Chapter 80 — Anna Karenina

In mid-July the village elder from Levin's sister's estate reports that the hay is cut and already divided. Levin hears vague answers about the principal meadow, notices the elder divided the crop without permission, and decides to inspect the stacks himself. Years of friction over his reforms hang in the background: he raised meadow prices, the peasants resisted, and they now mow for a third of the crop while still obstructing his management.

At the village Levin visits Parmenitch in the bee-house and gets evasive replies about the mowing. He orders a stack weighed by wagon loads and finds thirty-two loads, not the fifty claimed. The village elder invokes compressibility and divine fear; Levin refuses to accept the division. The dispute consumes the afternoon until the peasants take eleven stacks counted as fifty loads each.

When the accounting ends, Levin sits on a haycock and watches the meadow alive with labor. An old man praises the weather and points out his son and young daughter-in-law. Levin then studies Ivan Parmenov and his wife loading hay together: she forks bundles up with easy strength, he catches each load to spare her effort, and they laugh while tying the cart. Their faces show vigorous, young, freshly awakened love, a vivid contrast to Levin's own unsettled longing.