This chapter functions as the ceremonial and emotional climax of Levin and Kitty's courtship arc, which has stretched across the novel's first four parts. Tolstoy renders the Orthodox wedding rite with documentary precision—the pink silk rug, the crowns, the shared cup of wine, the triple circuit of the lectern—yet consistently filters ritual through subjective consciousness. The technique is characteristic of what critics call estrangement (ostranenie): Kitty hears the prayers but cannot follow their meaning, experiencing them as pure emotional sensation rather than doctrinal instruction. This gap between liturgical form and felt experience is not ironic but celebratory; the ceremony works on the characters below the level of rational comprehension.
The chapter develops the motif of contagious joy with notable structural care. Joy originates in Kitty, spreads to Levin when he looks at her, then radiates outward to the groomsmen, the priest, the deacon, and finally the whole congregation. Tolstoy's syntax enacts this diffusion: 'The spark of joy kindled in Kitty seemed to have infected everyone in the church.' The metaphor of infection, usually associated with moral or spiritual corruption elsewhere in the novel, is here entirely positive, suggesting that genuine happiness is as communicable as disease—a quiet counter-argument to the novel's darker social contagions.
The biblical allusions embedded in the prayers—Adam and Eve, Isaac and Rebecca, Joseph and Zipporah—situate the marriage within a typological tradition of divinely sanctioned union. Kitty's interior response ('That's all splendid … all that's just as it should be') is deliberately artless; Tolstoy uses her unsophisticated approval to endorse the ceremony's values without authorial intrusion. This contrasts sharply with Anna and Vronsky's relationship, which conspicuously lacks any such sacred or communal ratification.
Levin's final moment of belief—'he did not believe, he could not believe, that it was true. It was only when their wondering and timid eyes met that he believed in it, because he felt that they were one'—encapsulates a central Tolstoyan epistemology: embodied, relational knowledge supersedes abstract or institutional confirmation. The marriage becomes real not through the priest's words but through a shared glance. The phrase 'they were one' echoes the scriptural 'one flesh' read moments earlier, closing a loop between liturgy and lived experience that the chapter has carefully constructed.
The chapter's final sentence—'After supper, the same night, the young people left for the country'—is a masterpiece of narrative compression. Its plain, almost chronicle-like brevity after pages of heightened emotional texture signals a deliberate tonal shift. The country, associated throughout with Levin's agrarian values and spiritual authenticity, promises a life consonant with the ceremony's ideals, and the abruptness of the departure leaves the reader with a sense of forward momentum rather than closure.