The hens, and the schools

In the study, among newspapers laid out like mats round the lamp, Sviyazhsky is delighted to report that Frederick was not after all the chief agent in the Partition of Poland, and cannot say why it interests him. Pressed on the peasants he prescribes schools, schools, schools, to give the people other wants; Levin objects that new wants they cannot satisfy make things worse, and offers the woman who took her fractious baby to be set on a perch among the fowls. Putting peasants on schools, he says, is the same cure: what needs curing is their poverty, and schools will follow an economic order that leaves them better off. Sviyazhsky, cornered and frightened, retreats into praising the anecdote. Levin gives up on finding any connection between the man's life and his thoughts — he needs only the process of reasoning and dislikes blind alleys. Awake half the night on a bouncing mattress he drafts the answer he should have given: treat the labourer not as an abstract force but as he is, and give him a share. He decides to leave early and reverse his farming.

The hens curing fractiousness is Levin's best argument in the novel, and it lands on a man who will only compliment the story. The scheme that follows is drafted in bed from a farmyard glimpsed at a feeding stop, which tells the reader how much testing it has had. The diagnosis of Sviyazhsky — he needs the reasoning, not the conclusion — is the sharpest thing Levin says about anyone.