On this day in vegan history · September 9, 1828
Leo Tolstoy Is Born at Yasnaya Polyana
The count who would spend his last decades arguing that a moral life has to start with what's on your plate was born into a household of hunting parties and serfs.
The facts
- Born
- September 9, 1828 (August 28, Old Style), Yasnaya Polyana, Russia
- Key text
- "The First Step" (1891), preface to Howard Williams' The Ethics of Diet
- Later plan
- Tolstoy proposed founding a vegetarian journal called The First Step in 1893
Leo Tolstoy was born on September 9, 1828 (August 28 on the old Russian calendar), on his family's estate at Yasnaya Polyana, southwest of Tula. He grew up hunting, eating meat, and living the life of a Russian noble, and only turned toward vegetarianism decades later, after the moral crisis that also reshaped his religious views. In 1891 he wrote "The First Step" as a preface to the Russian translation of Howard Williams' book The Ethics of Diet, opening it with a scene of a butcher slaughtering a pig. His argument wasn't really about health. It was that a person who lets himself eat meat has already trained himself to override his own conscience, and that any serious attempt at a good life has to start by undoing that.
In their words
The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.
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I only wish to say that for a good life a certain order of good actions is indispensable; that if a man's aspirations toward right living be serious they will inevitably follow one definite sequence, and in this sequence the first thing will be self-control in food, fasting.
Leo Tolstoy, "The First Step," 1891
Source: Marxists Internet Archive
Why it still matters
Tolstoy gave the vegetarian movement something it hadn't had before: a world-famous novelist willing to say, in plain terms, that eating meat was a moral failure of attention rather than a private taste. That framing, diet as the first discipline a serious person takes on, still shows up every time someone calls going vegan a starting point rather than an endpoint.
Sources
This history is still being written.
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