Sviyazhsky, the riddle

Sviyazhsky, Marshal of the Nobility, is a riddle to Levin: an extreme Liberal who despises the gentry and wears a cockade and red band, thinks Russia doomed and holds a model official post, rates the peasant one degree above the ape and shakes more peasant hands than anyone at elections, believes in neither God nor Devil and keeps the village church, advocates women's right to work and has arranged that his wife does nothing. He is neither a fool nor a good-for-nothing, and whenever Levin tries to get past the reception rooms of his mind a look of fear crosses his face. Levin comes partly to test his feelings for the pleasant young sister-in-law everyone means him to marry, and finds himself unable to think for the square-cut bodice opposite him at tea, which he is sure was put on for his benefit. The shooting is poor — the marsh dried up, three snipe all day — and he keeps returning to the old peasant. In the evening two landowners arrive, and the grey-moustached one, an inveterate believer in serfdom, begins complaining about the peasants.

The catalogue of Sviyazhsky's contradictions is the novel's portrait of the educated Russian liberal, and its sting is that he is genuinely good and genuinely useless. Levin's question — how things will settle after emancipation — is stated plainly as the only important question in Russia. The bodice reduces him to a blushing boy, which keeps the intellectual chapter honest about who is thinking.