Chapter 96 — Anna Karenina

At Sviazhsky's table a gray-whiskered landowner jokes that he would sell his estate and flee to hear La Belle Helene, yet keeps farming because he lives in his own house and still hopes peasants will learn sense. He paints post-emancipation ruin: drunkenness, chopped-up strips, starving peasants who sabotage hired labor. Mihail Petrovitch describes patriarchal advances on tax day; the gray-whiskered man calls rational farming a failure and blames emancipation for destroying the authority that once forced improvements.

Levin finds the old landowner's lived argument more convincing than Sviazhsky's polish. He admits that rational husbandry loses money for him and his neighbors, then presses Sviazhsky on whether his land pays. Madame Sviazhskaya has already revealed a German expert found their farming thousands of roubles in the red. When Levin attacks rent as a European fiction on deteriorating Russian soil, Sviazhsky offers junket and raspberries instead of an answer.

Levin keeps arguing that a productive relation to labor must exist, but Sviazhsky cites Schulze-Delitsch, Lassalle, and the Mulhausen experiment as proof the forms are fixed. When Levin asks why Russia should not invent its own, Sviazhsky deflects again and sees the guests out, checking Levin's habit of peeping beyond the outer chambers of his mind. The evening leaves Levin stirred by labor as agriculture's central element and blocked by a host who treats reform as a library subject, not a local problem.