• Features
  • Books
  • Teaching
  • Digital & Film
  • Blog
  • IHS
  • Texas
  • Spotlight
  • About

The past is never dead. It's not even past

Not Even Past

Notes From the Field: Bulgaria’s Tolstoyan Vegetarians

by Mary Neuburger

It seemed like a bad idea at the time, but I did it anyway. Maybe, just maybe, there was hope that the little museum in the Bulgarian mountain village of Yasna Polyana would be open. Established in 1998, the museum contained the intellectual remnants of the Bulgarian Tolstoyan community, who had created an agricultural commune in the village of Alan Kayryak in 1906-07. They renamed the village “Yasna Polyana” (clear meadow) after Leo Tolstoy’s famous estate, Yasnaya Polyana.

I had visited Bulgaria’s Yasna Polyana–with its shortened adjective form “yasna” (instead of “yasnaya”) before.  Two summers ago I had made the long trip, braving the bumpy windy roads of the Bulgarian Strandja—a mountainous region on the SW coast of Bulgaria where the village is perched.  But that summer my efforts had been in vain. The museum was closed and locked “for renovation.” As I peeked through the dusty windows in frustration, huge storks looked down on me from their nests on the nearby utility poles. They seemed to laugh at my American optimism, until I finally gave up.

And yet I returned this summer, without confirming that they were open; I could find no phone number or email online. This time google maps betrayed me, sending me down what seemed to be a sheep trail in my rental car. Still, I made it through intact and, as luck would have it, the wonderful curator of the museum was there! She generously allowed me to peruse their collection of crumbling old newspapers, carefully stacked in a back cupboard. As I gleefully thumbed through the materials, snapping pictures on my iphone, the fascinating world of the Bulgarian Tolstoyans opened up to me.

Museum pamphlet “Bulgarian Yasna Polyana” showing key members of the the movement with Tolstoy hovering above them (via Mary Neuburger)

Tolstoy was a figure of global importance in this period. It was not just his famous novels—like War and Peace and Anna Karenina—that brought him fame. He became a towering figure in global exchanges about the moral and ethical concerns of the day. His essays and other writings made him into an intellectual leader and model on a range of philosophical, spiritual, and social questions. Tolstoy cultivated contacts with like-minded people from around the world, though he never approved of the idea of a “Tolstoyan” movement.

And yet one emerged. Before and after his death in 1910, Tolstoyan communes mushroomed around the world, from the US to South Africa—where Mahatma Gandhi set up an ashram named the “Tolstoy colony” near Johannesburg. At the same time, many of the Bulgarian movement’s leaders made the pilgrimage to Tolstoy’s estate in Russia’s Tula province. Khristo Dosev, for example, spent a number of years in residence there and became extremely close to Tolstoy and his inner circle. Dosev became a direct line of contact between Tolstoy and his followers back in Bulgaria. They translated, published, and made every effort to popularize the ideas of Tolstoy in Bulgaria.

By 1907 Bulgarian Tolstoyans had broken ground on their own agricultural commune in Yasna Polyana. Its adherents established a number of agricultural communes across Bulgaria in the years that followed, but Yasna Polyana remained the movement’s epicenter. Its members set up their own printing press for its many publications, which stressed “Tolstoyan” ideas like non-violence, but also temperance, and vegetarianism. The ties to Tolstoy were so strong that many claim that he was headed to Bulgaria in his final days—when he famously left his family estate and headed south. Alas he died along the way. But if anything the Tolstoyan movement gained in strength after his death, especially in the aftermath of World War I. The massive human casualties of the war brought an even greater urgency to the Bulgarian (and global) Tolstoyan project.

Stefan Andreichin (via Mary Neuburger)

In the Bulgarian Tolstoyan museum on that hot July day, I was most interested in the vegetarian strand of the commune’s intellectual and organizational work. I focused my reading (and scanning) on the Bulgarian Tolstoyan newspaper Vegetarian Review (Vegetarianski Pregled), edited by an important member of the movement, Stefan Andreichin. The history of vegetarianism in Bulgaria will be featured in my book on the history of food in Bulgaria. In a chapter that focuses on meat, I will explore the making of a modern meat-eating culture, but also on the vegetarian counter culture that hotly opposed this transition.

This story is best told in global context, and meat was one of the most hotly debated food sources in history—in the past as today. Is eating meat a human instinct, or a learned behavior? Is it the gold standard of fortification or will it kill us? Even if it is good for the human body, what about the ethics of killing animals, the implications of modern methods, or the environmental impacts of meat-eating?

