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4. That Savage Gaze: The Contested Portrayal of Wolves in Nineteenth-century Russia
- University of Pittsburgh Press
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63 Tolstoy’s Nikolai Rostov, an aristocratic protagonist in the novel War and Peace, watches ecstatically as his favorite borzoi throttles an old wolf that his pack of more than one hundred dogs has pinned to the ground: That moment when Nikolai saw the dogs struggling with the wolf in the gully and under the dogs, the wolf’s gray hair, its extended hind leg, and its frightened and choking head with flattened ears (Karai had a hold on its throat), was the happiest moment of his life.1 Rostov’s lack of compassion for the wolf and delight in its struggles may jar our modern sensibilities, but Tolstoy’s portrayal accurately reflects a prevailing cultural demonization of wolves that stretched from peasant proverbs to provincial newspaper accounts of wolves attacking livestock and children, to hunting laws that promoted the eradication of wolves through poisoning. Hunters embodied this animus, but it was widely shared by the nonhunting public and Russia’s scientific community. Until the final decades of the nineteenth century it was difficult to find any sort of empathy for wolves, let alone an understanding of their place in a natural system where predation played a necessary role. This was true not only of wolves and other mammalian predators but of such birds of prey as owls, hawks, and eagles as well. Wolves bore the additional stigma of being seen as carriers of rabies.2 The hunting journals of nineteenth-century Russia provided one of the 4H thAtsAvAgegAze The Contested Portrayal of Wolves in Nineteenth-century Russia ian m. helfant costlow nelson text4.indd 63 6/23/10 8:40 AM 64————iAn m. helfAnt primary venues in which Russian attitudes toward wolves were on display. Like the “thick journals” after which they in part modeled themselves upon, imperial Russia’s hunting journals employed a variety of genres in attempting to address issues of interest to hunters and the general public. These included scientific and pseudoscientific articles, literary prose and poetry, letters, memoirs, ethnographies, expedition accounts, and others. A common theme cutting across these generic representations was that wolves were a scourge to be combated by any means possible. Discussion of the “wolf question” reached a crescendo in the 1870s and 1880s, as the tsarist government prepared to revise Russia’s hunting laws. The epochal hunting law of February 3, 1892—the last major revision of Russian hunting law prior to the 1917 Revolution—codified this collective cultural animus against wolves and other predators. In the late 1880s and 1890s, however, isolated voices began to question this unwavering antagonism toward wolves and even the ethics of hunting itself. Most prominently, Tolstoy, who had hunted avidly until his spiritual crisis in the late 1870s and early 1880s, renounced hunting and became a pacifist and vegetarian. In a preface to an 1890 article entitled “A Wicked Pastime” by his friend and collaborator Vladimir Chertkov, which appeared in the newspaper New Times (Novoe vremia), Tolstoy called for others to renounce hunting as well. The article hinged upon Chertkov’s own renunciation of hunting after an epiphany—spurred by his detailed recollection of beating a wolf to death with a stick—that his lack of empathy for the wolf undermined his own humanity.3 The Russian Society for the Protection of Animals ([RSPA]Rossiiskoe obshchestvo pokrovitel’stva zhivotnym), established in 1865, also ran a series of articles and stories around the turn of the century that portrayed wolves in a more sympathetic manner.4 These articles polemicized with the antiwolf views that continued to prevail among hunters and the public and fervently criticized the institution of wolf-baiting, in which rival packs of borzoi hounds pursued, mauled, and sometimes killed previously captured wolves. Despite these fissures in Russia’s antipredator culture, attitudes and laws concerning wolves remained deeply hostile. Early in the new century, most Russians continued to view wolves as a scourge. Nevertheless, the representations of wolves were evolving from the mid-nineteenth century into the first decade of the twentieth century—a time during which the grand hunts of the prerevolutionary aristocracy were giving way to more egalitarian modes of hunting, but gentry hunters continued to believe that their self-appointed role as the protectors of rural peasants justified their killing costlow nelson text4.indd 64 6/23/10 8:40 AM [3.237.24.82] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 11:01 GMT) thAt sAvAge gAze————65 predators like wolves and bears and that these encounters were the greatest test...