or 
, that is, reflection or self-possession.
There has been and there can be no good life without abstinence. No good life is thinkable without abstinence. Every attainment of a good life must begin through it.
There is a ladder of virtues, and we must begin with the first rung, in order to ascend to the next; and the first virtue
which must be attained by a man, if he wants to attain the next, is what the ancients called or , that is, reflection or self-possession.
If in the Christian teaching abstinence is included in the concept of self-renunciation, the consecutiveness none the less remains the same, and the attainment of no Christian virtues is possible without abstinence, not because somebody has thought it out so, but because such is the essence of the matter.
Abstinence is the first step of every good life.
But even abstinence is not attained at once, but by degrees.
Abstinence is a man’s liberation from the lusts, their subjection to reason, 
. But there are many various lusts in man, and for the struggle with them to be successful he must begin with the basal ones,
those on which other, more complex ones grow up, and not with the complex, which have grown up on the basal ones. There are
complex passions, as the passion for adorning the body, games, amusements, gossiping, curiosity, and many others; and there
are basal passions, such as gluttony, idleness, carnal love. In the struggle with the passions it is impossible to begin at
the end, with the struggle with the complex passions; we must begin with the basal ones, and that, too, in a definite order. This order is determined both by the essence of the thing and by the tradition of human wisdom.
A glutton is not able to struggle against idleness, and a gluttonous and idle man is unable to struggle with the sexual lust. And so, according to all teachings, the striving after abstinence began with the struggle against the lust of gluttony, began with fasting. But in our society, where every serious relation to the attainment of the good life is lost to such a degree and has been lost for so long a time that the very first virtue, abstinence, without which no others are possible, is considered superfluous, there is also lost the consecutiveness which is indispensable for the attainment of this first virtue, and many have forgotten all about fasting, and it has been decided that fasting is a foolish superstition, and that fasting is not at all necessary.
And yet, just as the first condition of a good life is abstinence, so the first condition of an abstemious life is fasting.
A man may wish to be good, dream of goodness, without fasting; but in reality it is just as impossible to be good without fasting, as it is to walk without getting up on one’s feet.
Fasting is an indispensable condition of a good life. But gluttony has always been the first symptom of the reverse, of a bad life, and unfortunately this symptom has particular force in the life of the majority of the men of our time.
Glance at the faces and at the figures of the men of our circle and time – on many of these faces with pendent chins and cheeks, obese limbs and large bellies, lies the ineffaceable imprint of a life of dissipation. Nor can it be otherwise. Look closely at our life, at that by which the majority of the men of our society are moved; ask yourself what is the chief interest of this majority. No matter how strange this may appear to us, who are accustomed to conceal our true interests and to put forth false, artificial ones, the chief interest of the life of the majority of men of our time is the gratification of the sense of taste, the pleasure of eating, gluttony. Beginning with the poorest and ending with the wealthiest classes of society, gluttony, I think, is the chief aim, the chief pleasure of our life. The poor working people form an exception only to the extent to which want keeps them from surrendering themselves to this passion. The moment they have time and means for it, they, emulating the higher classes, provide themselves with what tastes best and is sweetest, and eat and drink as much as they can. The more they eat, the more they consider themselves, not only happy, but even strong and healthy. And in this conviction they are maintained by the cultured people, who look upon food in precisely this manner. The cultured classes imagine happiness and health to lie in savoury, nutritive, easily digested food (in which opinion they are confirmed by the doctors, who assert that the most expensive food, meat, is the most wholesome), though they try to conceal this.
Look at the life of these people, listen to their talk. What kind of exalted subjects interests them? Philosophy, and science, and art, and poetry, and the distribution of wealth, and the welfare of the people, and the education of youth; but all this is for the vast majority a lie. All this interests them only between business, between the real business, between breakfast and dinner, while the stomach is full, and it is not possible to eat any more. The one living, real interest, the interest of the majority of men and women, is eating, especially after their first youth. How to eat, what to eat, when, where?
Not one solemnity, not one joy, not one christening, not one opening of anything takes place without eating.
Look at people in their travels. In them you can see it best. ‘The museums, the libraries, the parliament – how interesting! And where shall we dine? Who sets the best table?’ Yes, just look at the people, as they come down to dinner, dressed up, besprinkled with perfume, to a table adorned with flowers, how joyously they rub their hands and smile!
