The turning-point of summer

Agatha Mikhaylovna sprains her wrist carrying pickled mushrooms to the cellar, and the new young Zemstvo doctor, delighted to meet the celebrated Koznyshev, supplies district gossip and enlightened views; Koznyshev leaves the conversation animated and takes his rod to the river, proud of liking so stupid an occupation. Levin drives him out. It is the turning-point of summer: grey-green rye with formed but unswollen ears, uneven oats, buckwheat hiding the ground, fallow trodden stone-hard, dried manure mixing with the honied smell of grasses, and the lowland meadows lying smooth as a lake, waiting for the scythe. Koznyshev admires the forest aloud; Levin, who thinks words detract from what he is looking at, counts the manure carts instead. Crossing the meadow he meets old Fomich carrying a recovered swarm in a skep and asks whether to begin mowing; custom says St Peter's Day, but the grass is fine. Koznyshev, having caught nothing, wants to talk, and offers a riddle.

Two men in one meadow, one describing it and one calculating it, and Tolstoy withholds judgement while making the preference plain: Levin thinks words subtract from what they name, and the chapter's own long sentence on the turning of summer is the counter-argument. The mowing is set up here, through Fomich, as a question of when rather than whether.