Tolstoy

By the summer of 1891, after the controversy surrounding The Kreutzer Sonata had died down, Tolstoy found himself struggling to concentrate on the new treatise he had begun the previous summer about non-violence. He had ideas for new fictional works which he wanted to develop (the future novel Resurrection and the story ‘Father Sergius’), and he also wanted to complete an article about gluttony. He had been greatly impressed with Howard Williams’s history of vegetarianism, The Ethics of Diet: A Catena of Authorities Deprecatory of the Practice of Flesh-Eating, which had been published in London in 1883, after serial publication in The Dietetic Reformer and Vegetarian Messenger (the monthly journal of the Vegetarian Society), and he wanted to write a preface for its Russian translation. His article, ‘The First Step’, was completed in July, after a sobering visit to the abattoir in Tula, and published the following year in the journal Issues in Philosophy and Psychology, which was edited by his friend Nikolay Grot, a professor at Moscow University.¹³⁹ If the article came hard on the heels of The Kreutzer Sonata, it was because Tolstoy drew a direct link between gastronomic and sexual indulgence, arguing that carnal consumption stimulated carnal desire. Like chastity, vegetarianism was a precondition of the Christian ascetic life to which he aspired.¹⁴⁰ Tolstoy was bound to become a hero of the animal rights movement, for he did not, as it were, mince his words when graphically describing the cruelties involved in the slaughter of animals:

Through the door opposite the one at which I was standing, a big, red, well-fed ox was led in. Two men were dragging it, and hardly had it entered when I saw a butcher raise a knife above its neck and stab it. The ox, as if all four legs had suddenly given way, fell heavily upon its belly, immediately turned over on one side, and began to work its legs and all its hind-quarters. Another butcher at once threw himself upon the ox from the side opposite to the twitching legs, caught its horns and twisted its head down to the ground, while another butcher cut its throat with a knife. From beneath the head there flowed a stream of blackish-red blood, which a besmeared boy caught in a tin basin. All the time this was going on the ox kept incessantly twitching its head as if trying to get up, and waved its four legs in the air. The basin was quickly filling, but the ox still lived, and, its stomach heaving heavily, both hind and fore legs worked so violently that the butchers held aloof. When one basin was full, the boy carried it away on his head to the albumen factory, while another boy placed a fresh basin, which also soon began to fill up. But still the ox heaved its body and worked its hind legs …

… [W]e cannot pretend that we do not know this. We are not ostriches, and cannot believe that if we refuse to look at what we do not wish to see, it will not exist. This is especially the case when what we do not wish to see is what we wish to eat. If it were really indispensable, or, if not indispensable, at least in some way useful! But it is quite unnecessary, and only serves to develop animal feelings, to excite desire, and to promote fornication and drunkenness. And this is continually being confirmed by the fact that young, kind, undepraved people – especially women and girls – without knowing how it logically follows, feel that virtue is incompatible with beefsteaks, and, as soon as they wish to be good, give up eating flesh.¹⁴¹

Contemporary writers may not be following the same spiritual path as Tolstoy, but the fact that revelations of animal cruelty in the twenty-first century still have the capacity to shock shows that we still behave like ostriches. Over a century after Tolstoy’s ‘First Step’ was published, many abattoirs are only a little more humane.¹⁴²