just how Tolstoy treats the moment that changes everything in the horse’s life, the transition from stallion to gelding – did all readers even understand in 1886 that this is a castration? – is one of the most shocking moments in European literature.
In the end, animal and human die in parallel, as they can only die with this narrator. There is no better way to use the period of just two hours than with this text, with this reader. Great 19th century where Nietzsche and Tolstoy were contemporaries! Didn’t Thomas Mann draw the sum from this constellation when he gave his Bauschan a Nietzsche beard in “Herr und Hund”?