"We reread Dostoyevski together in Tashkent and were struck both by his prophetic insights and by his incredible lapses as a publicist: his hatred of Catholicism, his cheap nationalism, and his "moujik Marei." "Both of them are heresiarchs," Akhmatova used to say about Dostoyevski and Tolstoi. She compared the two greatest Russian writers to twin towers of the same building. Both of them sought salvation from imminent catastrophe, the nature of which was understood by Dostoyevski, though not by Tolstoi. In their actual proposals for salvation both of them exhibited license in the highest degree. In fact, however, not even the best of proposals would have been able to halt a process of decomposition already so far advanced. Dostoyevski the artist is incomparably more profound than Dostoyevski the publicist. In the preparatory notes for his novels one sees the publicist's mind at work."
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Nadezhda Mandelstam Hope Abandoned (1974) Translated from the Russian by Max Hayward
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Fyodor_Dostoyevsky
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Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky or Dostoevsky [Фёдор Миха́йлович Достое́вский] (11 November 1821 - 9 February 1881) was a Russian novelist, short story writer, essayist, and journalist. Dostoevsky's literary works explore the human condition in the troubled political, social, and spiritual atmospheres of 19th-century Russia, and engage with a variety of philosophical and religious themes. Many literary critics rate him as one of the greatest novelists in all of world literature, as multiple of h
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