Prof. Dr. Brang taught Slavonic Philosophy at the Univeristy of Zürich from 1961 to 1990 |
We are pretty well informed about the history of meatless nutrition in Western Europe and the United States. During the last sixty years, many studies on vegetarianism have been published, beginning with the classical work of Johannes Haussleiter Der Vegetarismus in der Antike (1935) up to the histories of vegetarianism written by Janet Barkas (1975) and Colin Spencer (1993), Albert Wirz's book on Max Bircher-Benner and John H. Kellogg (1993) and the article of Hans-Jürgen Teuteberg on the social history of vegetarianism in Germany (1994) (1). But very little is known about vegetarianism in Russia. In Minsk, the Belorussian capital, there appeared in 1992 the Russian translation of a Polish book on vegetarianism. Translating and editing (100000 copies!) this book was justified by the fact that there existed very little in Russian on vegetarianism, and that it was in most cases polemic, since for a long time a negative attitude towards the vegetarian way of life had been predominant in Russia.
Yet vegetarian thought in that country has a long history, dominated by religious tradition. Russian monks renounce eating meat, while western monastic congregations do not (with the exception of Trappists and Carthusians). It's very significant that in the Vita of Sergej Radoneshsky (13141392 i.e. the Russian saint credited with the highest flourishing of monastic life in Russia) abstaining from meat plays an important role.
The future saint would never drink from the breast of his mother, when she had eaten meat. And he would not drink any milk on Russian Lenten days, Wednesday and Friday.
During the 19th and 20th centuries, abstinence from meat could be found in several Russian religious sects. Turgenev hints at this fact in one of his sketches from a 'Sportsman's Notebook' in the story of Kasyan. Some of the Russian flagellant sects (chlysty) were apparently vegetarians, as were the well-known Duchobors: More than 7'000 of them emigrated to Canada in 1898 with the aid of Tolstoy.
Many people in Europe, to the present day, do not know that vegetarianism has been widely spread throughout human history. Educated people know about the Pythagoreans. But where is the encyclopaedia's article on Leonardo da Vinci, who tells the reader that he was a fervent vegetarian? Colin Spencer says that among the 60 biographies on Leonardo's life and work he found only one which mentioned his vegetarianism. As for Russian literature, Dmitry Mereshkovsky, in his European bestseller on Leonardo (1901) informed readers about his protagonist's passion. In chapter VI of the novel "Diary of Giovanni Boltraffio" ( 14941495) we learn that Leonardo from his childhood would not eat meat.
He said that in time, all people would be content with a vegetable diet, and slaughtering animals would be considered a crime as slaying a human being.
This statement was followed by a scene in front of a butcher's shop and later by one of the master's pupils wondering how the cruelty of some of Leonardo's drawings would fit the blissful man "who loves the animals, who renounces the pleasures of meat-eating.' How many people know that Thomas Moore was the first, in his Utopia of 1516, to raise the problem of those immense losses of agricultural grounds which resulted from the "detour" through animal bodies? Maybe people know about Benjamin Franklin's and Voltaire's temporary adherence to a meatless way of life, maybe they remember that Rousseau's Julie, la Nouvelle Héloïse, "n'aime ni la viande, ni les ragouts; d'excellents légumes, les oeufs, la crême, les fruits, voilà sa nourriture ordinaire; et sans le poison qu'elle aime aussi beaucoup, elle serait une véritable pythagoricienne.' People may know that Percy Bysshe Shelley (17921822) was the first vegetarian poet in England; but as a rule they do not know that, besides the poem 'Queen Mab' (and his long note No.17 with information on vegetarianism), he wrote the essay, 'A Vindication of Natural Diet'. His work and his example played a certain role in the rise of the vegetarian movement in England. However, the decisive impulses came from the "Vegetarian Coalition" of the Bible Christian Church in Manchester (1809) and, as is well known, it was there that The Vegetarian Society was founded in 1847.
