Leo Tolstoy: Settling the Score with Hunting

Hardly any writer lived through recreational hunting as ambivalently as Leo Tolstoy.

In his youth he was, by his own records, a “passable marksman” who took aim at quail, ducks, wild boars and even bears. In his later work he became one of the fiercest critics of the very activity he himself had indulged in for decades. Anyone who traces this transformation will find no sudden conversion, but a long, often painful reckoning, closely interwoven with Tolstoy's religious and ethical crisis of the 1880s.

The recreational hunter of Yasnaya Polyana

Tolstoy grew up on the Yasnaya Polyana estate, where his hunting tutor and horse trainer already belonged to the family's staff. Recreational hunting was a firm part of life among the Russian landed gentry, and Tolstoy pursued it with devotion. In his novel “War and Peace” he devotes several chapters to the wolf hunt of the Rostov family: more than twenty mounted hunters, over 130 dogs, a detailed, almost loving depiction of the chase. In literary-historical terms these passages count as one of the most detailed hunting depictions in Russian literature altogether, and show how deeply the fascination with recreational hunting was anchored in Tolstoy's own experience.

A key experience dates to December 1858: during a bear hunt Tolstoy's life was in danger when a wounded bear attacked him and injured his face. He later processed the incident in literary form in the story “The Bear Hunt” (“Охота пуще неволи”, 1872). For two decades he nonetheless remained loyal to recreational hunting, as his alter ego Konstantin Levin in “Anna Karenina” (1877) also shows, whose hunting excursions bear autobiographical features.

The weapon as temptation: “A Confession”

The break was not literary but existential. In his «Confession» («Ispoved», written 1879/80, published 1884), Tolstoy describes a profound life crisis that, despite wealth, family and literary fame, brought him to the brink of despair. In this state, he writes, he stopped going hunting with a gun, for fear of succumbing to the temptation of using it to take his own life. Here the hunting weapon no longer appears as a tool of connection with nature, but as an instrument of a violence that Tolstoy increasingly understood as a fundamental problem, regardless of whom or what it was directed against.

This passage marks a first, still personal distancing. The actual ethical condemnation of recreational hunting followed only later and was no longer directed against the weapon itself, but against the pleasure taken in killing non-human animals.

The slaughterhouse visit: «The first step»

The turning point in Tolstoy's public stance is marked by the essay «The first step» («Pervaja stupen», 1891), originally written as a preface to a Russian translation of an English work on vegetarian ethics. In it, Tolstoy describes a visit he himself made to a slaughterhouse in Tula, the smell, the blood-smeared aprons of the workers, the routine indifference with which killing took place there. Notable is a minor figure in the text: the butcher whom Tolstoy accompanies is himself a passionate recreational hunter. Tolstoy uses this observation to draw a parallel that runs through his entire late work: whoever is not troubled by the killing of non-human animals in one context also grows accustomed to it in another.

Central is a conversation with a young slaughterer, who at first claims that killing does not bother him: «It is necessary.» When Tolstoy objects that eating meat is not a necessity but a luxury, the man concedes that he does feel pity for the non-human animals after all. For Tolstoy, the real harm lies not in the suffering of the killed animals alone, but in the fact that a person suppresses his highest spiritual faculty, compassion, against himself and thereby becomes numb.

«What purpose does this joy in killing serve?»

In his short text against recreational hunting, written towards the end of his life, Tolstoy sums up his criticism succinctly. He rejects the common argument that recreational hunting brings people closer to a natural struggle for survival: for civilised humans, this struggle has long consisted of work, agriculture and provisioning, not in pursuing and killing non-human animals. Recreational hunting is therefore not a natural necessity, but a voluntary return to a state that has been overcome, one that trains in humans precisely those instincts that their moral consciousness actually rejects.

His description of the methods of recreational hunting is particularly sharp: deception, traps, ambush, the joint action of many against a single individual, of the strong against the weak, the separation of young animals from their parents. Actions that would be considered despicable among humans, according to Tolstoy, are committed openly and without shame in recreational hunting, and by the very same people who would refuse even to shake hands with someone who did such things to them.

Consistency instead of contradiction

Importantly, Tolstoy's turn away from recreational hunting did not stand in isolation. It coincided with his embrace of vegetarianism, of Christian pacifism and of a radical doctrine of non-violence, which later became known as «Tolstoyism» and influenced, among others, Mahatma Gandhi. For Tolstoy, the rejection of recreational hunting was not an isolated animal welfare concern, but part of a more comprehensive ethical system: whoever regards violence against non-human animals as a legitimate pleasure, so his logic, undermines that capacity for compassion which also forms the basis for a non-violent coexistence among humans.

Precisely because Tolstoy himself was for decades an enthusiastic recreational hunter, and because the hunting scenes in «War and Peace» rank among the most striking in world literature, his later condemnation carries particular weight. It is the self-criticism of a man who knew the fascination of recreational hunting from his own experience and yet, after decades of ethical reflection, exposed it as what it ultimately was for him: a pleasure in killing that hides behind traditions and a supposed closeness to nature.