For Russians, by then standing on the threshold of historic upheaval, ‘Tolstoy or Dostoevsky’ seemed to be a metaphoric question of their own dichotomized fate.
Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, the two giants of Russian literature, became the center of heated discussion among the Russian intellectuals in the pre-Revolutionary fin de siecle atmosphere. First Merezhkovsky compared them in terms of ‘oppositional twins’, then followed the others(Berdyaev, Kropotkin, Shestov, etc.). They all chose to articulate Russia’s historical and philosophical questions by the name of two literary messiahs. For Russians, by then standing on the threshold of historic upheaval, ‘Tolstoy or Dostoevsky’ seemed to be a metaphoric question of their own dichotomized fate.