The article examines the vertical connection between fiction and classics expressed in the works of contemporary writers, Nikolai Karazin and Leo Tolstoy. Karazin’s prose becomes a breeding ground for Tolstoy. The social and psychological types of characters in Karazin’s works are transformed into individual characters in Tolstoy’s novels (“Anna Karenina”). The melodramatic situation in Karazin’s fictional plots turns into a reason for anthropological, psychological judgments in Tolstoy’s works (“The Kreutzer Sonata”). Describing the battle scenes, Karazin follows in the footsteps of Tolstoy. All the findings and discoveries of Tolstoy in the depiction of war, man in war (in “Sevastopol Sketches”) are comprehended by Karazin and refracted by him in the context of the Turkestan wars of conquest: the senselessness and spontaneity of military operations, the automatism of man in war, the loss of his moral qualities, while his career, ambitious concerns do not disappear even in the situation of mortal danger. The article presents a comparative analysis of fragments by Leo Tolstoy and Nikolai Karazin.