On this day in vegan history · November 20, 1910
Tolstoy Dies at a Stranger's Railway Station
The novelist who called meat-eating a moral injury spent his last week in a stationmaster's spare room, ten days after walking out on his own household at 82.
The facts
- Date of death
- November 20, 1910 (Old Style: November 7)
- Place
- Astapovo railway station, Russia
- Age
- 82
- Key essay
- "The First Step" (1891), his case against eating meat
Leo Tolstoy gave up meat in the 1880s and made the case against it in essays including "The First Step" (1891), arguing that killing animals for food does more damage to the killer's conscience than to the animal's death itself. On the night of October 28, 1910, at 82 years old, he secretly left his estate at Yasnaya Polyana with no fixed destination. Worn out by the journey, he came down with pneumonia on the train and was taken off at the small station of Astapovo, where stationmaster Ivan Ozolin gave him a room in his own house. Reporters and a film crew gathered outside as newspapers ran daily health bulletins. He died there on November 20, 1910 (November 7 by the Russian calendar of the time).
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.
-
This is dreadful! Not the suffering and death of the animals, but that man suppresses in himself, unnecessarily, the highest spiritual capacity, that of sympathy and pity toward living creatures like himself, and by violating his own feelings becomes cruel.
Leo Tolstoy, "The First Step," 1891
Source: The Animal Rights Library -
Ours is not a Christianity of fasting and privations, but of beefsteaks.
quoted by Leo Tolstoy in "The First Step," 1891
Source: The Animal Rights Library
Why it still matters
Tolstoy's argument was never really about the animal on the plate. It was about what the habit of killing does to the person doing it, and that question still sits under most vegan writing today.
Sources
This history is still being written.
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