 Lezhnev invites Rudin to dine with him, and over the dinner Rudin relates to Lezhnev his attempts to “act” – to improve an estate belonging to his friend, to make a river navigable, to become a teacher.In all three of this attempts Rudin demonstrated inability to adapt to the circumstances of Nicholas I's Russia, and subsequently failed, and was in the end banished to his estate.Lezhnev then appears to change his opinion of Rudin as inherently inactive, and says that Rudin failed exactly because he could never stop striving for truth.