The prosperous peasant's yard

Driving to the Surovsky district, Levin stops to feed his horses at a well-to-do peasant's house — a clean new yard, a handsome young woman in goloshes washing the floor, a bald red-bearded old man who opens the gates. Over tea Levin hears the whole history: four hundred acres rented ten years ago and bought outright last year, another nine hundred rented, the worst part let, a hundred and twenty acres worked by the family and two hired men. The old man complains for propriety's sake, but he has bought land at thirty-five roubles an acre, married off three sons and a nephew, and rebuilt after two fires each time better. He is not against new methods — potatoes already forming fruit, an English plough borrowed from a landowner, wheat sown — and he feeds his horses on rye thinnings, the waste of which Levin has never managed to stop on his own land. Asked about hired labour he says peasants look after everything themselves. Levin leaves with the impression of that household demanding attention.

The answer to the previous chapter arrives before the question has been fully asked, in a farmyard, unannounced. Every problem Levin catalogued is solved here by a household whose members own the result of their own work. Tolstoy declines to point this out and instead notes the handsome woman in goloshes, leaving the impression to work on Levin as it works on the reader.