Henry Oliver fires some shots at Dostoyevsky!

With apologies to the people who worked to publish The Friend of the Family — not often translated into English — I can only wish for readers to put down their Dostoevsky and pick up their Tolstoy, Gogol, Turgenev, anything, anything at all, so long as it is real literature and not Dostoevsky’s diatribe.

Personally I don’t have this same level of antipathy. I have enjoyed the Dostoyevsky I’ve read, but I am largely in the Tolstoy camp too. With Dostoyevsky I think “Hmm this interesting,” but with Tolstoy I read his work and think “This is perfect. Exactly what a book should be”.