I must say, though, that the respondents who come down on Dostoevsky’s side tend to write more entertainingly than the Tolstoyophiles, and the latter occasionally evidence a certain pomposity; when Andrew Kaufman says of Dostoevsky “What he doesn’t do, however, is make you love life in all its manifestations,” my response is “You shouldn’t need a novelist to make you do that, and that’s not what literature is for anyway.”
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"I’ve recently reread much of both, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. What strikes me about Tolstoy, when you read him parallel to Dost., is how few lower-class characters there are in his novels. He sees the world through the eyes of an upper-class, well-off person. And when he tries to get into the heads of simple people he fails. I’ve constantly felt Tolstoy’s condescending, patronising attitude to characters who are not of his class.
Dostoyevsky, an officer and a nobleman like Tolstoy, doesn’t have this attitude. He explores the farthest corners in people’s heads, both upper class and the lowest of the low, with the reach and power that, to me, Tolstoy is simply incapable of." (Comment from Sashura on same website)
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...in 1854, Tolstoy had written in his diary, "It's true that slavery is an evil, but it is an extremely lovable evil."
He describes what he saw as class hatred on the part of the peasants when they refused his offer to free them without also giving them all the land they worked ...
--Love and Slavery: Serfdom, Emancipation, and Family in Tolstoy's Fiction -- Anne Hruska
Just keeping it real ...
