There is but a slight shift in scale from the tangents and montage of facts in the composition of a single life-story to a sense of how modes of composition, philosophies of being, and thinking through translation could converge in a sharpened sense of biography's power to capture the dynamic pulse of life in the making. S. P. Rosenbaum observes that in Bloomsbury circles, the very Tolstoyan question, ‘What is art?’, would be met by the quintessentially Bloomsbury quip, ‘What isn't?’ (Rosenbaum 1987: 9). The same could presumably be said of the equally Tolstoyan question, ‘What is life?’, such as Virginia Woolf, in a very Tolstoyan moment, was asking in 1938: ‘My God, how does one write a Biography? Tell me. I'm fairly distracted with Fry papers. How can one deal with facts – so many and so many and so many? Or ought one, as I incline, to be purely fictitious? And what is a life?’ (LVW 6: 226).

While this particular example comes later in her career, when more directly Russian-inspired interfaces or experimentalism had been superseded, the question harks back to Woolf's most vividly Russian-inspired era:

Whether musing on existential questions of life, transposing former theological constructs into a new quest for the transcendent or numinous, or rereading a single life in the light of a ‘new spirit’ or nascent psychoanalysis, experiments in ‘new biography’ were very much a sign of the times.