Levin Goes Mowing in Anna Karenina

There was an interesting part of Anna Karenina that stood out to me-- the part where Levin goes out to mow the grass with the peasants. He found the work painful at first, but felt as though the work alleviated a burden from him. He enjoyed the moments when he forgot about the pain of the mowing and the difficulty of using the scythe and became lost in his work. Tolstoy alludes to some sort of external force pushing Levin up the hill when he would not have been able to climb on his own. I don't know whether Tolstoy was a religious person, but the experience that Levin puts himself through out with the peasants reminds me of the archetypal journey of suffering and sacrifice that is depicted differently throughout religions--Christ in Christianity, Buddha in Buddhism, Ram during his exile in Ramayana.

There seems to something very fundamental to human meaning that emerges from sacrifice and persistence through suffering sustained over a long period of time. For that reason, Levin is in some sense a role model to me.