If we could look into their souls – what do the majority of men long for? For an appetite for breakfast, for dinner. In what does the severest punishment from childhood consist? In being reduced to bread and water. What artisan receives the greatest wages? The cook. In what does the chief interest of the lady of the house consist? Toward what does in the majority of cases the conversation incline between the ladies of the middle class? And if the conversation of the people of the higher classes does not incline toward it, the cause of it is not because they are more cultured and busy with higher interests, but only because they have a housekeeper or a steward who is busy with this and guarantees their dinners. But try to deprive them of this comfort, and you will see in what their cares lie. Everything reduces itself to the question of eating, the price of grouse, the best means for boiling coffee, baking sweet tarts, etc. People assemble, whatever the occasion may be – christening, funeral, wedding, dedication of a church, farewell, reception, celebration of a memorable day, the death or birth of a great scholar, thinker, teacher of morality – people assemble, claiming to be busy with some exalted subjects. So they say; but they dissemble: they all know that there will be something to eat, good, savoury food, and something to drink, and it is this mainly which has brought them together. For several days previous to this animals have been slaughtered and cut up for this very purpose, baskets with supplies have been brought from the gastronomic shops, and cooks, their assistants, scullions, peasants of the buffet, especially dressed up in clean starched aprons and caps, have been ‘working’. So, too, chefs, who receive five hundred roubles per month and more, have been working and giving orders. The cooks have been chopping, mixing, washing, arranging, adorning. With the same solemnity and importance there has been working a similar superintendent of service, counting, reflecting, casting his glance, like an artist. The gardener has been working for the flowers. The dishwashers… A whole army of men work, the products of thousands of work-days are devoured, and all this in order that the people assembled may have a chance to talk of the memorable great teacher of science or morality, or to recall a deceased friend, or to say farewell to a young couple who are entering upon a new life.
In the lower and middle classes it is evident that a holiday, funeral, wedding, means gluttony. It is thus that they understand the matter in these classes. Gluttony to such an extent takes the place of the motive of assemblage that in Greek and French ‘wedding’ and ‘feast’ have the same meaning. But in the higher circle, amidst refined people, great art is employed in order to conceal this and to make it appear that the eating is a secondary matter, that it exists only for decency’s sake. They can conveniently represent this in such a way, because for the most part they are in the real sense of the word satiated – they are never hungry.
They pretend that they have no need of a dinner, of eating, and that it is even a burden to them. But try, instead of the refined dishes expected by them, to give them, I do not say bread and water, but porridge and noodles, and you will see what a storm this will provoke, and how the real facts will come to the surface, namely, that in the gathering of these men the chief interest is not the one which they put forth, but the interest of eating.
See what people deal in; walk through the city and see what is being sold: attire and articles of food.
In reality this ought to be so and cannot be otherwise. We cannot stop thinking of eating, keep this lust within its limits, only when we submit to the necessity of eating; but when a man, only submitting to this necessity, that is, to the fulness of the stomach, stops eating, then it cannot be otherwise. If a man has taken a liking to the pleasure of eating, has allowed himself to love this pleasure, and finds that this pleasure is good (as the vast majority of men of our society and the cultured find, although they pretend the opposite), then there is no limit to its increase, there are no limits beyond which it cannot grow. The gratification of a need has its limits; but enjoyment has none. For the gratification of a need it is indispensable and sufficient to eat bread, porridge or rice; for the increase of enjoyment there is no end to dishes and to seasonings.
Bread is an indispensable and sufficient food (the proof of this: millions of strong, lithe, healthy men, who work much, live on nothing but bread). But it is better to eat bread with some preparation. It is good to soak bread in water with meat boiled in it. It is still better to put vegetables into this water, and still better a lot of different vegetables. It is not bad to eat meat itself. But it is better to eat, not boiled, but roasted meat. And still better, meat slightly broiled with butter, and with the blood, and only certain parts of it. Add to this vegetables and mustard. And wash it down with wine, best of all red wine. You do not feel like eating anything else, but you can still devour some fish, if it is seasoned with sauce, and you can wash it down with white wine. One would think that no other fat or savoury food would go down. But you may still eat something sweet, in the summer ice-cream, in the winter preserves, jams, etc. And this is a dinner, a modest dinner. The pleasure of this dinner may be greatly, very greatly increased. And people do increase it, and there is no limit to this increase: there are appetizers, and entremets, and desserts, and all kinds of combinations of savoury food, and adornments, and music during the dinner.