The implications social, economic, and ethical of the rise of the vegetarian movement in England and Germany have been shown lately by Spencer and Teuteberg . Very little is said in these studies about Russia. Yet, vegetarianism there, too, made remarkable progress in the 25 years before the First World War, notwithstanding the oppressive measures taken by the tsarist authorities and the Orthodox Church. The movement first attracted part of the intelligentsia, especially certain writers and formative artists. Vegetarian societies were founded, the first one in St.Petersburg on December 1st, 1901. By 1915, more societies existed in St.Petersburg, renamed Petrograd, as well as in Moscow, Kiev, Odessa, Poltava, Saratov, Minsk, Charkov, Rostov n. D., Ekaterinodar and Shitomir.
Vegetarian restaurants arose in many towns. Moscow's "Main Vegetarian Restaurant' founded in 1909 counted 11'000 visitors in the first year, 72'000 in 1910, 152'000 in 1911, 349'000 in 1912, 500'000 in 1913 and 643'000 in 1914. Some attempts were made to found vegetarian newspapers; from 1904 to 1905 there existed in St. Petersburg 'The Vegetarian Messenger' (Vegetarianskij Vestnik), from 1909 to 1915, first in Kishinev and then in Kiev. ' The Vegetarian Review' (Vegetarianskoe obozrenie), and in 1914 to 1915 and again in 1917 in Kiev, a second journal, named 'The Vegetarian Messenger'. The month of April 1913 saw the first 'All Russian Vegetarian Congress' in Moscow. The outbreak of the war and the October Revolution put an end to the vegetarian movement in Russia as it did to many other things.
As a matter of fact, a very important role for the vegetarian movement in the tsarist Empire was played by Leo Tolstoy. He had begun to live on vegetarian grounds in 1883. In 1892, he published his essay 'The First Step', republished in 1893 as an introduction to the Russian translation of Howard Williams's book 'The Ethics of Diet'. Several Russian writers were deeply impressed by Tolstoy's example, especially N.S. Leskov, D.V. Grigorovich, M.P. Artsybashev, I.A. Bunin, V.V. Mayakovsky, I.F. Nashivin and A.P. Barykova (some of them became vegetarians); Tolstoy's vegetarianism (and his motives for it!) caused some painters like I. E. Repin und N.N. Gay to change to a meatless diet; the sculptor P.P Trubeckoy had already done this on his own initiative.
Cover of the Russion Journal "Vegetarian Review", Dec 1914.
Tolstoy's interest in questions of diet arose well before the 1880s; as early as 1857 during his visit to Switzerland, he was convinced that his health had improved since he reduced the consumption of stimulating drinks and meat: "Jamais depuis que j'ai cessé de boir du vin, du thé, du café et que je mange moins de viande, je me sens bien.' Tolstoy and vegetarianism this theme is vast and has previously been dealt with (especially by Prof. R. F. Christian).
In this paper we focus our consideration on the attitude of some other writers towards vegetarianism.
One writer addresses different cases of cruelty to animals. The author was angered by the fact that in 1895 a single Norwegian ship transported 30'000 skins of seals which had been killed in a horrible way; he doubted the right of man to train animals for the circus. These problems are still being discussed today.
Grigorovitch, on the other hand, was involved in the failure of the first attempt to edit a vegetarian journal in Russia. In 1893 at the Tolstoys' the plan of a young student named Smirnov to publish a journal entitled "The First Step' was discussed. The program included not only questions of diet, but also some ethical and sexual considerations. Grigorovitch was present, and since he had good connections to the tsar's court he was acting as a reader Tolstoy begged him to plead there for the allowance. Grigorovitch received a sketch of the journal's programme for his personal information. He was naïve enough to hand this text to the person at court with whom he spoke. And so, when poor Smirnov came to the censors committee for approval of the programme, he was told that permission could not be given. Smirnov was amazed: the programme, he said, is very modest. Yes, said the censor, the program which you sent us is modest, but this cannot be said of the one we received from Grigorovitch's ' A Russian story'. A very close adherence to Tolstoy's ideas of moral self-improvement and of a meatless diet began when one of the most famous writers of 19th century Russian literature, Nikolaj Leskov, first met with Tolstoy in Moscow on the 4th of April, 1887.
