Exploring the Meaning of Work Through Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina
- This article was inspired by a recent Virtual Reading Group on Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, led by Richard Gunderman. Learn more about our Virtual Reading Groups at the Online Library of Liberty.
Productivity is a measure of efficiency, tending to focus on the relationship between inputs (number of workers or hours worked) and outputs (units of product or service produced). Boosting productivity can raise wages and profits, lower prices, and generate more tax revenue for governments. It can also improve living standards for a worker, a firm, or a nation. On this account, taking steps to boost productivity seems to approximate a moral and political imperative. Yet productivity is only one way of assessing and enhancing work. In fact, there are ways of enriching our labor that are not only not captured by productivity but positively obscured or even undermined by focusing on it.
To see how and why this is so, we need to look beyond the textbooks and journals of professional economists to another resource, one that dwells less on efficiency and more on meaning. Specifically, we turn to the novel—in fact, one of the greatest novels ever composed, Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. In this text, we find a very different account of work. A large part of the novel centers on a landowner, Konstantin Levin, a man with a deep interest in the productivity of his land, yet who discovers—and through whom we discover—dimensions of work of which productivity measures take no account.
Consider one of the book’s most-beloved scenes, that of Levin mowing with the peasants.
Levin has just been arguing with his older half-brother, the well-known public intellectual Sergei Koznyshev. Koznyshev is cross with Levin for having withdrawn from the local district council. He maintains that his brother is duty-bound to serve there, so that he can see that the best interests of the people are protected and promoted. Levin, however, feels that he understands nothing about the world of politics and is unable to accomplish anything. In short, Levin questions whether such political activity is truly important. Koznyshev is horrified. “How can you find it unimportant that the common people you love, as you assure me, are dying without aid, that ignorant peasant women are letting their children starve to death, and the people are stagnating in ignorance and held in thrall by the village scribe, while you have been handed the means to remedy this, and you are not helping because in your opinion it is not important?”
Levin, disgusted, says that he does not believe in medicine. What he really means is that he does not know how to refute his brother, who in any case always comes out on top in any reasoned argument. Yet he question of whether policies intended to address such matters at the level of whole population could possibly succeed remains. Levin believes that the good of the people can be served only at a local level, where people know one another. “I am prepared to discuss what concerns me, but to judge where to distribute the forty thousand of the district’s money… that I do not and cannot understand.” Koznyshev dismisses his brother’s reasoning for its lack of rigor, supposing that he is merely using philosophy in the service of his own inclinations, accusing him of failing to consider the connection between the individual and the common interest out of “Russian laziness and arrogance,” and assuring him that his “temporary delusion” will soon pass.
Throughout their conversation, something else, a “personal matter,” has been weighing on Levin’s heart. The previous year, he discovered that he could calm himself by mowing, and several times he has taken up his scythe and mowed with the peasants, once even mowing the entire meadow in front of his house himself. The mowing season has now come, and even though he feels guilty about leaving his brother alone for the day, he longs to go out and mow with the peasants again. When he tells his brother of his plans, Koznyshev replies, “I like that work very much,” which is true, at a theoretical level. The difference, however, is that Koznyshev has never gone mowing, while his brother has, and he is eager to get back to it. Later, Koznyshev thinks of coming to watch but finds the day too hot. By contrast, Levin wants to work, though not in the way that economists commonly suppose. He cherishes not the wages the work will produce but the work itself.
When Levin gets back from his lunch, he finds himself mowing next to an old, unnamed man; it is from this anonymous peasant that Levin, and we the readers, stand to glean some of the deepest and most transformative insights about work.
- The old man, holding himself erect, walked ahead, moving his outturned feet evenly and widely, and with a precise and even movement that did not seem to cost him more effort than swinging his arms as he walked, as if he were playing, turned down a tall, identical row. It was not exactly he but rather his sharp scythe itself that cut a swath through the succulent grass.
It is in the person of this old man that we see work elevated to its highest level, one in which talk of productivity in the conventional sense could only be deemed misdirected. To be sure, he is quite productive, but productivity is neither the end he has in view nor any part of the way he understands his work.
Levin is working hard, under conditions that many workers might reasonably choose to avoid. In the worst heat of the day, the sweat is pouring down, yet it is also cooling him, and the sun, which is burning his back, head, and arms, is also energizing his work. “More and more often he experienced those moments of that unconscious state when you do not have to think about what you are doing. The scythe cut by itself. These were happy moments. Even more joyous were the moments when, as they neared the stream where the rows ended, the old man wiped his scythe with thick wet grass, rinsed its steel in fresh stream water, dipped his tin cup, and offered some to Levin.” “Not bad, eh?” says the old man. And he is right—nothing could be so refreshing. “Levin never drank a beverage like this warm water with the floating bits of greenery and the rust taste from the tin cup.”
“Neither Tolstoy nor his alter ego, Levin, can refute the purely rational account of work in economic terms, but he can also experience labor in a quite different way that brings meaning to both work and life, something that presumably even his hyper-intellectual brother is capable of experiencing, if only he would allow himself a chance.”
Levin is working both efficiently and effectively. Without the need to think about it, he is also gaining a new awareness that eluded him in the debate with his brother. As soon he is done drinking, he is back at the “slow, blissful walk with his hand on his scythe when he could wipe away the steaming heat, fill his lungs with air, and look around at the whole extended string of mowers and at what was happening around him, in the woods and in the field.” Neither Tolstoy nor his alter ego, Levin, can refute the purely rational account of work in economic terms, but he can also experience labor in a quite different way that brings meaning to both work and life, something that presumably even his hyper-intellectual brother is capable of experiencing, if only he would allow himself a chance.
