Three partnerships on the land

Levin has to alter the machine while it is running. The steward agrees warmly that everything done till now was foolish and goes silent at the proposal that he take a share. The cowman Ivan understands the dairy partnership and remembers urgent tasks whenever future benefits are explained. Underneath lies the peasants' invincible mistrust that a landlord can want anything but to rob them, and their unalterable condition that they not be made to use new tools. Still, by autumn three sections are running: Ivan's artel in the dairy, six families under the carpenter Theodore Rezunov on the long-fallow far field, and Shuraev in the vegetable gardens. Ivan opposes heated sheds and fresh-cream butter and expects wages as before; Rezunov's group calls the land held for payment in kind and puts off building; Shuraev sublets. Levin reads Mill and the socialists and finds European laws called universal and nothing at all about Russia. He means to go abroad, and to prove his case in his book and on his land.

Tolstoy lists every way the scheme is failing — 'it is true that' four times over — and then reports that Levin thought matters were getting on. Rezunov's derision, noticed and set aside, is the measure of the self-deception. The reading tells him nothing because the question he is asking has not been asked in Europe, which is the claim the book he is writing exists to make.