Koznyshev's book is not reviewed

Nearly two months later, in the middle of a hot summer, Koznyshev is only now leaving Moscow. His book, six years' work — An Attempt to Review the Foundations and Forms of Government of Europe and Russia — came out the year before, and he waited with feigned indifference for its impression. Nothing came: weeks of silence, then a facetious feuilleton in the Northern Beetle about the singer Drabanti with contemptuous remarks interpolated, and at last a hostile review by a very young, sickly, bold, uneducated journalist he had once met at Golubkov's. The quotations are adroitly chosen for readers who have not read the book, and the wit is of a kind Koznyshev would have liked to wield himself. He does not dwell on the arguments but recalls correcting the young man's use of a word, and finds his explanation there. Dead silence follows; six years are thrown away. With no literary work left, he gives himself to the Slavonic question and the Serbian war, sees the frivolity and the interested motives in it but also the growing enthusiasm, and calls it the soul of the nation becoming articulate. In July he sets off for Levin's with Katavasov.

Tolstoy opens the last part on Anna's absence, spending it instead on a failed book and a fashionable war. Koznyshev's move from private humiliation to public cause is the part's argument in miniature: the Slavonic enthusiasm gets its plausibility from a man who needed somewhere to put six years of energy. The journey to Levin's sets up the debate that will close the novel.