What you’re seeing is Leo Tolstoy reading a book.
What you’re looking through is a window into our history, circa 1908.
105 years in the past in high resolution.
The Russian writer would be dead 2 years later, in 1910.
It is safe to say, I think, that in this picture he is unaware of his fate.
Despite the books he wrote, this last bit of knowledge was, more than likely, kept secret from him.
See the candle on his desk?
The light bulb was invented in 1879.
Tolstoy was a Luddite.
“When the life of people is unmoral, and their relations are not based on love, but on egoism, then all technical improvements, the increase of man’s power over nature, steam, electricity, the telegraph, every machine, gunpowder, and dynamite, produce the impression of dangerous toys placed in the hands of children.”
–diary of Leo Tolstoy (1828 – 1910)