ing dog during a shooting outing. In the fields so prosaically presented by the narrator, Levin's view of the peasants that work his lands is nothing short of an exalted religious experience accompanied by an intense and driven rational analysis. Here, sickle in hand, Levin confronts in archetypal and symbolic simplicity the source of his unhappiness and a vision of how it may be overcome. The arbitrary twists and turns of the fields they mow and the uneven surface of the Earth that knock and trip the mowers are symbols of the unstructured world that Levin confronts and that is so indifferent to the intense and almost unspeakable love that draws him to Kitty. As he tears at the grass with such energy that he nearly collapses at the end of each length, next to him an old man slices easily through the thick stalks and Levin, forgetting his cares understands in that nonverbal Tolstoyan manner that peace is possible, that it is possible both to think and to live.Nonverbal communication is for Tolstoy, as mentioned above, a major avenue through which characters interact with each other. Some scenes of interaction, notably Levin's second proposal of marriage, occur almost entirely without words, and the intuitive understanding of someone else's thoughts, whether occasioned by chalk marks on a leather table cover or by the subtlest nuance in someone's eyes, in contrast to the falsehoods of social language that obscure and separate people, create a few brief and sometime ecstatic moments of "penetration" between usually separate conciousnesses, a transcending of interpersonal space. And yet words are still the tools by which, literally, men live or die. Levin's search for structure, as mentioned above, may be considered a struggle to find a language of truth. Nowhere is this more evident than in Levin's observation of the sky that occurs first at the end of the mowing scene and then much later in Part VIII, an example both of Levin's developmen...
