Tolstoy or Dostoyvsky

George Steiner's "Dostoyvsky or Tolstoy" is still readable and/or re-readable for an appreciation of Tolstoy and Dostoyvsky. From a special viewpoint and for special reasons, Tolstoy was championed by Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky and the rest of Bolshovists, including their writers: Gorky, Yessenin and Maykovsky. The reason for this preference was Tolstoy's optimisim, futurism as he wrote about supermen and Dostoyvsky's pessimism and nihilism as he wrote about submen, although in a letter Nietzsche tells Dostoyvsky that his subman and his superman was the same man struggling his way out of the pit of human existence. Tolstoy leads to Ibsen, Shaw, Brecht and Arthur Miller, whereas Dostoyvsky leads to Strindberg, Chekhov, Tennessee Williams and Samuel Beckett