These questions and many more were debated on the pages of Vegetarian Review, in the years between the World Wars. For philosophical grounding, its contributors looked to ideas on vegetarianism that Tolstoy’s famous 1892 essay, “The First Step,” linked to non-violence and Christian ethics (along with a range of other spiritual traditions). Bulgarian Tolstoyans also sought intellectual scaffolding for their vegetarian convictions in famous ancient, medieval and modern vegetarians—from Pythagoras to Buddha, and Henry George to George Bernard Shaw. In addition, the journal featured articles on vegetarian strictures embedded within movements of local origin–namely the Thracian worshippers of the poet, musician, and prophet Orpheus and the eleventh-century dualist Christian sect, the Bogomils.

This preoccupation with historical precursors was coupled with a pointed critique of the industrial machine of modern animal slaughter and meat processing. In Vegetarian Review, “civilization” was derided for turning people into pleasure seeking “machines,” that could “swallow muscles and gnaw on bones” of poor innocent animals. The Chicago stockyards—since the late nineteenth century the epicenter of modern meat production–were seen as a kind of mass death camp. As an article on the pages of Vegetarian Review alleged, “In just one world city, Chicago, 54 million animals, cows, lamb, sheep, pigs and others are killed a year, with enough blood flowing from them to fill a huge reservoir.”

Cover of the Vegetarian Review (via Mary Neuburger)

This clear ambivalence towards “progress,” however, did not preclude the Tolstoyans from formulating a vision of the future. Indeed, far from retreating into the past, Tolstoyan authors advocated change, a “new life,” which they claimed was only possible without “the remains of death in our teeth.” Keeping up with the times, the Bulgarian Tolstoyans enlisted new streams of thought in nutritional science, economics, and ecology in their effort to convince a mass audience beyond its narrow circles. Vegetarianism was offered as a solution to a range of social ills, including the pervasive violence and self-destruction that seemed to be bringing the modern world to the brink of extinction.

Many—though perhaps not all—of their arguments still ring true today. And yet, after a day of reading in the museum, I have to admit that I could not forgo a heaping plate of grilled kebabche — spiced meat patties — to accompany my glass of wine at a restaurant in nearby Sozopol. This region of Thrace, after all, was the ancient home to the cults of Orpheus and Bacchus. And as a historian and enthusiast of food, I had to partake of the local cuisine. And let’s not forget, that I was raised amidst the American cult of meat, in which meat was both seen as necessary protein source and the height of pleasure and leisure—just pull that burger off the barbeque and enjoy. This cult had clear (although distinct) echoes—my research had shown—behind the Iron Curtain. And yet, in both contexts—as globally—there were very locally situated anti-meat schools of thought. In this region those ideas and practices went back to ancient times, but were articulated most powerfully by the interwar Tolstoyans.

Also by Mary Neuburger on Not Even Past:

The Prague Spring Archive Project
Tobacco & Smoking in Bulgaria
The Museum of Sour Milk: History Lessons on Bulgarian Yoghurt
Cold War Smoke: Cigarettes Across Borders
Notes from the Field: From Feasts to Feats (or Feet) on the Coals

You may also like:

Sowing the Seeds of Communism: Corn Wars in the USA by Josephine Hill
Felipe Cruz reviews Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption & Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States
Rebecca Johnston reviews The Man Who Loved Dogs

“What is African Literature?”: Uncovering One Woman’s Answers

By Mackenzie Finley

In 1963, Dennis Duerden of the Transcription Centre in London and Henry Doré of the National Educational Television Centre in New York collaborated with prominent South African writer Lewis Nkosi to develop a television series featuring leading African artists and writers of late-colonial and early-independent Africa. As part of the project, Duerden corresponded with Kenyan writer, Grace Ogot—the only woman writer whose life and work the series intended to explore. The documents exchanged between Duerden and Ogot (currently housed at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin) offer glimpses into the intent of the television project, the relationship between Anglo-American and African personalities in the early 1960s, and the intellectual lives of Duerden and Ogot during the period of their exchange.

Painting of Grace Ogot, by Joseph Nyagah. Courtesy of the Daily Nation, Kenya.

Painting of Grace Ogot, by Joseph Nyagah. Courtesy of the Daily Nation, Kenya.

On June 22, 1963, Duerden initiated a series of letters with Ogot regarding the proposed television series. Duerden’s first letter was accompanied by a questionnaire, which Ogot was requested to complete. The questionnaire, developed by Nkosi and Duerden, was intended to gather biographical information about the writer before Duerden and his team began production on the film series. Ogot returned the questionnaire with reticent answers.

