Home to Pokrovsk, and Pava's calf

Levin leaves Moscow next morning and the oppression lifts the moment he steps off the train and sees his one-eyed coachman Ignat, the sledge with its carpet-lined back, and hears that the contractor has come and Pava has calved. On the drive home he resolves: to stop hoping for exceptional happiness from marriage, never again to be carried away by passion, never to forget Nicholas but to keep him in sight, and — taking his brother's communism more seriously than he had at the time — to work harder still and allow himself less. At home Agatha Mikhaylovna is up, Laska throws herself at his knees, and the study with its stag's horns and broken ash-tray tells him he will never be different. He answers it with dumb-bells. The steward reports with suppressed triumph that the buckwheat burned in the new kiln Levin invented, then that Pava has calved; Levin goes out with a lantern, admires the big-boned calf, and forgives him.

Place restores him where argument could not, and Tolstoy stages the recovery through livestock and a coachman rather than reflection. The four resolutions are listed like a farm plan and every one of them will be broken. The furniture speaking its verdict is the novel's only moment of outright allegory in Part One.