Metrov, and the jubilee meeting

Katavasov introduces Levin to the celebrated Metrov, who is interested in his book. Levin explains, feeling his way, that the Russian labourer's view of the land differs from other nations' and follows from a consciousness of a vocation to populate the empty East. Metrov interrupts: it is easy to be led astray about a people's vocation, and the labourer's condition always depends on his relation to land and capital — and then expounds his own teaching at length. Levin sees that although Metrov has written against the economists he still judges the Russian labourer by capital, wages and rent, while admitting that rents are nil over most of Russia, that wages are bare sustenance for nine-tenths of eighty millions, and that capital exists only as primitive tools. He stops objecting and enjoys being talked to so carefully, not knowing that Metrov talks to anyone fresh about a subject not yet clear to himself. At the jubilee meeting a biography is read, then verses, then Katavasov's paper. Levin decides that ideas develop only when each man works alone, and declines the invitation.

The meeting Levin has wanted for two parts produces nothing, and Tolstoy diagnoses why in one aside: Metrov talks because the subject is not yet clear to him, and Levin thinks the attention is a tribute. The refusal of the invitation is growth of a bleak kind — each man along his own line, exchange useless. Levin's view of the Russian people's vocation goes untested.