Nursing the baby, Kitty reflects on her husband's unceasing search for belief. Since the death of his brother, Levin examined the questions of life and death through reading philosophy and through modern scientific concepts which replaced the religious faith of his childhood. Though these ideas are intellectually interesting, Levin thinks, they provide no guidance for life. Feeling like a man "unprepared for life who must inevitably perish because of it." Levin reads tirelessly, but still finds no explanation. "Without knowing what I am and why I am here, life's impossible," he thinks. If I am just a little "bubble-organism" in the immensity of time and space which lasts a little and then bursts, then life is not just a lie, but the "cruel jest of some evil, hateful power to whom one could not submit." Death is the one way to escape this power, and Levin hides gun and rope for fear of committing suicide.
But he exists happily, he discovers, when he ceases worrying about the meaning of life. Absorbed among the thousand daily tasks of his existence — farming, livestock, his family, his hobbies and shooting and beekeeping — Levin finds satisfaction, but he does not know why.
On an especially busy day, Levin chats with one of his peasants. Remarking on the differences among people, the old man explains why some extend credit and why other don't. "Some men live for their own wants, nothing else," he says, "while some like Fokanitch (an upright old peasant) live for their soul. He does not forget God." Suddenly inspired, Levin asks how one lives "for his soul?" "Why that's plain enough," answers the worker, "It's living rightly, in God's way. Like yourself, for instance. You wouldn't wrong a man . . ." Feeling wonderfully illuminated, Levin finds the ideas he struggles with so clear they "blind him with their light." And he has been solving the problem of life's significance all along without having realized it, he thinks. One must live with "the greatest goodness possible," and reason and intellect have merely obscured this simple, natural, irrational truth. In light of the truth of "natural goodness" Levin finds everything clear and simple. He returns home with a joyful heart.
