A comparison of the aesthetic system of Émile Zola, as the founder of European naturalism, with naturalist sequences in Tolstoi's drama The Power of Darkness, concentrated, similarly to those in the drama A Bitter Fate by A. F. Pisemsky, in the scene of the murder of a baby. Tolstoi's technique of drama is compared with his dramatical postulates expressed in his essay On Shakespeare and on dramaturgy. Tolstoi's drama is built on an anti-Shakespearean conception of dramatic illusion based on the life reality. Naturalism used in Tolstoi's drama The Power of Darkness intensifies its ethical meaning and moral message.