In 1889 Leskov published an article entitled, "On vegetarians or compassionate people and about the time of fasting' in the journal, 'New Times' (Novoe Vremja). Leskov told his readers about a certain Malinovsky who, according to newspaper reports, had been living up to the age of 60 in very good health and full strength, though he would not eat any meat or fish, abhorring such food. Leskov wanted to know whether this man lived in such a way because of his abhorrence of meat or of the act of killing, which animals must suffer before one can offer part of their body on a plate. This was, Leskov said, a very interesting and important question: Vegetarianism resulting from personal taste or health problems was not worth talking about. However vegetarianism, as a result of the abhorrence of killing was a moral phenomenon. Among the common people, only the latter was an object of reverence "compassionate people', who do not want to eat meat because it is the product of slaughtering.
Among the common Russian people, you would find young and old persons who had never heard about vegetarianism, but did not eat meat or fish. They were not a great many, but they were more numerous than those [from the intelligentsia] who followed vegetarianism. They followed only their compassion.
Three years later Leskov published in the same journal an appeal "On the necessity of having a well-done cookery book for vegetarians'. There existed, he pointed out, such cookery books in German and very many in English. Vegetarians in Russia whose numbers were continuously growing, needed such a book urgently. But there was no author to write it, -- a good cook in command of the English language! She would have to choose from English cookery-book recipes which were convenient to Russian products and taste. Leskov declared he was ready to take the initiative and invited interested ladies to write to him.
This intrepid appeal groused a storm of laughter and mockery in the Russian press. One critic maintained Leskov, while sleeping, indulged in reveries about slaughter houses, and while awake would devour ham and write soap operas about the damage caused by beef. Leskov answered by a "Letter to the Editor' entitled: 'Literary Vindication'. His "foolery', he said, was mocked in several newspapers, and authors would maintain that the instigators of such "nonsense' were Leo Tolstoy and Vladimir Solovyov [the philosopher]. Leskov chose not to speak about his foolery; but as for the "nonsense' allegedly contrived by Tolstoy and Solovyov he felt the need for a correction. The "nonsense' of not eating the meat of animals was practised, besides a huge number of unknown persons, by many renowned persons of ancient and modern times. And then there follows a very detailed "catalogues of vegetarians': reaching from Zarathustra and Buddha , Pythagoras, Epicure, Seneca, Ovid, Juvenal, Origines and Johannes Chrysostomos up to Rousseau, Franklin, Pascal, Byron, Shelley, Schiller, Alexander von Humboldt and others. Lamartine was quoted
extensively from memory. The journalists' campaign against Leskov raised indignation with several contemporaries, among them Anton Chekhov.
Nikolaj Leskov, painted by V. Serov, 1894
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Nikolaj Leskov did not only point out the necessity for a Russian cookery book for vegetarians and defend the vegetarian way of life against scornful and hostile articles published by the Russian press. He also argued in several private letters of the early nineties in favour of nutritional reform. Thus, in a letter to the editor, Suvorin, of October 1892, Leskov advised him not to eat meat. It was necessary to transfigure this world into a paradise, into a garden cultivated by God, he wrote. The ethics of diet was a vital question. He himself had ceased to eat meat a year before. In several letters, Leskov spoke about the advantages of a meatless diet maintaining vegetables, milk, eggs. But it is not altogether clear to what extent his adherence to such a diet was ethically respectively medically motivated.
Leskov's son, Andrej, in the biography of his father which appeared as late as 1954, wrote a chapter entitled "Without meat from the slaughterhouse', where he mocked his father. He claimed that Leskov took "lessons in meatless food' with Tolstoy, spoke about "table-ascetisism' and reminded the reader that his father once (1881) had written the story, 'A Peasant's Revolt in the Dobryn Parish'. In that tale we are told that the peasants slaughtered young pigs in honour of Basil the Theologian from Caesarea. The animals enjoyed this, according to the peasants' belief, since any animal being slaughtered for a Christian festival "meets the knife joyfully'. When the slaughtered young pigs were lined up in the frosty night holding up the stumps of their paws, the peasants would say: "Look how the young pigs pray in that way with our Father Pope. We are going to eat them at the feast of the Caesarea Saint.' Andrej Leskov said this were "attic lines' with naïve joy in the life of the common people, without any hint at his father's forthcoming sermon of temperance and vegetarianism. He overlooked the altogether critical picture which his father gives of the pope who was a drunkard.
