Dostoevsky: His Life and Literary Work

"The name of Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky is usually mentioned alongside those of Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Goncharov, and I don’t think anyone will deny his right to stand in the first ranks of the ‘glorious pack’ of writers of the 1940s. But if it is even possible to bring Dostoevsky closer to his peers in terms of place, time, strength, talent, and the common ‘literary origin’ (from Gogol), such a comparison is very difficult and would require the most elaborate stretches—since we move to the spirit, meaning, and form of the works. For all these things, Dostoevsky is indebted primarily to himself and to the strange circumstances of his personal life. This is his inalienable property—where his sharply defined individuality is vividly expressed: his painful, psychopathic genius, the originality of his thinking and fantasies, which have nothing comparable or equal in Russian literature."