Twenty-two hours, and a new voice

Levin is listening to the doctor's story about a quack magnetizer when a scream comes unlike anything he has heard; the doctor tilts his head and smiles approvingly. At the bedside Kitty grips his cold hands in her perspiring ones, tells him not to go and to take off her earrings, then pushes him away — 'No, this is awful! I shall die!' He stands against the door-post knowing all is lost, hating the child, wishing only that the suffering would end. The doctor says it is coming to an end and Levin takes the word for death. In the room Kitty's face no longer exists; the screaming climbs to the limit of horror and stops, and her voice says, 'It's over.' Twenty-two hours in a terrible unearthly world end in an instant, and he is returned to the everyday one, radiant with an unbearable joy; the strings snap and he sobs. At the foot of the bed a life flickers in Mary Vlasevna's hands, and a bold insolent voice with no consideration for anything announces a new human being. The child seems superfluous to him.

Tolstoy refuses the father the feeling the occasion prescribes: Levin hates the child, stops wanting it to live, and wants only the pain to stop. The whole scene is written from outside the room and at the bedstead, never from the bed. The new voice is described as bold and insolent with no consideration for anything, which is the least sentimental first sentence about a baby in the language.