своеобразие

Literature reflects life in a more multifaceted and profound way, the brighter the creative individuals working in it - with rich life experience, with a penetrating ideological outlook, with a unique way of artistic perception and depiction. Without the creative self-image of individual authors, the artistic wealth of literature as a whole is unthinkable. Reality is infinitely diverse. It is, according to Dostoevsky, both unexpected and fantastic, and sometimes even incredible. (Russian Writers on Literary Work. Leningrad, 1955, vol. III, p. 151). It seems to me that these words are especially suitable for our contemporary reality, with the miraculous transformations that take place in it. And what a deep meaning, what beauty in this vital "fantasy" of ours. As long as the writer knows how to penetrate it.

A resourceful French artist painted Rabelais's portrait in an interesting composition: behind the great satirist stand Homer and Socrates - the one the embodiment of poetry, and the other - of wisdom. In front of Rabelais's brilliant work "Gargantua and Pantagruel" one can see a "crowd" of writers who have more or less experienced the influence of his ironic laughter. Among the crowd of artists are depicted such brilliant masters of the pen as Moliere, Swift, Lesage, Voltaire, Balzac, in whose satirical works, according to the artist, the unfading tradition of the cheerful French monk lives. Whatever the extent of Rabelais's influence on the work of these writers, their satire is still so peculiar, so "theirs" that we call it "Moliere's satire", "Swift's satire", "Balzac's satire", thereby expressing its peculiarity. Every gifted author who wields a Juvenal whip in his hand, without necessarily being in the ranks of those great morons I mentioned above, has his own characteristic sarcasm, or, so to speak, as many satirists exist in literature as there is bitter laughter.

The literature on Leo Tolstoy shows that each era has approached the assessment of his work with its own criterion. What seemed to the democratically minded representative of realistic literary thought of the second half of the last century, N. N. Strakhov, in Tolstoy's work to be of undeniable value, was precisely what the reactionary decadent D. Merezhkovsky considered the great writer's artistic impotence. They make no exception to this general approach to the study of L. Tolstoy's work and his late works. However, compared to the vast literature devoted to the brilliant writer, there are few publications on his late work. Nevertheless, they very clearly outline the main trends in pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary Russian science, which, with few exceptions, are reduced to denying the creative potential of the old Tolstoy and the artistic significance of his works - The Kreutzer Sonata, Father Sergius, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, After the Ball, etc.