After we see an object several times, we begin to recognize it. The object is in front of us and we know about it, but we do not see it—hence, we cannot say anything significant about it. Art removes objects from the automatism of perception in several ways. Here I want to illustrate a way used repeatedly by Leo Tolstoy, that writer who, for Merezhkovsky at least, seems to present things as if he himself saw them, and saw them in their entirety, and did not alter them.
