Chapter 70 — Anna Karenina

Part Three opens by placing Sergey Ivanovitch and Levin in the same country house but in different mental worlds. Sergey arrives to rest from intellectual labor and enjoy rural life as a healthy counterweight to city corruption. Levin, who loves his brother, is still immediately uneasy because the country for him is not scenery or therapy. It is daily work, practical responsibility, and the core setting of his actual life.

That difference sharpens around their attitudes toward peasants. Sergey speaks with peasants gracefully and draws stable conclusions about the people as a category, which lets him argue with confidence. Levin, by contrast, resists fixed definitions because he works with peasants as partners and sees contradictory traits up close: vigor and fairness, but also carelessness, drunkenness, and lying. In argument this makes him look inconsistent, and Sergey easily defeats him, yet Levin's uncertainty comes from lived complexity rather than shallow thought.

The chapter closes with the brothers' daily rhythm exposing their deeper divide. Sergey enjoys rural idleness, conversation, and polished ideas, while Levin cannot sit still because he knows concrete farm tasks are being mishandled while he talks. Even in friendly intimacy, Levin feels strained by a mode of life that treats principles as sufficient while urgent labor waits outside. He repeatedly escapes discussion and runs back to the fields, ending the chapter in motion rather than theory.