Lewis Nkosi at the Centre for the Study of Southern African Literature and Languages (CSSALL) at the University of Durban-Westville (UDW), 2001. Via Wikipedia

Lewis Nkosi at the Centre for the Study of Southern African Literature and Languages (CSSALL) at the University of Durban-Westville (UDW), 2001. Via Wikipedia

Consequently, Duerden wrote a follow-up letter to Ogot, requesting that she include greater biographical detail in her answers. In his letter, Duerden endorsed the value of the television project, hoping its worth would inspire Ogot to be more forthcoming. Whether or not Ogot was convinced of the project’s value, she filled out the questionnaire the second time with significantly more revealing information.

In Ogot’s second set of answers, we encounter glimpses of her values, interests, and intellectual life. For example, we learn that her primary literary influences included the short story “How Much Land Does a Man Require” by Leo Tolstoy, The Dark Child by Camara Laye, Mary Slessor of Calabar by William Pringle Livingstone, and Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. Ogot elaborated on the significance of these works in her life. Tolstoy’s short story, for instance, prompted her to write: “If the whole world read this story, perhaps there would be no war.” Regarding the biography of Mary Slessor by Livingstone, Ogot explained, “If anything at all, this book had a lot to do with the shaping of my life and the choice of my career.” Seeking to emulate the positive impact that Slessor had on African society, Ogot “became a nurse … I regarded this as an expression of that feeling of gratitude in me towards Mary Slessor of Scotland who did so much for my Africa.”

The television project as a whole intended to help a burgeoning African literary scene develop parameters for what might be called “African literature.” To this end, the fifth question on the questionnaire is perhaps the most illuminating. “WHAT DO YOU CONSIDER TO BE SPECIFICALLY AFRICAN INFLUENCES IN YOUR LIFE …?” The question presumes the existence of a tangible “Africanness” which is also reflected in the discourse of late-colonial and early-independent Africa, where African identities and trajectories of peoples, nations, and the continent were all being negotiated. Duerden’s second letter to Ogot unpacks the intention of this question further: “What we want to do is to establish how far the background of your people’s traditions have affected the texture of your life.” The question arises: What does it mean to the author of the questionnaire to be “African” in texture and influence?

Initially, Ogot offered very little in terms of a response to the fifth question. In fact, she chose to write, “NIL.” Yet when Duerden begged for more elaborate answers, Ogot disclosed what she considered to be the “African influences” coloring her life:

“Looking back now, I think that there were some African influences that affected my marriage. An English friend of mine asked me once, “After all these years of Education, you still want to be married according to African customs?” My answer was simple. “There is something terribly African in me that school education has not touched.” The negotiations about my marriage were done according to Luo tradition, and full dowry was paid.”

Ogot went on to summarize her wedding day and highlight some of the specific Luo rituals to which she adhered. Interestingly, Ogot had begun to write that the negotiations regarding her marriage were done according to “African” tradition; however, at “Afri” she stopped and scribbled out the word, replacing it with “Luo”, as quoted above. In the struggle against colonialism, which necessitated a certain unity among African peoples, Ogot’s response displays her active negotiation and mediation of her identity, imagined somewhere in between “Luo” and “African.” Her initial dismissal of the question might also suggest that “Africanness” to her was something embodied rather than something that could be divorced from context, defined, and analyzed. Indeed, in her response, she defines “African influences” as “something terribly African in [her].”

Following her participation in the television series, Ogot went on to publish short stories and novels, including The Promised Land (1966) and a collection of short stories entitled Land Without Thunder (1968). Luo history and tradition saturated her fiction. Yet, Ogot is also remembered for her prominent role in Kenyan national politics. Thus her life’s work reflects the plurality of identities—local, national, and continental—that confronted African literary elite in the wake of African independence. Rather than conclusively answering the question, “What is African Literature?,” the television series on prominent African writers served to expose the tensions underlying such plurality.

bugburnt

Sources:

Box 17, Folder 21, The Transcription Centre Records, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas, Austin.

Recent Posts

  • IHS Workshop: “Whose Decolonization? The Collection of Andean Ancestors and the Silences of American History” by Christopher Heaney, Pennsylvania State University
  • Converting “Latinos” during Salem’s Witch Trials: A Review of Cotton Mather’s Spanish Lessons: A Story of Language, Race, and Belonging in the Early Americas (2022) by Kirsten Silva Gruesz
  • Breaking ChatGPT: Good Teaching Still Beats the Best AI
  • Remembering Rio Speedway
  • Fear Not the Bot: ChatGPT as Just One More Screwdriver in the Tool Kit
NOT EVEN PAST is produced by

The Department of History

The University of Texas at Austin

We are supported by the College of Liberal Arts
And our Readers

Donate
Contact

All content © 2010-present NOT EVEN PAST and the authors, unless otherwise noted

Sign up to receive our MONTHLY NEWSLETTER

  • Features
  • Books
  • Teaching
  • Digital & Film
  • Blog
  • IHS
  • Texas
  • Spotlight
  • About