All the literary characteristics which we have noted in the works of his later period are to be found here, and of these especially the concentration of the narrative, which is even more striking in a long novel than in a short story. There is a wonderful unity about the book; in which respect it differs widely from _War and Peace_ and _Anna Karenin._ There are hardly any digressions of an episodic nature. A single train of action, tenaciously followed, is worked out in every detail. There is the same vigorous portraiture, the same ease and fullness of handling, as in the _Kreutzer Sonata._ The observation is more than ever lucid, robust, pitilessly realistic, revealing the animal in the man "the terrible persistence of the beast in man, more terrible when this animality is not openly obvious; when it is concealed under a so-called poetical exterior." Witness the drawing-room conversations, which have for their object the mere satisfaction of a physical need: "the need of stimulating the digestion by moving the muscles of the tongue and gullet"; the crude vision of humanity which spares no one; neither the pretty Korchagina, "with her two false teeth, the salient bones of her elbows, and the largeness of her finger-nails," and her _décolletage,_ which inspires in Nekhludov a feeling of "shame and disgust, disgust and shame"; nor the herione, Maslova, nothing of whose degradation is hidden; her look of premature age, her vicious, ignoble expression, her provocative smile, the odour of brandy that hangs about her, her red and swollen face. There is a brutality of naturalistic detail: as instance, the woman who converses while crouched over the commode. Youth and the poetic imagination have vanished; except in the passages which deal with the memories of first love, whose music vibrates in the reader's mind with hypnotic intensity; the night of the Holy Saturday, and the night of Passover; the thaw, the white mist so thick "that at five paces from the house one saw nothing but a shadowy mass, whence glimmered the red light of a lamp"; the crowing of the cocks in the night; the sounds from the frozen river, where the ice cracks, snores, bubbles, and tinkles like a breaking glass; and the young man who, from the night outside, looks through the window at the young girl who does not see him: seated near the table in the flickering light of the little lamp--Katusha, pensive, dreaming, and smiling at her dreams.