The 19th century Russian Empire was a great era for their national writers and poets like Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Pushkin, Gogol, Chekov. With stories raging from reckless foids 
to raging incels 
!bookworms !classics, what are the works, writers and characters of Russian Literature you love and those you hate? And what are your unpopular opinions/hot takes on them?
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Im a relatively good Russian speaker and there is a certain additive grimness in the original language.
I have personally found Pushkin and Tolstoy to be annoying r-slurs with neither insight nor interesting premises to validate reading their literature.
Dostoyevsky and Gogol however have interesting premises of books and yet through them manage to push out great insights. Gogol in particular is interesting because he is one of the few people in history who can arguably be considered a real historic Ukrainian, but he wrote mostly in Russian about how Cossacks are cool, the Tsar is sacred, and Poles are n words
TL;DR skip Tolstoy and Pushkin read Dosto and Gogol
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I liked Karamazov more than Crime and Punishment, recommend which Gogol I should read first pls
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Taras Bulba and Viy are my personal favourites of his. The former as a historical flick on war honour and filial piety, the latter as something that I consider critical to development of modern horror
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Thanks m8 Ive added both to my list
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Mind to explain that one? Lmao
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Sure. Most of the territory of today's Ukraine was under Poland-Lithuania, and the Cossacks and Ruthenians living therein generally didn't like piving under Poland. There were something like six uprisings, upon which Gogol based one of his best works "Taras Bulba" on. Resistance against the Poles became a key part of national consciousness of both Ukrainians and Russians over that time.
In Taras Bulba the Poles are depocted as greedy, immoral, vain, yet not particularly clever or innovative (outsourcing this to Jews), and they win the story by whoring out one of their noble daughters to a son of the Cossack commander who was in love to thus make their war effort buckle.
Its kind of a reverse of the Polish book "With fire and sword" if you know Polish literature.
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I read a couple books by Tolstoy and they were unironically boring as frick
Dostoevski though remains one of my favorite writers, I loved The Idiot so much
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