"It was the most pressing work time, when all the peasants show such an extraordinary effort of self-sacrifice in their labour as is not shown in any other conditions of life, and which would be highly valued if the people who show this quality valued it themselves, if it were not repeated every year, and if the results of this effort were not so simple.
To mow and reap rye and oats and cart them, to mow out the meadows, to cross-plough the fallow land, to thresh the seed and sow the winter crops - it all seems simple and ordinary; but to manage to get it all done, it was necessary that all the village people, from oldest to youngest, work ceaselessly during those three or four weeks, three times more than usual, living on kvass, onions and black bread, threshing and transporting the sheaves by night and giving no more than two or three hours a day to sleep. And every year this was done all over Russia."
Leo Tolstoi, Anna Karenina, tr. Pevear and Volokhonsky
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