Levin takes up a scythe

The personal matter on Levin's mind is mowing: a year ago he took a scythe to calm his temper and liked it so much he mowed the whole meadow before the house. He hesitates now for fear Koznyshev will laugh, then decides — he needs the exercise or his character is spoilt — and sends his scythe to Titus to be sharpened. At the Kalina meadow forty-two mowers are already on their second swath: old Ermil bent in his long white shirt, young Vaska taking the full width, and Titus, his mowing master, going without stopping as if in play. An old man in a sheepskin warns him that having put his hand to the plough he must not look back, and the line laughs. Levin mows badly for ten minutes under advice from behind, then falls into it; when he stops thinking about the work it becomes nearly as even as Titus's, and the moment he tries, it goes wrong. Rain comes and is welcome. After four hours the peasants want breakfast, which had not occurred to him.

Levin's answer to his brother is not an argument but an action, placed in the next chapter without comment. The discovery that the work goes well only when he forgets he is doing it is the novel's whole epistemology in one physical fact, and it will return at the end as faith. Titus lengthening the first swath to test his master is the peasants' own judgement, delivered in silence.