Ballet defamiliarization: Avdotya Panaeva, Leo Tolstoy, or Viktor Shklovsky?

Abstract

The article studies the device of defamiliarization (ostranenie) in the context of its connection not with excess but with deficiency. Having not only an aesthetic but also a social dimension defamiliarization emerges as a response to the exhaustion of forms, their decay and loss of expressiveness. Avdotya Panayeva, describing the mechanics of theatrical illusion from an insider’s rather than spectator’s perspective, anticipates Tolstoy’s exposure of artificiality. Ballet appears as a space of dual evaluation: on one hand, it can be perceived allegorically, while on the other, it becomes subject to social critique O. Sedakova, S. Žižek and P. Bojanić, developing this line of Tolstoy’s dual evaluation, offer divergent interpretations: while Žižek sees in ballet’s artificiality a perversion of experience, and Bojanić discerns a master-slave dialectic, Sedakova draws parallels between ballet and the limitations of realistic religious painting. Panayeva’s insider description of ballet reveals not only its mechanical nature but also the ethical issues of subjugation. In cinema, according to Shklovsky, defamiliarization loses its social pathos, becoming a tool of formal innovation. Yet by returning to Panayeva’s perspective, defamiliarization can be seen not merely as a literary device but as a means of ideological critique.