Anna Karenina

A landowner complains: "If I'd only the heart to throw up what's been set going ... such a lot of trouble wasted ... I'd turn my back on the whole business, sell up, go off like Nikolay Ivanovitch ... to hear _La Belle Hélène_," The frustrated landowner fantasizes about abandoning his estate to go enjoy opera in the city - "_La Belle Hélène_" was a popular comic opera. "Said the landowner, a pleasant smile lighting up his shrewd old face" - despite his complaints, he's smiling. This is familiar venting. "But you see you don't throw it up," said Nikolay Ivanovitch Sviazhsky; "so there must be something gained." Sviazhsky points out the contradiction - if it was truly hopeless, he'd actually leave. "The only gain is that I live in my own house, neither bought nor hired. Besides, one keeps hoping the people will learn sense." He stays because it's his property and because of stubborn hope that peasants will improve. "Though, instead of that, you'd never believe it—the drunkenness, the immorality! They keep chopping and changing their bits of land. Not a sight of a horse or a cow. The peasant's dying of hunger, but just go and take him on as a laborer, he'll do his best to do you a mischief." This is a classic complaint of post-emancipation landowners - freed peasants are supposedly drunken, immoral, chaotic, and spiteful. The chapter shows a conversation about agricultural economics and peasant management, with discussion of sociology: "I'm not a professor of sociology, of course, but it interested me, and really, if it interests you, you ought to study it." Landowners are trying to understand their changing world through emerging social sciences. Finally: "The two neighbors had risen, and Sviazhsky, once more checking Levin in his inconvenient habit of peeping into what was beyond the outer chambers of his mind, went to see his guests out." This is a key observation - Levin wants to dig deeper into ideas and get to fundamental truths, but Sviazhsky keeps redirecting him away from profound questions. Sviazhsky is comfortable with surface-level understanding; Levin wants to penetrate to deeper meaning. This chapter shows Levin among other landowners, hearing their complaints and theories, but finding their thinking somehow unsatisfying - they don't go deep enough for him.