Oblonsky plans his dinner

Sunday: Oblonsky takes the dancer Masha Chibisova her promised coral necklace, kisses her behind the scenes and arranges supper after the ballet; then buys the perch and asparagus himself and goes to Dusseaux's to collect three men. His dinner is planned as carefully as the menu — Kitty and Levin screened by a cousin and young Shcherbatsky, with Koznyshev the Moscow philosopher and Karenin the Petersburg politician as the main dish, Pestsov as condiment, and himself to set them all by the ears. Two things trouble him: Karenin's coldness in the street, and a new superior reputed to rise at six and have the manners of a bear. He finds Levin measuring a fresh bearskin with a peasant from Tver. Levin reports that in Russia the question is not the working class but the relation of labourers to the land, and then that he thinks constantly of death: the world is a speck of mildew on a tiny planet and all thought and action are grains of sand. Oblonsky says he has come round at last to enjoying life.

Oblonsky composes a dinner party the way he composes everything, and Tolstoy lets the necklace and the asparagus share a paragraph without comment. Levin's speck of mildew is the despair of Part Three restated to a man who hears it as a conversion to pleasure. Both are wrong about each other, and the dinner is being built to put Levin and Kitty in one room.