Oblonsky comes to shoot

A bell at the gate makes Levin hope, and then be ashamed of not hoping, that it is Nicholas; it is Oblonsky, muddy on nose and eyebrow, come for three reasons — to see Levin, to shoot, and to sell the Ergushevo forest to the dealer Ryabinin. He is delighted by the house, the nurse, the monastic style, and by a dinner that collapses into smoked goose, pickled mushrooms, nettle soup and Crimean white wine. Levin pours out everything that has collected in his solitude: the spring, the estate, his book, whose real basis is a criticism of all previous works on agriculture. Oblonsky is unusually tender with him and says nothing at all about the Shcherbatskys, for which Levin is grateful and which leaves him unable to ask. Driving out to the shoot, Oblonsky defends wanting a roll while drawing rations, and describes the Ossianic woman he has found. Levin cannot enter into it.

Oblonsky arrives in the country as a device: he carries the news Levin wants and cannot ask for, and his tact prolongs the suspense past comfort. The roll metaphor returns from Part One unchanged, which is Tolstoy's way of showing a man who has learned nothing. The new tenderness toward Levin goes unexplained and reads as pity.