Sviyazhsky, Levin, and two old-fashioned landowners discuss farming and peasant life. One of the landowners says that he uses a system of loaning the peasants money in exchange for work; emancipation, he says, has ruined Russia. Under serfdom, landowners could force peasants to accept innovations, but now, the system is crumbling. Even if Levin doesn’t completely agree with the landowner’s rationale, he agrees that farming in Russia is on the decline.
Many of the landowners, like Sviyazhsky, agree that the Russian feudal system is theoretically broken, but in practice, they don’t want to change anything. Levin, on the other hand, thinks things are wrong both in theory and in practice, and he doesn’t understand how the men can be so hypocritical.
Sviyazhsky says that Russia should adopt some of the new forms that have taken off in Europe. Levin argues that Russia should develop Russian forms. But before Levin can probe too much into Sviyazhsky’s mind, the landowners leave and Sviyazhsky ends the conversation.
Throughout the novel, Tolstoy is suspicious about foreign viewpoints being imported artificially into the Russian landscape: all the affected, hypocritical society people speak French rather than Russian, for example. In Tolstoy’s view, too much Western culture is often antithetical to Russia’s own needs .