And, strange to say, the people who every day eat such dinners, in comparison with which Belshazzar’s feast, which called forth the remarkable threat, is nothing, are naïvely convinced that they can with it all lead a moral life.
Fasting is an indispensable condition of a good life; but in fasting, as in abstinence, there appears the question, with what to begin the fasting, how to fast, how often to eat, what not to eat. And as it is impossible seriously to busy oneself with anything, without having acquired the consecutiveness necessary for it, so it is impossible to fast, without knowing with what to begin the fast, with what to begin the abstinence from food.
Fasting! But there is the choice to be made as to what to begin with. This idea seems ridiculous and extravagant to the majority of men.
I remember with what pride, on account of his originality, an Evangelical Protestant, who was attacking the asceticism of monasticism, said to me, ‘My Christianity is not with fasts and privations, but with beefsteaks.’ Christianity and virtue in general with beefsteaks!
So many savage and immoral things have eaten their way into our life, especially into that lower sphere of the first step toward a good life, the relation to food, to which very few people have paid any attention, that it is difficult for us even to comprehend the boldness and madness of the assertion in our time of a Christianity or virtue with beefsteaks.
The only reason why we are not horrified at this assertion is that with us has happened the unusual thing that we look and do not see, that we listen and do not hear. There is no stench, no sound, no monstrosity, to which a man cannot get used, so that he no longer notices what is startling to a man who is not used to it. The same is true in the moral sphere. Christianity and morality with beefsteaks!
The other day I visited the slaughter-house in our city of Tula. The slaughter-house is built according to a new, perfected method, as it is built in large cities, so that the animals killed shall suffer as little as possible. This was on a Friday, two days before Pentecost. There were there a large number of cattle.
Before that, a long time before, when reading the beautiful book, Ethics of Diet, I had made up my mind to visit the slaughter-house, in order with my own eyes to see the facts of the case, which are mentioned whenever vegetarianism is mentioned. But I felt uneasy, as one always feels uneasy when going to see sufferings which are sure to be there, but which one cannot prevent, and so I kept putting it off.
But lately I met on the road a butcher, who had been home and now was going back to Tula. He is not yet an experienced butcher, and his duty consists in stabbing with a dagger. I asked him whether he did not feel sorry that he had to kill the animals. And as the answer always is, so he answered, ‘Why be sorry? This has to be done.’ But when I told him that eating meat was not necessary, he agreed with me, and then he also agreed with me that it was a pity to kill. ‘What is to be done? I have to make a living,’ he said. ‘At first I was afraid to kill. My father never killed a chicken in all his life.’
The majority of Russians cannot kill; they feel pity, which they express by the word ‘afraid’. He, too, had been afraid, but had stopped. He explained to me that the busiest day is Friday, when the work lasts until evening.
Lately, too, I had a talk with a soldier, a butcher, and he, too, was surprised in the same way at my assertion that it is a pity to kill; and, as always, he said that this was the law; but later he agreed with me, ‘Especially when it is a tame, kind animal. The dear animal comes up to you, believing you. It is truly a pity!’
One day we returned from Moscow on foot, and some drivers of drays, going from Serpukhov to a forest to get a merchant’s timber, gave us a lift. It was Maundy Thursday. I was riding in the first telega with a strong, red-faced, coarse driver, who was apparently very drunk. As we entered a village, we saw that from the last yard they were pulling a fattened, shorn, pink-coloured pig, to get it killed. The pig squealed in a desperate voice, which resembled that of a man. Just as we passed by, they began to kill the pig. One of the men drew the knife down its throat. It squealed louder and more penetratingly than before, tore itself loose, and ran away, shedding its blood. I am near-sighted and so did not see all the details; all I saw was the pink-coloured flesh of the pig, which resembled that of a man, and I heard the desperate squeal; but the driver saw all the details, and he looked in that direction without taking his eyes off. The pig was caught and thrown down, and they began to finish the killing. When its squeal died down, the driver drew a deep sigh.
