Theodore speaks of Daddy Plato

Koznyshev arrives on one of Levin's most distressing days, in the busiest season, when for three or four weeks every peasant works three times as hard on kvas, onions and black bread and sleeps two or three hours. Levin rides out to the sowing, drinks coffee with Kitty and Dolly, and walks to the farm to start the new threshing machine. In the cool of the newly-thatched barn, watching the chaff-dust whirl in the doorway and the swallows pause in the light, he wonders why any of it is being done: Matrena, whom he doctored after a girder struck her in the fire, will be buried, and the girl in the red skirt, and the piebald gelding, and Theodore with chaff in his curly beard, and himself, and nothing will be left. He thinks this while checking his watch to set the day's task, then tells Theodore to feed the drum evenly and takes over the roller himself. Afterwards, by the stack of seed-rye, they talk of the land now let to the innkeeper Mityuka, who will pity no Christian, while Daddy Plato lets men off and runs short — because Plato lives for his soul and remembers God. Levin walks home dazzled.

The revelation is engineered to arrive from the least authoritative source available — a peasant picking rye out of his shirt, drawing a distinction between two men who rent land. Tolstoy keeps Levin's death-thoughts and his stopwatch running in the same paragraph, so the turn does not come from contemplation. Theodore's 'people differ' is the whole of the answer, and it is offered as a commonplace.