#Tolstoy’s second greatest novel, Anna Karenina, might have been called, in the vein of War and Peace, #City and #Country. While Anna’s urbane tragedy unfolds, necessarily, in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, Tolstoy’s sympathies, as they were in life, are indubitably sylvan. The passage I return to most often is the mowing of Mashkin Hill, where the writer’s doppelgänger joins the peasants for a day of stubble-tromping, sunshine work. His savvy city brother, who is staying with

#Tolstoy is hot right now, in part because we have the time to read his ten-gallon books; and also because his later non-fictional books laid out a blueprint for social justice that seems increasingly apt. Trying his best to strip #Christian #scripture (as Jefferson did) of its institutional accretions, Tolstoy arrived at a Christ of primitive pacifism; a dissolution of caste divisions, a disgust with institutional religion, indeed a call for the end of most institutions. May