‘Is it possible men will not have to answer for this?’ he muttered.
So strong is people’s disgust at any kind of a murder; but by example, by encouraging men’s greed, by the assertion that this is permitted by God, and chiefly by habit, people have been brought to a complete loss of this natural feeling.
On Friday I went to Tula, and, upon meeting an acquaintance of mine, a meek, kindly man, I invited him to go with me.
‘Yes, I have heard that it is well arranged, and I should like to see it, but if they slaughter there I sha’n’t go in.’
‘Why not? It is precisely what I want to see. If meat is to be eaten, cattle have to be killed.’
‘No, no, I cannot.’
What is remarkable in this case is, that this man is a hunter and himself kills birds and animals.
We arrived. Even before entering we could smell the oppressive, detestable, rotten odour of joiner’s glue or of glue paint. The farther we went, the stronger was this odour. It is a very large, red brick building, with vaults and high chimneys. We entered through the gate. On the right was a large fenced yard, about a quarter of a desyatina in size – this is the cattle-yard, to which the cattle for sale are driven two days in the week – and at the edge of this space was the janitor’s little house; on the left were what they call the chambers, that is, rooms with round gates, concave asphalt floors, and appliances for hanging up and handling the carcasses. By the wall of the little house, and to the right of it, sat six butchers in aprons, which were covered with blood, with blood-bespattered sleeves rolled up over muscular arms. They had finished their work about half an hour ago, so that on that day we could see only the empty chambers. In spite of the gates being opened on two sides, there was in each chamber an oppressive odour of warm blood; the floor was cinnamon-coloured and shining, and in the depressions of the floor stood coagulated black gore.
One of the butchers told us how they slaughtered, and showed us the place where this is done. I did not quite understand him, and formed a false, but very terrible conception of how they slaughtered, and I thought, as is often the case, that the reality would produce a lesser effect upon me than what I had imagined. But I was mistaken in this.
The next time I came to the slaughter-house in time. It was on Friday before Pentecost. It was a hot June day. The odour of glue and of blood was even more oppressive and more noticeable in the morning than during my first visit. The work was at white heat. The dusty square was all full of cattle, and the cattle were driven into all the stalls near the chambers.
In the street in front of the building stood carts with steers, heifers and cows tied to the cart stakes and shafts. Butchers’ carts, drawn by good horses, loaded with live calves with dangling heads, drove up and unloaded; and similar carts with upturned and shaking legs of the carcasses of steers, with their heads, bright red lungs and dark red livers drove away from the slaughter-house. Near the fence stood the mounts of the cattle-dealers. The cattle-dealers themselves, in their long coats, with whips and knouts in their hands, walked up and down in the yard, either marking one man’s cattle with tar paint, or haggling, or attending to the transfer of bulls and steers from the square to the stalls, from which the cattle entered the chambers. These men were obviously all absorbed in money operations and calculations, and the thought that it is good or bad to kill these animals was as far from them as the thought as to what was the chemical composition of the blood with which the floor of the chambers was covered.
No butchers could be seen in the yards: they were all working in the chambers. During this day about one hundred steers were killed. I entered a chamber and stopped at the door. I stopped, both because the chamber was crowded with the carcasses which were being shifted, and because the blood ran underfoot and dripped from above, and all the butchers who were there were smeared in it, and, upon entering inside, I should certainly have been smeared with blood. They were taking down one carcass, which was suspended; another was being moved to the door; a third, a dead ox, was lying with his white legs turned up, and a butcher with his strong fist was ripping the stretched-out hide.
