The Slavonic question over honey

Dolly tells Levin that Koznyshev travelled with Vronsky, who is going to Serbia and taking a squadron at his own expense. The old Prince asks whom the Volunteers are fighting, and whether Ragozov and the Countess Lydia Ivanovna, assisted by Madame Stahl, have declared war on Turkey. Koznyshev, lifting a bee out of the running honey with a knife-blade, answers that nobody has declared war, people sympathise with suffering neighbours. Levin argues that war is so bestial that no man, let alone a Christian, can take responsibility for beginning one, and that in affairs of State citizens renounce their personal will. Katavasov says Society announces its will when the Government fails to; Koznyshev prefers the tipsy man beating a woman in the street, whom one would rush at without asking whether war was declared. Levin says he would not kill the man, and that he feels no instinctive sentiment about the Slavs though he is one of the people. The Prince agrees, having wondered abroad whether he was a monster, and says the peasants sighed at the church reading and gave a kopek without knowing why. Mikhaylich the beekeeper says the Emperor thinks for them, and offers Grisha more bread.

The debate is staged among cucumbers, honey and a wasp mistaken for a bee, which keeps the rhetoric at domestic scale. Koznyshev's appeal to the will of the people is answered by Mikhaylich, produced as evidence and obligingly agreeing with whoever spoke last. Tolstoy gives the argument for intervention its strongest form — the beaten woman — and lets Levin decline to say what he would do.