Vegetarianism is a theme in several of Leskov's later tales. Thus in the tale 'Figura', (1889), the title hero is a passionate gardener. He lives near Kiev and sells his cucumbers, pumpkins, melons, cabbages, beet-roots and radishes on the market. He lives with a young woman, Christja, and her daughter, Katja. The three of them do not consume any meat or fish, "nothing which has consciousness of life'. The narrator learns that Figura has inherited this attitude from his mother, who did not eat any meat or fish, for pity on the living beings. About the animals she would say: "Those I have seen living, and so they are my acquaintances, and I cannot eat my acquaintances.' The priest told her that God himself had arranged things the way they are, and he showed her in the Euchologion the prayers for the consecration of meat; but he could not convince her.
When her son, Figura, as a young officer, was unable to fulfil the sanctions required by code (to fight a duel), because of Christian convictions, his general was about to dismiss him from the service. He gave Figura the advice to become a monk, once the young man refused to eat meat. In the monastery, the general explained, also he could get excellent fish. Figura replied: 'I don't eat fish either.' You don't eat fish, either? Why? Very likely that's innate with me. My mother, too, never eats the flesh of killed animals, not even fish. How strange! That means you eat only mushrooms and greens? And milk and eggs. There are so many things we can eat.' In a letter to Tolstoy, Leskov revealed that this person was taken from real life: the prototype of Figura was the founder of Ukrainian Stundism one of the religious sects.
In 1890, Leskov wrote his tale, 'Midnight Talks'. At first, no Russian journal was ready to print it. Finally it appeared in autumn 1891. The hero is a young woman, a follower of Tolstoy. She is a strong vegetarian. Because of her views and lifestyle, she is brought to examination. As for animal flesh which is destined for consumption she uses consequently the term "corpse', as Tolstoy himself sometimes did and as Leskov used to do in his letters. When the officials ask her what corpses she meant, she answers, "The corpses of birds and animals.' The dishes prepared for table, she said, were "mostly made from corpses'. Claudia is cross-examined by the authorities because "this nonsense can be found nowadays with many people, and we must know it.' The tsarist state and the orthodox church wanted to get information about the adherents of Tolstoy…
'A Winter Day' is the title of another tale of Leskov's, where Tolstoyism plays a role. Two young women, Lidya and her servant Fedora, are adherents of non-violence. In a discussion, they are confronted with the reproach that Tolstoy "forbids eating meat'; they say this is not true.
In 1884, through Tolstoy's initiative the publishing house Posrednik, was founded in Petersburg. In 1892 it moved to Moscow and propagated Tolstoy's ideas, among them vegetarianism. Anton Chekhov did not participate, but he exchanged letters with several of the authors who cooperated with the Posrednik. In 1893, he begged one of them, Gorbunov-Posadov, to send him two or three books on the problems of vegetarianism. In Chehov's library a vegetarian cook-book was found, with notes from his hand. Chekhov was a doctor, but he was not a vegetarian. He had gone through a period of interest in Tolstoy's ideas. But, in 1894 he wrote in a letter to Suvorin a sentence which has been quoted very often: "Reflection and justice tell me that in electricity and steam power there is more love for mankind than in chastity and abstinence from meat.'
Yet, in the years to follow, Chekhov wrote several stories where he dealt with vegetarianism. Thus, in the tale 'My Life' (1896) the hero, Misail, a young nobleman, wants to earn his money by the work of his hands. He works as a house painter, but also in a slaughter house. The provincial governor tries to persuade him that he should give up the life of an outsider. He asks him, if he is a vegetarian. 'No, your excellency, I am used to eating meat. Earlier in the same tale the doctor Blagogo blames a young woman: "If you dedicate your life to such tasks as rescuing insects from slavery and abstinence from beef-cutlets, well my congratulations, dear lady. What is necessary for us is to learn, to learn, to learn.