Through the door opposite to the one where I was standing they were at that time taking in a large, red, fattened ox. Two men were pulling him. And they had barely brought him in, when I saw a butcher raise a dagger over his head and strike him. The ox dropped down on his belly, as though he had been knocked off all his four legs at once, immediately rolled over on one side, and began to kick with his legs and with his whole back. One of the butchers immediately threw himself on the fore part of the ox, from the end opposite his kicking legs, took hold of his horns, bent his head to the ground, and from beneath the head there spurted the dark red blood, under the current of which a boy besmeared in blood placed a tin basin. All the time while they were doing this, the ox kept jerking his head, as though trying to get up, and kicked with all his four legs in the air. The basin filled rapidly, but the ox was still alive and, painfully contracting and expanding his belly, kicked with his fore legs and hind legs, so that the butchers had to get out of his way. When one basin was filled, the boy carried it on his head to the albumen plant, while another boy set down another basin, which also began to fill up. But the ox kept contracting and expanding his belly and jerked with his hind legs. When the blood stopped flowing, the butcher raised the head of the ox and began to flay him. The ox continued kicking. The head was bared and began to look red with white veins, and assumed the position given to it by the butchers; on both sides of it hung the hide. The ox continued to kick. Then another butcher caught the ox by a leg, which he broke and cut off. Convulsions ran up and down the belly and the other legs. The other legs, too, were cut off, and they were thrown where all the legs belonging to one owner were thrown. Then the carcass was pulled up to a block and tackle and was stretched out, and there all motion stopped.
Thus I stood at the door and looked at a second, a third, a fourth ox. With all of them the same happened; the same flayed head with pinched tongue and the same kicking back. The only difference was that the butcher did not always strike in the right place to make the ox fall. It happened that the butcher made a mistake, and the ox jumped up, bellowed, and, shedding blood, tried to get away. But then he was pulled under a beam and struck a second time, after which he fell.
I later walked up from the side of the door, through which they brought in the oxen. Here I saw the same, only at closer range, and, therefore, more clearly. I saw here, above all else, what I had not seen through the other door – how they compelled the oxen to walk through this door. Every time when they took an ox out of the stall and pulled him by a rope, which was attached to his horns, the ox, scenting the blood, became stubborn and bellowed, and sometimes jerked back. It was impossible for two men to pull him in by force, and so a butcher every time went behind and took the ox by the tail, which he twisted until the gristle cracked and the tail broke, and the ox moved on.
The oxen of one owner were all finished, and they brought up the cattle of another. The first from this lot of the other owner was a bull. He was a fine-looking, thoroughbred black bull, with white spots on his body and white legs – a young, muscular, energetic animal. They began to pull him; he dropped his head and absolutely refused to move. But the butcher who was walking behind took hold of his tail, as a machinist puts his hand on the throttle, and twisted it; the cartilage cracked; and the bull rushed ahead, knocking the men who were pulling at the rope off their feet, and again stood stubbornly still, looking askance with his white, bloodshot eyes. But again the tail cracked, and the bull rushed forward and was where he was wanted. The butcher walked up, took his aim, and struck him. But the stroke did not fall in the right place. The bull jumped up, tossed his head, bellowed, and, all covered with blood, tore himself loose and rushed back. All the people at the doors started back; but the accustomed butchers, with a daring which was the result of the peril, briskly took hold of the rope and again of the tail, and again the bull found himself in the chamber, where his head was pulled under the beam, from which he no longer tore himself away. The butcher briskly looked for the spot where the hair scatters in the form of a star, and, having found it, in spite of the blood, struck him, and the beautiful animal, which was full of life, came down with a crash and kicked with its head and legs, while they let off the blood and flayed the head.
‘Accursed devil, he did not even fall the right way,’ growled the butcher as he cut the hide from his head.
Five minutes later the red, instead of black, head, without the hide, with glassy, fixed eyes, which but five minutes before had glistened with such a beautiful colour, was suspended on the beam.
Then I entered the division where they butcher the smaller animals. It is a very large and long chamber, with an asphalt floor and with tables with backs, on which they butcher sheep and calves. Here the work was all finished; in the long chamber, which was saturated with the odour of blood, there were only two butchers. One was blowing into the leg of a dead wether and patting the blown-up belly; the other, a young lad, with a blood-bespattered apron, was smoking a bent cigarette. There was no one else in the gloomy, long chamber, which was saturated with the oppressive odour. Immediately after me there came in one who looked like an ex-soldier, who brought a black yearling lamb, with spots on his neck, which he put down on one of the tables, as though on a bed. The soldier, apparently an acquaintance of theirs, greeted them and asked them when their master gave them days off. The young lad with the cigarette walked up with a knife, which he sharpened at the edge of the table, and answered that they had their holidays free. The live plump lamb was lying quietly as though dead, only briskly wagging his short tail and breathing more frequently than usual. The soldier lightly, without effort, held down his head, which was rising up; the young lad, continuing the conversation, took the lamb’s head with his left hand and quickly drew the knife down his throat. The lamb shivered, and the little tail became arched and stopped wagging. While waiting for the blood to run off, the young lad puffed at the cigarette, which had nearly gone out. The blood began to flow, and the lamb began to be convulsed. The conversation was continued without the least interruption.
