The nape of his red neck

Back from Moscow, Levin writes in the study while Kitty embroiders in her dark lilac dress on the old leather sofa. His book, once his salvation from a dismal life, is now needed so that life should not be too monotonously bright; he is drafting a chapter arguing that a foreign civilisation grafted on Russia — railways brought by political rather than economic necessity — has forced manufactures and credit ahead of agriculture, like one organ of an animal outgrowing the rest. She meanwhile is thinking about his jealousy of young Prince Charsky, deciding to make him turn round by looking hard at the nape of his red neck, and succeeding. Their serious matters do not get on. Left alone, Levin is tormented by something Capuan in his life: three months and nothing done, the farm neglected, the work barely begun before it stops. He blames her upbringing for leaving her without real interests, and does not understand that she is instinctively preparing for the gigantic task ahead while building her nest.

Tolstoy sets the economic argument and the nape of a neck in one room and gives them equal weight, which is the chapter's method. Levin's self-reproach turns immediately into blame of her education — the mechanism named outright: a dissatisfied man must reproach whoever is nearest. The correction comes from the narrator rather than from Kitty, who never defends herself.