The Grotesque Aesthetics of Tolstoy’s War and Peace
The Grotesque Aesthetics of Tolstoy’s War and Peace

Summary/Abstract: This paper aims to analyze Tolstoy’s War and Peace through the lens of grotesque aesthetics. The grotesque is a literary style that seeks to expose the underlying reality of things hitherto taken for granted through uncanny and unfamiliar images and language. In War and Peace, the grotesque effectively embodies Tolstoy’s literary artistry. The oddity and horror evoked by the grotesque reveal the dark abyss within the human psyche or cast a moral judgment on spiritual corruption. More saliently, the unique characteristics of the grotesque in War and Peace reveal the gap between the truth of life as perceived by its protagonist Andrei and objective reality from an epistemological perspective. Andrei’s revelations, in particular, are closely linked with grotesque motifs, such as physical disease, corpses, pests, and the Sphinx, suggesting that a consciousness fractured by extreme physical suffering can perceive a transcendent world beyond the reach of reason and gain a sense of a noumenal realm beyond the phenomenal world.

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