Benedikt also lacks this understanding. Because in his world, Fyodor Kuzmich is omnipotent and omniscient, Benedikt takes it on faith that Fyodor Kuzmich must be the prolific author that he claims to be despite the diverging styles. Unlike Varvara, Benedikt, as with his interpretation of the poems, is unable to imagine that literature can do anything but reinforce what he already knows about the world. Though both robbed of context, Varvara reacts productively and Benedikt moronically.
Benedikt matures somewhat after he immerses himself in his father-in-law’s library, but although his understanding deepens, it never sheds its essential superficiality. The reading that he does enables him to comprehend the literal events of a book more than before, and he no longer mentions issues with understanding allusions as he does when he works as a copyist. He also develops an ability to imagine the worlds he reads about in books as separate from his own, as illustrated by his pining after the “beauties” he reads about, who he thinks much more wonderful than any women he actually knows. 
Significantly, however, his new idealized, self-inserting style of reading still reflects a childlike attitude towards literature. He mentally transposes himself into each story, so that he stars in each one and reaps the benefits of the beauties’ attentions. It is hard to pin down exactly what Benedikt is failing to “get” out of these books (especially without having read them), but his new idealization of the stories’ content appears to come at the expense of their emotional truth or thematic implications. Benedikt’s fixation on organizing the books as physical objects stems from this lack. 
He fetishizes the books as objects, another overly literal “misreading” on Benedikt’s part; after all, the point of a book is not its size or color or arrangement but its contents. The giant, mostly-alphabetized list of the books in Benedikt’s library bears out Benedikt’s misconception; it contains a vast range of titles, from Chekhov to Mutant Ninja Turtles Return to technical manuals of an order that Benedikt couldn’t possibly understand, revealing not just his indiscriminating taste but his lack of understanding that such works are fundamentally different from each other and cannot all be consumed in the same way. Even once he absorbs the contents of the library, he does not become wise—actually, he loses his former appealing innocence. With just Benedikt’s story alone, it would seem that Tolstaya is suggesting that literature has the power to corrode empathy and understanding. 
On the other hand, Nikita Ivanich serves as an example of the humanist potential of literature, when it is imbued with the intended cultural context. 
For Nikita, literature is the cultural context that passes the values of his extinguished world to posterity. Thus, literature and culture have an almost paradoxical relationship: one both requires literature to pass on the culture and requires the cultural knowledge to fully comprehend the literature. Nikita’s regret over his loss of Pushkin’s portrait serves as an example; because he lacks the portrait, he cannot perfect the Pushkin statue, but without familiarity with Pushkin’s literary stature, neither portrait nor statue are meaningful, as Benedikt’s confusion demonstrates.
