There is a beautiful passage in Anna Karenina (part III, chapters 4 and 5) which describes the pleasure to be found in demanding physical work. Konstantin Lévin, a landowner, spends a day with a group of forty muzhiks – peasants who work for him on his land – harvesting the summer grass. They work in a long row, each man with a regularly sharpened scythe, cutting a swathe through the meadows under the heat of the sun. The day is long and hard, especially for Lévin who is unused to hours of repetitive physical work, but he finds happiness in belonging to this collective endeavour, seeing the large fields of his property transformed around him. At some moments, he loses all sense of time and place, the rhythmical movements of his arms and legs becoming automatic, his mind at ease, as if his blade acted upon its own will: In this hottest time the mowing did not seem so hard to him. The sweat that drenched him cooled him off, and the sun, burning on his back, head and arm with its sleeve rolled to the elbow, gave him firmness and perseverance in his work; more and more often those moments of unconsciousness came, when it was possible for him not to think of what he was doing. The scythe cut by itself. These were happy moments.
Agricultural workers around the world would have cut grass together each year in a similar way for hundreds of years. However, in 1877, when Tolstoy’s novel was published, machines were routinely supplanting human labour: the novel ends – famously – with a woman’s suicide assisted by a train. The process of automation of work has continued ever since. The modern farmer no longer has need of forty men to cut the grass of her fields: instead, she will have a tractor driven perhaps by a computer. She will have other machines to bale the hay and transport it to where it will be stored for the winter. Today, work is more about controlling machines than swinging scythes, which means much less sweat but much greater productivity.
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