A muslin garment in the frost

Since watching Nicholas die, Levin has been less horrified by death than by life without knowing where it came from or what it is for. The terms that replaced his childhood beliefs — organisms, the conservation of energy, development — serve for mental purposes but give no guidance for living, and he feels like a man who has swapped a fur coat for a muslin garment and stepped into the frost knowing he must perish. Marriage stifled the thoughts, but since Kitty's confinement, idle in Moscow, the question has pressed harder: if he does not accept the answers Christianity gives, what answers does he accept? He finds nothing in his convictions even resembling one, and is like a man looking for food in a toyshop. Most men of his set, having made the same exchange, are contented, which torments him — are they sincere, or do they understand something he does not? He discovers that everyone near him who lives well believes: the old Prince, Lvov, Koznyshev, his wife, and ninety-nine in a hundred of the Russian people. And during the confinement he, an unbeliever, prayed and while praying believed — a state he can neither disown nor place.

Tolstoy states the crisis in the flat expository voice of a confession rather than dramatising it, and the argument is made by two images — the muslin coat in the frost, the man seeking food in a gunsmith's. The unplaceable prayer during the confinement is left standing as data he cannot dismiss, which is how the resolution will eventually reach him.