Chapter 98 — Anna Karenina

Levin returns home and launches his partnership plan while harvest continues, so he must repair the machine in motion. The bailiff applauds past failures as stupid until Levin proposes sharing profits with laborers, then retreats into urgent rye sheaves and second ploughing. Peasants absorbed in daily work have no time to weigh new terms; Ivan the cowherd grasps the cattle plan but flees to forks and dung whenever Levin describes future gains.

Peasant suspicion runs deeper: whatever a landowner says, they assume his real aim hides in the silence. They refuse new tillage methods even while admitting modern tools work better. Levin accepts lower cultivation standards, divides the estate into separate partnerships for cattle, fallow land, and gardens, and by autumn believes the system is working despite endless friction.

Ivan treats advances as wages and rejects warm housing and fresh cream. Ryezunov's group skips double ploughing and calls the land rented, not shared. Shuraev misreads garden terms. Levin still reads Mill and socialist books, finds only European laws that ignore Russian hands and acres, and burns bridges with Oblonsky and Sviazhsky while summer work and his own book consume him. He concludes peasants work well only in their peculiar way and wants to prove that truth in print and on soil.