It is impossible to imagine him in front of the desk. I see him in his cobbler's dungeon between his knees and holding the nails with his lips (such is the image he has: the god Michael became a cobbler and entered the service of master Simon); he turned his terrible head from the case to the door, where some western journalist appeared to ask about the count's attitude to women's freedom or, let's say, the Russo-Japanese war, appeared with delight and sweatily repented, because in the count's heavy gaze he already saw his correct assessment, a charlatan. I see him sticking his fingers under the horse's belly - the farmer has saddled him tightly, digging in the hay with a wooden spoon that he himself has made, with strong fingers, eating kvass bran, tying a beehive from a thick plank of quail in their white Russian sun, building the neighboring peasant's hut with him, and the broken, almost silent conversation of the two of them is not understood by anyone around. no one is aware of the warmth that this simple friendship with a simple person gives him. The dog would not have barked at him, the horse would not have kicked, the Pharisees would not have been captured, Leonardo with the brush in his hand would have blushed and waited for his approval, the border fences would have gone up long before his appearance, before him, the great creator of lands, people and animals, his great passer of that weary earth... and that picture of the sly old man is also his for us, of all his characters. the most beloved image, the image of his Leo Tolstoy, the most enormous, the creation and editing of which took all his time, all his talent and all his hard work as a peasant. Before sending himself on a big journey through time, he checked, tried and checked again that image of his.
It is impossible to imagine that old man sitting in front of the desk.
His work of a hundred and more volumes, that examination and judgment of his time, does not seem to be written, in other words, and his world is not represented by books, but by images that are full of light, movement, scent, space, sounds and thoughts. Books: the composition, the font, the bad translation, the good translation, the original, the syntax, the annotation, cannot turn his world into a book. with the vibration of Mozart's melody, life evades, overflows, soars, plays, unfolds and refuses to enter into a book and be closed, although more than a hundred years have passed and it seems that it was time for that life to be loved as literature and culture.
Like God, from above him, he says: and there is light, he speaks with the right words, and the space of light, that great meadow of yasnaya, expands, and in that great valley of light, children, animals, flowers appear with his words, which are assigned by their creator, the enemy of approximation and so-called reinterpretation, to be only a flower, only an animal and only a child... with his words, passions are ignited, events unfold, and he himself and everything he is the owner of everything and knows well all the layers of those events, the causes of passions, all the vicissitudes of existence, from the self-conceited arrogance of the ruler to the spinal cord feelings of the murdered man, from the teenager's, a kind of flower-vegetal ablution, from the last clucks of old princesses, from the obedient waiting of a dying horse, from the mischievous blood of a torch to a rational man. the tragic struggle against his God-ordained calling.
He has no depersonalized dogs, no nondescript horses, no impersonal-mechanical movement of a horse, dog, wolf, rabbit, man, retinue, troop, all of them - running, rain, dawn of such and such a day, tree - are all characters. He does not use the words crowd, people, masses, which would be a sign of his weakness as a writer or his indulgence and secret fears of a well-to-do count, the word crowd does not exist for him; name by name, care by care, fate by fate, he knows them all, and they are all his children, at any moment they can separate from the background, emerge, take the place of Prince Balkonsky, father Sergi or the Kholstomer horse, pushing the latter into the background and thus again pointing out that the background is not a crowd, but Balkonskys. Before being a question of talent and ability, this is a question of worldview, this is a question of humanity, if, of course, humanity is not also a question of talent and ability.
Not someone else's, but his story's edge breaks, gives way and includes the poor life of a soldier who was accidentally hit by a random bullet in the dark, the village, his parents, the wife who had an affair with the clerk. the border bends, stretches, after the case of Hadji Murad, it reaches Petersburg, includes the tsar, who looks with glorified eyes and does not see, that lucky favorite of the palace maidens and the bad master of the country, and it becomes clear that the hard-grown forests of the Caucasus will be cut down, the poor and well-kept auls of the Chechens will be blinded, soldiers will fall from random bullets.
His people, things, phenomena, animals are not limited by their physical boundaries, they radiate, and this is their inner characteristic. That radiance, that constant vibration of light on its spaces, that halo around its animals and people, is not brought from above, it is not the scattered light of Christianity or Islam, it is not the coronation of a believing flock before the heavenly master, it is not a deception, a vision, a deception and preaching for the sake of something high, it is the nature of existence, and Tolstoy is the revealer of that nature.