The bridegroom has no shirt

A crowd, mostly women, presses round the lit church and peers between the window bars while twenty carriages are ranged along the street by mounted police. Inside, every surface is inundated with light and the guests pass through every phase of anticipation: first indifference to the delay, then glances at the door, then an awkwardness they cover with conversation. The archdeacon coughs hard enough to shake the windows; the choir tries its voices and blows its noses; the priest keeps sending a chanter to look. Kitty has been standing ready in her veil and orange blossoms for half an hour. Levin is pacing his room in trousers without a coat, because Kuzma packed every shirt he owned and sent the trunks to the Shcherbatskys', the shops are shut on Sunday, and Oblonsky's is too wide and too short. Kuzma at last arrives out of breath, having caught the trunk as it was being hoisted into the cart. Oblonsky follows without haste, assuring him it will all shape itself.

Tolstoy spends the chapter before the sacrament on a missing shirt, and the comedy is structural: the solemnity of Part Five is built on a foundation of luggage. The crowd's shift from patience to embarrassment is observed with the same care as anything in the service. 'It will all shape itself' returns from Part One, still meaning nothing and still true.