Humanity, with him, is but a vortex in the bubbling maelstrom.” Nietzsche famously called him “the only psychologist from whom I have anything to learn.” Henry Miller’s praise of the writer of particularly Russian forms of misery and trespass is a little more colorful: “Dostoevsky,” he wrote, “is chaos and fecundity. Dostoyevsky has long been described as a psychological novelist. It’s the high-stakes desperation of his characters, the tragic irony of their un-self-awareness, or the gnawing obsession of those who know a little bit too much, about themselves and everyone else.

Dostoevsky back and forth a time or two, and I have to say I usually give the edge to Dostoevsky. Magic,” even as people who have these kinds arguments acknowledge them both as “irreducibly great.” Both novelists are read with similar reverence and devotion by their fans, and they are often pitted against each other, writes Kevin Hartnett at The Millions, like “Williams vs. Leo Tolstoy, aristocrat-turned-mystic, whose detailed realism feels like a fictionalized documentary of 19th century Russian life and Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, the once-condemned-to-death, epileptic former gambler, whose fever-dream novels read like psychological case studies of people barely clinging to the jagged edges of that same society.

In the pantheon of Great Russian Writers, two heads appear to tower above all others-at least for us English-language readers.

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