Levin looks for paternal feeling

By ten the Prince, Koznyshev and Oblonsky are talking about yesterday's club dinner, and Levin, feeling a hundred years older and as if standing on an unattainable height he must climb down from so as not to hurt anyone, walks out mid-phrase. Kitty is awake, hair brushed, in a cap trimmed with blue, making plans for the christening; her face carries the same change from the earthly to what is beyond it that is seen on the dead, except that theirs is a farewell and hers a welcome. Mary Vlasevna brings the baby, unwraps the quivering red object and swaddles it again, and Levin searches his soul for paternal feeling and finds only repulsion — until he sees the little saffron arms bent like soft springs and is so afraid she will hurt it that he tries to stop her hand. Kitty laughs when the baby takes the breast. It sneezes. What Levin feels is not joy but a new and distressing fear: the consciousness of another vulnerable region.

Fatherhood arrives as fear rather than joy, and Tolstoy names it precisely — another vulnerable region — which is the truest thing said about parenthood in the novel. The pity comes before the love and comes through a pair of thin arms. The sneeze is allowed to carry the unreasoning joy, and even that is half hidden by dread.