Pre-revolutionary vegetarianism

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Ilya Repin's raw food dinner parties, the confrontation between the “killless” and the “hygienists”, and Mayakovsky’s “performances” in vegetarian canteens: a hundred years ago, the controversy over refusing to eat meat was much more violent than today.

"Breakers" versus "hygienists"

The first vegetarian society under the comic name "Neither Fish nor Meat" appeared in Russia back in the 1860s, but the ideas of vegetarianism really began to gain momentum with the suggestion of Leo Tolstoy. The writer, who himself gave up meat in the 1880s, published a powerful essay "The First Step" in 1891. In it, he announces vegetarianism as the first step towards spiritual rebirth, proves that "virtue is incompatible with beefsteak," and, for greater persuasiveness, describes his visits to slaughterhouses in color.

It was Tolstoy's sermons that largely determined the main difference between Russian vegetarians and their Western counterparts. While the European supporters of vegetarianism appealed primarily to rational arguments, considering meat food harmful to the body, in Russia they became vegetarians primarily for moral and ethical reasons. To talk about the benefits were treated even with some contempt, disparagingly calling the "hygienists" "gastric vegetarians." “Among vegetarians all over the world, only Russians made the principle of 'Thou shalt not kill' as the main condition,” writes VP Voitsekhovsky proudly in the Vegetarian Bulletin. “In general, there is still a lot of idealism among the Russian people,” confirms the German magazine Vegetarische Warte. - Here they look at vegetarianism for the most part from the ideal side; the hygienic side is still little known."

Unsurprisingly, society treats vegetarians as strange eccentrics at best, and dangerous sectarians at worst. “Vegetarianism of the tenths had little in common with modern vegetarianism,” wrote Benedict Livshits in 1933. - It was basically something like a sect that arose at the intersection of Tolstoyism with occult doctrines. It fought, recruiting supporters among the intelligentsia in approximately the same ways that abstainers, Churikovites and members of other brotherhoods resorted to. The dazzling white kerchiefs of the women serving and the snowy tablecloths on the tables - a tribute to Europe and hygiene? Of course of course! And yet there was some subtle taste of sectarianism in them, bringing this almost ritual whiteness closer to the fluttering of pigeon wings on Khlyst's zeal.

Elixir of life

Ilya Repin became one of the most famous adherents of vegetarianism in Russia. The painter's torment is best illustrated by his letters to Tolstoy's eldest daughter Tatiana. So, on August 9, 1891, he reports: “I am a vegetarian with pleasure, I work, but I have never worked so successfully”; but ten days later he sent a desperate letter: “I had to give up vegetarianism. Nature does not want to know our virtues. After I wrote to you, at night I had such a nervous tremor that the next morning I decided to order a steak - and disappeared like a hand. " “Do you know, no matter how sad it is, I came to the final conclusion that I cannot exist without meat food,” he confesses in another letter. - If I want to be healthy, I must eat meat; without it, I now begin the process of dying. In general, Christianity is not good for a living person."

• L. N. Tolstoy and I. E. Repin, Yasnaya Polyana, 1908. Photo: S. A. Tolstoy

  

• Ilya Repin reads a message about the death of Leo Tolstoy, 1910, Kuokkala

  

His second wife Natalya Nordman helped the artist finally come to vegetarianism: she is an eccentric person in many respects, she became one of the first preachers in Russia not only of vegetarianism, but also of a raw food diet. Already in 1910, in a letter to a friend, Repin enthusiastically says: “As for my nutrition, I have reached the ideal: I have never felt so vigorous, young and efficient. And meat - even meat broth - is poisonous to me: I suffer for several days when I eat in some restaurant in the city. And my herbal broths, olives, nuts and salads restore me with incredible speed … Salads! How lovely! What a life (with olive oil!). A broth made from hay, from roots, from herbs - this is the elixir of life. Satiety is full for 9 hours, I do not want to drink or eat, everything is reduced - I can breathe more freely. The fats that protruded from the top of the swollen muscles in lumps were gone; my body rejuvenated and I became tough in walking, stronger in gymnastics and much more successful in art."

