Tolstoy and The Goodness of Physical Labor

We get a feel for the goodness of working as creatures with bodies in Leo Tolstoy’s classic Anna Karenina. In the novel, Constantine Dmitrich Levin is a wealthy landowner in nineteenth-century Russia. As a gentleman he is able to exempt himself from manual labor, practically by definition. But when his more cosmopolitan brother, Sergius, visits from the city, Levin grows weary of their overly intellectual conversations; he longs to engage his body. And so a novel idea dawns on him:…