And those hens and chickens, which every day in a thousand kitchens, with heads cut off, shedding blood, jump about comically and terribly, flapping their wings?
And behold, a tender, refined lady will devour the corpses of these animals with the full conviction of her righteousness, asserting two propositions, which mutually exclude one another:
The first, that she is so delicate – and of this she is assured by her doctor – that she is unable to live on vegetable food alone, but that her weak organism demands animal food; and the second, that she is so sensitive that she not only cannot cause any sufferings to any animal, but cannot even bear the sight of them.
And yet, this poor lady is weak for the very reason, and for no other, that she has been taught to subsist on food which is improper for man; and she cannot help but cause the animals suffering, because she devours them.
We cannot pretend that we do not know this. We are not ostriches, and we cannot believe that, if we do not look, there will not be what we do not wish to see. This is the more impossible, when we do not wish to see what we wish to eat. And, above all else, if it were only indispensable! But let us assume that it is not indispensable, but necessary for some purpose. It is not.* It is good only for bringing out animal sensations, breeding lust, fornication, drunkenness. This is constantly confirmed by the fact that good, uncorrupted young men and women and girls, feel, without knowing how one thing follows from the other, that virtue is not compatible with beefsteak, and as soon as they wish to be good, they give up animal food.
What, then, do I wish to say? Is it this, that men, to be moral, must stop eating meat? Not at all.
What I wanted to say is that for a good life a certain order of good acts is indispensable; that if the striving after the good life is serious in a man, it will inevitably assume one certain order, and that in this order the first virtue for a man to work on is abstinence, self-possession. And in striving after abstinence, a man will inevitably follow one certain order, and in this order the first subject will be abstinence in food, fasting. But in fasting, if he seriously and sincerely seeks a good life, the first from which a man will abstain will always be the use of animal food, because, to say nothing of the excitation of the passions, which this food produces, its use is directly immoral, since it demands an act which is contrary to our moral sense – murder – and is provoked only by the desire and craving for good eating.
Why abstinence from animal food will be the first work of fasting and a moral life has excellently been said, not by one man, but by the whole of humanity, in the persons of its best representatives in the course of the whole conscious life of humanity.
‘But why, if the illegality, that is, the immorality, of animal food has for so long a time been known to humanity, have men not yet come to recognize this law?’ is what those men will ask who are generally guided, not so much by their reason, as by public opinion. The answer to this question is this, that the moral progress of humanity, which forms the basis of every progress, always takes place slowly; but that the symptom of the true, not the accidental, progress is its unceasingness and constant acceleration.
And such is the motion of vegetarianism. This motion is expressed in all the thoughts of the writers on this subject, and in the life of humanity itself, which more and more passes unconsciously from meat eating to vegetable food, and consciously in the motion of vegetarianism, which has been manifesting itself with especial force and is assuming ever greater dimensions. This motion has for the last ten years been growing faster and faster; there appear every year more and more books and periodicals which deal with this subject; we constantly meet more and more men who reject animal food; and the number of vegetarian restaurants and hotels is growing every year abroad, especially in Germany, England and America.
This motion must be particularly pleasing to those who live striving after the realization of the kingdom of God upon earth, not because vegetarianism in itself is an important step toward this kingdom (all true steps are both important and not important), but because it serves as a sign of this, that the striving after man’s moral perfection is serious and sincere, since it has assumed the proper invariable order, which begins with the first step.
We cannot help but rejoice in this, just as people could not help but rejoice who, striving to get to the top of a house, had been vainly and in disorder trying to climb the walls from various sides, and now at last assemble near the first rung of the ladder, knowing that there is no way of getting to the top but by beginning at this first rung of the ladder.
[Translated by Leo Wiener]