"Apples and Leaves". Ilya Repin, 1879

Not stopping at what has been accomplished, the couple are trying to instill the idea of a raw food diet in everyone around them. “Yesterday at the Psycho-Neurological Institute Ilya Efimovich read 'About youth', and I read: 'Raw food as health, economy and happiness,' says Natalia Nordman in a letter to friends in 1913. - There were about a thousand listeners, during the intermission they gave tea from hay, tea from nettles and sandwiches, from mashed olives, roots and mushrooms. After the lecture, everyone moved to the dining room, where the students were offered a four-course meal for six kopecks: soaked oatmeal, soaked peas, a vinaigrette of raw roots, and ground wheat grains that could replace bread. Despite the mistrust with which they always treat at the beginning of my sermon, it ended up with the listeners' heels still being set on fire, they ate a pound of soaked oatmeal, a pound of peas and an unlimited number of sandwiches. We washed it down with hay and got into some kind of electric, special mood. " Nordman even suggested to Bekhterev to establish a "department of vegetarianism" in St. Petersburg and sketched out a rough training plan, but the matter did not go further than conversations.

Two pea sausages, please

Meanwhile, vegetarianism is gaining momentum: at the beginning of the 20th century, at least one vegetarian canteen already operates in every more or less large city. And they enjoy success: according to statistics, four Moscow canteens in 1914 accepted almost 643 thousand people, and in St. Petersburg (where there are nine such canteens) - twice as many. In total, at the beginning of 1914, 73 canteens were registered in 37 cities.

Repin describes one of the Moscow canteens with delight: “The order of the canteen is exemplary; in the front dressing room it was not ordered to pay anything. And this makes a serious sense, in view of the special influx of insufficient students here … The walls of all rooms are hung with photographic portraits of Leo Tolstoy, of different sizes and in different turns and poses. And at the very end of the rooms, to the right - in the reading room, hangs a huge life-size portrait of Leo Tolstoy on a gray, dappled horse riding through the Yasnaya Polyana forest … The choice of food is quite sufficient, but this is not the main thing; and the fact that the food, so that you do not take it, is so tasty, fresh, nutritious that it involuntarily breaks off the tongue: why, this is a delight!"

In Chukovsky, who was not a vegetarian, we find a more restrained description: “There I had to stand for a long time both for bread, and for dishes, and for some kind of tin coupons. The main baits in this vegetarian cafe were pea cutlets, cabbage, potatoes. A two-course dinner cost thirty kopecks."

Pre-revolutionary vegetarian canteen. Photo: wikimedia.org

But the young Mayakovsky especially mercilessly mocked the vegetarians. In one of the canteens, in his usual manner, he made a uniform scandal, which another involuntary participant in the "performance" - Benedict Lifshitz - described in detail in "One and a half-eyed archer":

Scraps of a warm ball in my ears, and from the north - gray snow -

fog, with a bloodthirsty cannibal face, chewed tasteless people.

The clock hung like a rough language

behind the fifth, the sixth loomed.

And some rubbish looked from the sky

majestically like Leo Tolstoy.

Peace, labor, meat

If at first society treated vegetarians condescendingly, albeit ironically, then with the outbreak of the war, their ideas began to be perceived with hostility. In conditions when many people could not afford meat anyway, vegetarian sermons sounded like a form of mockery, and the slogan "Thou shalt not kill" was poorly combined with military propaganda.

The victory of the revolution did not alleviate the situation of the "killless". Already in the first years of Soviet rule, vegetarian societies were banned, the most ardent activists received prison sentences, and the very idea of vegetarianism was recognized as harmful. Vegetarian canteens, however, still worked during the NEP period: Ilf and Petrov made fun of them in The Twelve Chairs:

Vegetarian canteen menu. Photo: wikimedia.org

Be that as it may, by the thirties the issue was finally resolved. “Vegetarianism, based on false hypotheses and ideas, has no adherents in the Soviet Union,” the definition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia sounded like a sentence. Once again, interest in the ideas of vegetarianism began to awaken only in the years of perestroika.