The old man is the key. When he comes to a hummock or unweeded sorrel, he handles it easily. “As a hummock approached, he would alter his motion, and using either his heel or the end of his scythe, crop the hummock on either side with short strokes.” He knows what he is doing so well, he has done it so many times before, that he responds to obstacles effortlessly, without even thinking consciously about them. He is not formulating or drawing on philosophical principles. He is not plugging values into an equation to see which among a range of alternative courses of action would produce the greatest return on investment. In a sense, he is not thinking at all, at least not in the sense that Levin and Koznyshev were reasoning during their sometimes-heated conversation. Instead, the old man is simply completely present in the activity at hand and able, by virtue of his practical wisdom born of decades of experience, to respond effortlessly as the situation calls for.
And yet he is most emphatically not self-absorbed. If anything, he is more aware of others than anyone else.
- He was constantly examining and observing what was coming up ahead; or else he was picking a stalk of sorrel, eating it or offering it to Levin, or else he was flinging a twig aside with the tip of his scythe, or examining a quail’s nest after the hen had flown out right from under the scythe, or catching a snake that had landed in his path, and lifting it with his scythe as if on a fork, he would show Levin and toss it aside.
The old man is not only working but showing Levin what work at its very best can open up to us. He is aware, and he is showing Levin what is worth noticing. He is taking not only for himself but sharing what he finds with his companion. If only Levin could learn to see through the old man’s eyes, a more bountiful world would emerge into view.
If someone had asked Levin how much time passed, he would have said half an hour. Yet it was already approaching dinner time, and the old man draws his attention to “the little girls and boys, barely visible, coming toward the mowers from different directions through the tall grass and along the road, carrying bundles of bread that dragged down their little arms and pitchers of kvass stoppered with rags.” The beauty of this sight can hardly be overstated. It is through the good graces of small children that the mowers will be refreshed. Their repast will be humble in the extreme—loaves of bread and barely stoppered pitchers of drink. It can in no way compare to the rich feasts Levin’s friends attempt to share with him in cities such as Petersburg. And yet, never will he enjoy a more profound sense of communion in breaking bread with others.
Levin had planned on returning home for dinner. Yet he cannot bear to leave the peasants. “Some were washing; the young men were bathing in the stream; others were setting up a place to rest, untying their bundles of bread and unstopping their pitchers of kvass. The old man crumbled some bread in his mug, crushed it with the handle of his spoon, added water from the dipper, broke up some bread, and after sprinkling it with salt, said a prayer, facing east.” “Here you go, master, some of my tyurka,” he said. The tyurka is so tasty that Levin changes his mind about going home for dinner, and he and the old man begin talking about domestic affairs, Levin taking the liveliest interest in them. “He felt closer to the old man than to his brother and could not help but smile at the affection he felt for this man.” After the old man says another payer, he lays down under the bush, and Levin does the same.
When Levin awakens, he does not recognize the place, “so much had everything changed.”
- The huge expanse of the meadow had been mown and gleamed with a special, new gleam, its rows now fragrant, in the slanted evening rays of the sun. The bushes cut down by the river, and the river itself, which had not been visible before but now gleamed like steel in its bends, and the moving and rising people, the steep wall of grass where the meadow had not been mown, and the hawks circling over the bared meadow—all this was completely new.
Tolstoy is too much of a realist to transform Levin into some kind of shaman. It is not long before Levin begins calculating how much had been mown and how much could yet be done in the day. He realizes that they have been tremendously productive, and that still more could be done, and he wants only to finish as much and as quickly as possible. He asks the old man if they could still mow the Mashkin upland, and soon all, young and old, are trying to outdo one another in the mowing. Eventually, they reach the upland, with the sun setting behind the woods, the dew already falling, and a mist rising. Yet on they go, the mowers “clattering their boxes and making noise with the clashing of scythes or the whistle of the whetstone on a scythe as it was sharpened, or chasing each other with cheerful shouts.” Although this is the most ordinary and even tiresome work, one to which man has been condemned since the expulsion from the Garden, it is also just about as good as it gets.
The old man is still at it, “just as cheerful, jocular, and free in his movements,” despite the long day. In the woods, where they are constantly coming across brown mushrooms, which have swelled in the succulent grass and which they cut with their scythes, the old man stops, bends over, picks up a mushroom, and puts it in his shirt, saying “Another treat for my old woman.” In the midst of the work, the old man is thinking of others. He takes not for himself. Instead, he takes so that he might give. He puts things in his shirt not to protect them from others’ covetous gaze but to share. His is a harvest that cannot be measured in numbers of bushels or bushels per acre. He is teaching Levin how to live, and to have more of what is good in life. Levin has not merely heard it from a teacher or read it in a learned book. He has experienced it firsthand in the company of an unnamed master. He has lived it, and these lessons will abide with him and enable him in going forth to serve as a sharer in his own right.
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When Levin returns home, his brother is disgruntled at his appearance and chides him for standing at the doorway, where he might let in flies. Yet Levin takes it all in stride, for now, instead of longing for an excuse to leave his brother, he feels cheerful and wishes not to be parted from him. After he freshens up, the brothers join at the dinner table, where, though Levin thought he was not hungry, he finds the meal exceptionally delicious. Having previously said he did not believe in medicine, he now wants to enrich it with a new term, the work-cure. It is not in theorizing about the population of his district or the Russian people in general but in working side-by-side with the peasants that he has found the means to live, to come fully alive, and to savor life to the fullest extent possible. No tuition has been collected and no course credit or progress toward a degree has occurred, but Levin has learned, through work, the worthiest of life lessons—where true abundance lies.
