The landowners argue about Emancipation

The grey-moustached landowner argues that Russia has been ruined by the Emancipation: his land yielded ninefold under serfdom and yields threefold now, progress can only be achieved by authority — potatoes were introduced by force — and hired labourers water horses at the wrong time, break harness and drop bolts into threshing machines because they hate anything beyond them. Michael Petrovich describes his own simple method: lend the peasants their tax money and take the work back at harvest. Sviyazhsky answers that Russians do not know how to farm, have no machines, no good horses and no accounts, and that a steam thresher and Flemish drays cannot be spoiled. Levin points out that he has means and has never made improvements without loss, then asks whether Sviyazhsky's own farming is profitable — knowing from the hostess that an audited German found a loss of three thousand a year. The frightened look appears, Sviyazhsky sends for curds and raspberries, and the conversation ends where Levin thinks it begins.

Three positions on the labour question are set out and none of them works, which is Tolstoy's actual argument. The reactionary is credited with thinking his own thoughts in solitude and the liberal with borrowing his; the audited three-thousand-rouble loss sits underneath Sviyazhsky's whole performance. Levin's unanswerable question is met with raspberries, and that evasion is the chapter's verdict.