Affective Horses: Nationalism-Enabling Topos between Dostoevsky and Tarkovsky

• In Event: Beyond the Chronotope: Reading Thematically across Temporal and Geographic Boundaries

Abstract

When Fyodor Dostoevsky depicts the beating of a mare from Raskolnikov’s childhood in Crime and Punishment, he effectively accesses the emotional register of his intended readers, who in the 19th century were struck and moved by this act of extreme violence. One hundred years later, Andrei Tarkovsky manages a similar effect with the treatment of animals in his film Andrei Rublev, in which a horse famously is famously killed during production. By reading these two horses in the context of authors to varying degrees linked by mysticism and nationalism, this paper considers the apparatus by which literary horses can drive a nationalist agenda by pulling on the emotions of the reader or viewer.

Author

• Eric Kim, Stanford U