I'm sure Liam, he's always struck me as writing from a position of mania, with all of that ruggedness and uneveness as an integral part of his mania and writing process. He was epileptic wasn't he, some even say post Siberia, a little crazy, and so I can't quite see him as ever writing polished prose in the way a writer like Tolstoy does, being that careful and methodical, but that said, I just don't know Tolstoy anywhere well enough to compare the two, it's just impressions!
The thing which initially attract me was the psychological probity, and in C & P that detective story excitement, the way chapters end, but I know he's been criticised for that, because it's seen by some as being part of the techniques of "lower fiction" - you know, build ups and suspense points, to keep us reading, and also on interest, the particular way he tackles warped and distorted states of psychology, deals with criminals and life's dropouts and lowlife, the misfits, the man or woman out on the streets, it's a gallery of rogues and oddballs!
Tolstoy for me is more upper society, and Dostoyevsky is therfore lower, both relevant of course -- with D, apart from the outcasts and psychological types there's the great themes, say with a work like Brothers K, the whole atheistic vs religous debates!
This seems very of timely at the moment, with such debates and books by folks such as Hitchens and Dawkins flying off the shelves.
I've also been looking over the many, 18 or so in all, theological books written by Dr Rowan Williams. You'll probably know him as the Archbishop of Canterbury over here, or at least he was until recently... who has written works which put the opposite case to the atheistic manifesto, and he's also written a book on Dostoyevsky!
Tolstoy seems to be an observer of the political issues of Russian life and some of the large canvass observations, society in disarray, ripped apart by war, what war does to us, and takes us inside the drawing room with beautifully drawn characters.
However, when I read an introduction to War & Peace recently, I was interested to see how it's assumed generally that Tolstoy does the refined or 'nice literature', carefully constructed, gentee, and so forth, but in fact it's written as an experiment thoughout, with characters appearing and disappearing and lot of loose ends, and so it's certainly a different kind of book to the one I'd expected to read when I first attempted it some years ago, so I'm glad that I abandoned it until now, as I have perhaps a better appreciation of the history.
I read a fairly interesting quote about Dos and Tolstoy some years ago -- it ran something like this: ". . . when we read D his stories strike us again like a shock and remind us of his talents, the excitement of C & P etc etc, whereas with the latter his greatness is with us all of the time."
It was said by John Jones in the intro to C & P, the Jessie Coulson translation, by OUP, the new edition has a new introduction but the essay by Jones is outstanding, I still remember it years later, it's nothing but pure enthusiam for the book.
I need to read more Tolstoy, I took out a few of the short stories last month, but didn't have enough time to give them a fair shot, so they went back to the library.