Borges vs Tolstoy: a labyrinth or a life?

Why drown a reader in a thousand pages of soldiers and suppers when a single paragraph can contain the whole universe?

Because life is not a riddle to be solved in a footnote, Señor Borges; it is Natasha at the ball, a peasant in the field, the slow weight of years.

And yet your Russia is just one library; I offer readers every book that was, is, and might be, all at once.

You give them mirrors and tigers and forking paths, but I give them themselves—and no man ever wept at a labyrinth.