Likewise, as we’ll see in a bit, when Tolstoy recounts the thoughts or feelings of his characters, he does this succinctly and precisely, using simple objective sentences that seem factual in their syntax and modesty of assertion.

A fact draws us in. This seems to be one of those “laws of fiction” we’ve been seeking. “The car was dented and red” makes a car appear in the mind. Even more so if the fact is an action: “The dented red car slowly left the parking lot.” Notice how little we doubt that statement, the spontaneous, involuntary buy-in that makes us forget that there is no car and no parking lot.

Well, of course, the writer is not the person. The writer is a version of the person who makes a model of the world that may seem to advocate for certain virtues, virtues by which he may not be able to live.

“Not only is the novelist nobody’s spokesman,” wrote Milan Kundera,

but I would go so far as to say he is not even the spokesman for his own ideas. When Tolstoy sketched the first draft of Anna Karenina, Anna was a most unsympathetic woman, and her tragic end was entirely deserved and justified. The final version of the novel is very different, but I do not believe that Tolstoy had revised his moral ideas in the meantime; I would say, rather, that in the course of writing, he was listening to another voice than that of his personal moral conviction. He was listening to what I would like to call the wisdom of the novel. Every true novelist listens for that suprapersonal wisdom, which explains why great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors. Novelists who are more intelligent than their books should go into another line of work.

Gogol was a strange creature,” Nabokov wrote, “but genius is always strange; it is only your healthy second-rater who seems to the grateful reader to be a wise old friend, nicely developing the reader’s own notions of life.” Tolstoy and Chekhov, Nabokov said, also had their “moments of irrational insight” that produced an abrupt moment of “focal shift,” but in Gogol “this shifting is the very basis of his art.

In a story, attribute must meet adversity. (Olenka, in “The Darling,” is an extreme one-man woman; then that man dies. Vasili, in “Master and Man,” is arrogant; a blizzard appears, to humble him.) Here, the family’s reception of Alyosha is a minor, introductory adversity. How will Alyosha respond? By doing what he’s always done: cheerfully working hard. He doesn’t talk back, does everything immediately and “willingly,” never rests.

He [Tolstoy] also wrote this, thirty years earlier, in 1865: “The aim of the artist is not to solve a problem irrefutably but to make people love life in all its countless inexhaustible manifestations.” It wasn’t just age that produced the contradiction; the artist and the prude seemed to flicker on and off in him at every stage of his life.