Dostoevsky and Tolstoy are the titans of Russian literature. As mature
artists, they led very different lives and wrote vastly different works,
but their early lives and writings display provocative kinships, while
also indicating the divergent paths the two authors would take en route
to literary greatness. The ten new critical essays here, written by
leading specialists in nineteenth-century, Russian literature, give
fresh, sophisticated readings to works from the first decade of the
literary life of each Russian author--for Dostoevsky, the 1840s; for
Tolstoy, the 1850s. Collectively, these essays yield composite portraits
of these two artists as young men finding their literary way. At the
same time, they show how the early works merit appreciation for
themselves, before their authors were Titans.