Levin sows a row himself

In high boots and a cloth coat Levin goes out to the farm. The calves are fine — Pava's three-month-old is the size of a yearling — but the racks are broken, the carpenter who should be at the threshing-machine is mending harrows that should have been mended before Lent, only sixteen acres of clover are being sown instead of fifty, and the English seed-oats are being turned with shovels when they should be run down from the loft. He flares at the steward, whose despondent face says 'it will be as God wills', the elemental force Levin can never overcome; they have never managed to hire more than forty labourers at the proper price. Riding out on Kolpik through forest and thawing field he grows happy again, planning willow rows, a new cattle-yard, a pond. At the clover sowing he finds unsifted earth and the cart standing in the winter wheat, and applies his remedy for vexation: he takes the basket and sows a row himself. Vasily tells him proudly it was Levin who taught them wheat.

The estate is shown failing in detail so that Levin's remedy — doing the work himself — reads as method rather than sentiment, and the whole mowing sequence of Part Three is prepared here. 'As God wills' is named as an opponent, which makes it a character. Vasily's pride in his own sowing is the counter-evidence to Levin's theory of the immutable labourer.