Dostoyevsky’s novels are so schematic, so exaggerated, so over the top—there’s relatively little scenery, relatively few things—everything is pared down to foreground these crazily heightened scenes of drama and “scandal.” People are constantly falling down in hysterics, fainting, having nervous breakdowns, giving speeches, committing murder or suicide, having seizures, going on trial, writing insanely long letters and declaiming them in public spaces. Reading Dostoyevsky is like sitting in a room watching a small group of actors who are all trying to make eye contact with you and provoke some cathartic reaction. It’s not meant to be realistic—you know, like Oedipus Rex isn’t about killing your father and sleeping with your mother—it’s a play that depicts certain universal dramas and tensions through the bizarre and hyperbolic example of a king who kills his father and sleeps with his mother.
These kinds of dramatic exaggerations are incredible and powerful and fascinating—but personally I enjoy more the more cinematic, more historically conditioned, more realistic representations of Anna Karenina and War and Peace where you’re surrounded by detail, by the stuff of daily life. For Dostoyevsky, the important thing is dialogue and psychology, and it doesn’t really matter if the setting is a garret or a monastery or a pool hall or a forest grove or a prison cell or a charity ball—on Dostoyevsky’s stage, the costumes and set aren’t that important. For Tolstoy, on the other hand, if an encounter takes place at a train station or the horse races or a battlefield or an opera house or a hunting ground, that encounter is also in some sense really about horse racing or trains or battles or opera or hunting, and I really like that. The sets are real and very expensive. To me, Tolstoy’s novels really capture the experience of what it’s like to be alive on planet Earth—not by the kinds of exaggerated examples that invite us to look into our souls or whatever, but in a straightforward mimetic way.
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