Levin waits out the spring

Levin had told himself the refusal would fade as being ploughed in physics had faded, but three months on it hurts as it did at first, and he is further from marriage than ever. Shameful trivial memories wound him worse than genuinely bad actions ever did. Work and time cover them over; he waits for news that Kitty is married, hoping it will cure him like the drawing of an aching tooth. In February Mary Nikolavna writes that Nicholas is worse and refuses treatment, and Levin goes to Moscow, persuades him to see a doctor and take a cure abroad, and lends him the money without irritating him. He is writing a book on agriculture whose argument is that the character of the labourer must be treated as a fixed factor alongside climate and soil. Lent stays frosty, Easter finds snow on the ground; then warm rain for three days, mist, the ice cracking on the river, larks over the stubble, lambs, bees in the willows. The real spring has come.

Placed immediately after the consummation, the spring passage does the novel's structural work: two kinds of life set side by side with no comment. Levin's thesis about the labourer's immutable character is his whole quarrel with Europe in one sentence, and Part Three will test it in a hayfield. The catalogue of thaw is Tolstoy's answer to a chapter that ended in a nightmare.