It’s pointless to arbitrarily pit two authors against one another when no such rivalry existed in real life, but when it comes to Russian literature, it’s hard to ignore the tension between the lovers of Dostoevsky and the lovers of Tolstoy. Some people love both, yes, but generally, readers fall into one camp or another. There are also the Chekhovites, who members of both camps respect, and Nabokovians, who are largely viewed like the foot fetishist in this webcomic.

I consider myself a follower of Dostoevsky, but I get why some people prefer Tolstoy. They’re wrong, but I get it. In some ways, he was the better writer. Wanting desperately to discover my own love for him, I’ve read three of his most major works — Anna Karenina, Ivan Ilych, and now War and Peace.

I can now say that Tolstoy means less to me than ever before.

Don’t get me wrong. War and Peace is, in some ways, a pretty good novel. It’s ambitious, sincere, and sporadically engaging and insightful. However, I ultimately dislike it for the same reasons that I dislike Tolstoy’s entire body of work: it’s repetitive, dull, and smacks of artifice.

There are moments where his talent is undeniable. His portrayal of the battles of Austerlitz and Borodino shines with inspiration; on the “Peace” end of the spectrum, the ending of Volume II, concerning Natasha’s attempt to flee Petersburg with Kuragin, marks a high point for the whole novel. (During this section, I found myself unable to stop reading, much as I was unable to stop reading during the birth scene in Anna Karenina, which made me feel like a choir of angels was singing in the background.) Those virtuosic moments, however, are few and far between. I hate to complain about a novel being too long, or having too much “padding,” since I generally find these criticisms juvenile, but when a significant chunk of this novel is occupied with social gatherings where very little occurs dramatically or thematically, I have to conclude that it is indeed too long and has too much padding. Social gathering scenes can be great, but I felt like I was being strung along, only to be let down by an utter anticlimax.

Worse are the chapter where Tolstoy tries his hand at philosophy. I probably would have enjoyed this novel much more if it were not for the last act, where the characters are largely forgotten. Instead, Tolstoy dedicates the last section of War and Peace to an elongated ramble about history and why historians are dumb, illustrating through several hundred metaphors a single point that was not that interesting to begin with. This is especially bizarre considering how the novel’s earlier chapters make this point much more organically and fully. (Take, for instance, the contrast between how the masses experience Austerlitz with the idolized Napoleon being later seen prancing foplike around the devastated battlefield; or how the “swarm history” of the people is contrasted with the significance of individual revelation when Pierre sees the Great Comet of 1812.) It’s like Tolstoy's worried the reader will be too stupid to understand his very simple ideas and instead decides to hammer them home bluntly, like a 19th-century schoolmaster rapping the chalkboard as he tells a room full of bored children about his doctoral thesis that would have changed the world if only those rubes at the academy had accepted it. Yes, the prose is very pretty, but prose means little when this novel ultimately amounts to 1200 pages that have little to say beyond “This is water and historians are wrong about Napoleon.” (Never mind how Tolstoy undercuts his own critiques of Great Man Theory by lionizing Kutuzov.)

This, ultimately, is why Dostoevsky wins my heart. Tolstoy takes a God’s-eye-view of man, analyzing his complexities like a scientist; Dostoevsky takes a man’s-eye-view of God, wrestling with something he can barely control and coming out half-dead every time. Tolstoy is neat and nice and lyrical; Dostoevsky is sloppy and ugly and raw. Tolstoy provides an intimate examination of material reality; Dostoevsky takes a sledgehammer to it and breaks through to something new, something vital, something thrilling.