Lev Nikolai Tolstoi You lion, you child The wrath of your thought flames, loving and forgiving You are the proclamation and the evocation of anarchy resurrected and ethics are your foundation Shepherd of feelings and ideas, you are both vision and expression 'It cannot be . . . and it isn't!' (translated by Allan Antlijf and Nina Gurianova) The paradoxical twist in the last line (which alludes to the declarative ending of a short story by Tolstoi - 'Notes of a Madman' - in which the protagonist lives in terror of his own mortality), shows up the corrosive interplay between Tolstoi's ethical authoritarianism and his anarchism, which also figures in his theory of art.