Chapter 97 — Anna Karenina

Levin is bored with the ladies after dinner, but a new idea stirs him: his farming dissatisfaction is not private failure but Russia's general condition. The prosperous peasant household he passed on the road becomes proof that laborers can work the soil on terms that succeed. He decides the problem can be solved and that he ought to try before another season wastes itself in quarrels.

In Sviazhsky's study he asks for books on the labor question while his host enthuses about a review proving Friedrich was not chiefly responsible for partitioning Poland. Levin wonders why that topic animates Sviazhsky and gets no follow-up. Their debate turns to schools: Sviazhsky says education gives peasants fresh wants; Levin compares that to curing a sick child by putting him on the hen-roost with a charm. Poverty must be cured, not decorated with catechism and arithmetic.

Alone on the spring mattress Levin replays the gray-whiskered landowner and constructs a partnership plan: interest laborers in success, accept some lower-tech improvements, divide yield so both sides gain. He skips sleep, resolves to leave early, feels shame at the sister-in-law's bodice, and decides to revolutionize his whole system before winter wheat sowing, hope returning as a plan rather than a woman.