The eighty-rouble uniform

Levin has been a month in Moscow for the confinement when Koznyshev asks him to the Kashin elections; he wavers until Kitty, without telling him, orders the eighty-rouble uniform, and the eighty roubles decide it. Five days of his sister's wardship business teach him the helplessness of trying to use force in a dream: every kind, obliging man understands his position and cannot help, the notary needs a signature from a President sitting at the Session, and nobody — not even his lawyer — can say whom the delay profits. Marriage has made him patient, so he tries not to condemn but to find the serious meaning. Koznyshev explains: Snetkov, the old-type Marshal of the Province, is kind and honest and opposes popular education, and must be replaced by a practical new man — Sviyazhsky, or better Nevedovsky, an ex-professor. The Governor makes a speech and asks that Mary Ivanovna be told his wife is sorry about the Orphanage. In the cathedral Levin swears the oath and is moved. On the fourth day a long dispute about audited funds ends nowhere; Koznyshev says the man is honest but patriarchal management must stop.

Tolstoy sets the wardship business beside the elections so the reader sees the same machine from both ends: unanswerable obstruction below, ceremony and dispute above. The eighty-rouble uniform deciding a man's politics is the chapter's cleanest joke. Levin's new patience — not knowing everything, he cannot judge — is offered as growth and will be tested to breaking in the chapters ahead.