A central role is played by vegetarianism in a tale which Ivan Bunin thought was one of Chekhov's best: 'The Pecheneg' (1897). Shmukhin, a former Cossack officer, has met an advocate during a railway journey. He invites his fellow traveller to spend a night at his house. Upon arrival (and again during the hasty departure next morning) the advocate, who remains nameless, becomes witness to a scene of utmost cruelty to animals. The two half-grown sons of his host take pleasure in throwing hens into the air and shooting them down. During supper the guest refuses to drink vodka and is content with eating bread and cucumbers. ' And why no ham?' asks Shmukhin. 'Thanks, I don't eat it. I don't eat any meat at all.' 'Why not?' "I am a vegetarian. Killing animals that contradicts my convictions.' Shmukhin asks, 'What about the animals, if you don't eat them.' ' They would have a free life.' 'But what looking at the ham of the pigs? They would breed rapidly and destroy gardens and field?' No answer is given to these questions.
Shmukhin, who in his somewhat primitive way, loves to philosophise, is totally upset by this encounter with his vegetarian guest. He begins talking about the misery of the world and does not allow his guest a night's rest. He creates such discord, that the advocate 'notwithstanding his mildness', cannot refrain from telling Shmukhin 'in sudden anger' that his nerves are ragged; and he leaves abruptly.
After 1917, the time for vegetarian experiments and leading different lifestyles, was over. Vegetarian restaurants continued to exist during the twenties in some towns, but vegetarian societies had difficulty in getting their statutes officially approved. In 1929, the Tolstoyan movement was forbidden. Some vegetarians resorted to scientific-hygienic vegetarianism, restricting themselves to problems of health. In 1927, the journal Gigiena pitanija (Hygiene of nutrition) appeared in Leningrad with the subtitle, 'Organ of the Leningrad Scientific-hygienic Vegetarian Society'. In 1930, the word "vegetarian' disappeared from the title.
Among the poets of this time was Mayakovsky, one who fought against the ethical principles of vegetarianism. Just before World War I, he had created a scandal in a Moscow vegetarian restaurant by reciting verse which ridiculed Tolstoy and Tolstoyism. In his autobiography "I Myself' (Ja sam; 1922/1928) he complained that in 1915 he was forced to eat vegetarian food when visiting the painter Repin at Kuokkala: "I am eating the herbs of Repin. For a futurist of two meters height not the right thing.' After his visit to the United States in 1925, he wrote his sketch "My discovery of America':
"You cannot live without meat, and it's useless to flirt with vegetarianism. Therefore in the very centre of Chicago, you will find the bloody heart the slaughter-houses'. Yet, the impressions Mayakovsky conveys to his reader from these meat producing factories support those of Upton Sinclair in 'The Jungle'. In 1928, Mayakovsky wrote a verse-parody on Tolstoyans entitled "The Vegetarians'. This poem advised that vegetarian pacifist propaganda should be made in Chamberlain's country, but not in the Soviet Union.
(1)Johannes Haussleiter: Der Vegetarismus in der Antike. Berlin 1935; Janet Barkas: The Vegetable Passion. A History of the Vegetarian State of Mind. London 1975; Colin Spencer: The Heretic's Feast. A History of Vegetariansim. Hanover and London (1993; 1995); Albert Wirz: Die Moral auf dem Teller. Zürich1993; Hans-Jürgen Teuteberg: Zur Sozialgeschichte des Vegetarismus in Deutschland. 1994
Prof. Dr. Peter Brang taught Slavonic Philosophy at the University of Zürich from 1961 to 1990. He is the author of books on Pushkin and Turgenev and on Swiss-Slavonic cultural relations. A vegetarian since 1924, he is actually preparing a study on vegetarianism in Russia.
For contact:
Prof. Dr. Peter Brang,
Bundtstr. 20,
8127 Zürich,
Switzerland;
Tel: +41 (0) 1 980 0950;
e-mail: peka.brang@ggaweb.ch
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