Lev Tolstoy and the Freedom to Choose One’s Own Path

Journal for Critical Animal Studies, Volume V, Issue 2, 2007
Lev Tolstoy and the Freedom to Choose One’s Own Path
Andrea Rossing McDowell, PhD
It is difficult to be sat on all day, every day, by some other creature, without
forming an opinion about them. On the other hand, it is perfectly possible to sit all
day every day, on top of another creature and not have the slightest thought about
them whatsoever.
-- Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (1988)

Committed to the idea that the lives of humans and animals are inextricably linked, Lev
Nikolayevich Tolstoy (1828–1910) promoted—through literature, essays, and letters—the
animal world as another venue in which to practice concern and kindness, consequently leading
to more peaceful, consonant human relations. The focal point of Tolstoy’s philosophy of humananimal
relations, however, is susceptible to distortion or misinterpretation. On the one hand,
some scholars minimize or dismiss as extremist Tolstoy’s renunciation of hunting, his vegetarian
lifestyle, and his rejection of animal subjects for medical or scientific purposes.

...Tolstoy includes animals among those downtrodden, dominated beings
whose own needs and protection are discounted for the “benefits” of those in control. Thus
mindful of the subjugated Other, Tolstoy realizes he must “turn his back completely on the
system of values accepted by the comfortable elite to which he belonged” (Walicki 326). Only in
this way can a person freely live an ethical and humane existence: by disavowing society’s
system of values—including the devaluation of non-human animals. These ultimate realizations
and convictions at which Tolstoy arrived provides a valuable framework for recontextualizing
earlier literary works, in that the animal realm aided his efforts to discern what it means to be
human and humane, and to live by deed rather than words....

Read full document here
http://www.animalliberationfront.com/Philosophy/mcdowell-tolstoy.pdf