The old man's kvas

After breakfast Levin mows between a humorous erect old man, whose scythe seems to whizz through the grass of its own accord, and young Mishka, married last autumn and out for his first summer, who would sooner die than admit the work is hard. The moments of oblivion come more often now — not his arms swinging the scythe but the scythe swinging his whole body — and thought is needed only to cut round a molehill or a clump of sorrel. The old man manages that easily while noticing everything: a sorrel stalk to eat, a quail's nest, a beetle lifted on the scythe-point. At the river he offers Levin his kvas, lukewarm water with green stuff and a taste of rusty tin, which Levin thinks the best drink he has known. Children come through the grass like midges with jugs and bread; Levin shares the old man's soaked bread and sleeps under the willows. Forty-two men finish a meadow that once took thirty men two days, then take Mashkin Heights for the promise of vodka.

The old man is the answer Levin could not get from the professor in Part One: a man who works without strain and notices everything, because he is not watching himself do it. Tolstoy measures the change in output against serfdom and lets the figure speak. Levin's inability to change action at a molehill is where the class difference actually shows, not in the mowing.