Which one of these three is the best?

>It implies cheap melodrama and unrealistic plotlines churned out by second-rate writers for an undiscerning audience.
Tolstoy to a T.

why must you antagonize?

Tolstoy was 10 times the writer Dostoyevsky was, Dostotard.

They're very different, and both extremely good. One thing that's true is that Dostoevsky is much less realistic and more melodramatic than Tolstoy. It's probably fair to say that when it comes to pure writing skill Tolstoy is a lot better. But Dostoevsky is definitely the better "thinker", I guess you could say. Tolstoy's philosophizing in War and Peace can't be taken seriously, he declares almost without argument that military tactics, strategy and leadership are fake as a blatant dig against Napoleon. It only works if you treat him as a character in the book, the sort of pompous narrator getting carried away by patriotism and the Russian Spirit.

Dostoevsky, on the other hand, has been taken dead-seriously as an original thinker by philosophers, theologians, psychologists, probably more than any other novelist.

Unfortunately these are all cliche observations, Tolstoy vs Dostoevsky has been debated for so long it's hard to find anything original to say

I do want to add that one point to Dostoevsky's writing is that it's somehow aged extremely well. Tolstoy, despite his later radicalism, is in his novels on the side of the normies. He'll show some happy wholesome family scene and interject with proclamations about the Nature of Women or whatever. Dostoevsky writes about conflicted, mentally-ill freaks (see: the average IQfy poster) waging some internal struggle against nihilism, which he saw as the scourge of his time and is definitely the scourge of ours. He has a good sense for the "twisted", the whole Hannibal Lecter mind-of-a-killer thing is sort descends pretty directly from his books.

That's oversimplification to the point of just being wrong, and also doesn't contradict what I said.

If you are alluding to Dostoevsky’s worst novels, then, indeed, I dislike intensely The Brothers Karamazov and the ghastly Crime and Punishment rigamarole. No, I do not object to soul-searching and self-revelation, but in those books the soul, and the sins, and the sentimentality, and the journalese, hardly warrant the tedious and muddled search. Dostoyevsky’s lack of taste, his monotonous dealings with persons suffering with pre-Freudian complexes, the way he has of wallowing in the tragic misadventures of human dignity – all this is difficult to admire. I do not like this trick his characters have of ”sinning their way to Jesus” or, as a Russian author, Ivan Bunin, put it more bluntly, ”spilling Jesus all over the place." Crime and Punishment’s plot did not seem as incredibly banal in 1866 when the book was written as it does now when noble prostitutes are apt to be received a little cynically by experienced readers. Dostoyevsky never really got over the influence which the European mystery novel and the sentimental novel made upon him. The sentimental influence implied that kind of conflict he liked—placing virtuous people in pathetic situations and then extracting from these situations the last ounce of pathos. Non-Russian readers do not realize two things: that not all Russians love Dostoevsky as much as Americans do, and that most of those Russians who do, venerate him as a mystic and not as an artist. He was a prophet, a claptrap journalist and a slapdash comedian. I admit that some of his scenes, some of his tremendous farcical rows are extraordinarily amusing. But his sensitive murderers and soulful prostitutes are not to be endured for one moment—by this reader anyway. Dostoyevsky seems to have been chosen by the destiny of Russian letters to become Russia’s greatest playwright, but he took the wrong turning and wrote novels.

I do think Nabokov is partly right though, Dostoyevsky's slavophilia blinded to some aspects of reality.

Keep in mind that Nabokov was an effete aristocrat aesthete that never experienced the grosser forms of suffering his entire life. His writing and tastes reflect this. Dostoevsky was sent to a labor camp in Siberia and was almost executed. He lost a child. He endured poverty, addiction, madness, sickness, humiliation and terror. His writing and tastes reflect this.

Dostoyevsky was a christian, you moron

It's definitely both. Do you remember this scene from Crime and Punishment?:
>"I don't believe in a future life," said Raskolnikov.

>Svidrigailov sat lost in thought.

>"And what if there are only spiders there, or something of that sort," he said suddenly.

>"He is a madman," thought Raskolnikov.

>"We always imagine eternity as something beyond our conception, something vast, vast! But why must it be vast? Instead of all that, what if it's one little room, like a bath house in the country, black and grimy and spiders in every corner, and that's all eternity is? I sometimes fancy it like that."

>"Can it be you can imagine nothing juster and more comforting than that?" Raskolnikov cried, with a feeling of anguish.

>"Juster? And how can we tell, perhaps that is just, and do you know it's what I would certainly have made it," answered Svidrigailov, with a vague smile.

>This horrible answer sent a cold chill through Raskolnikov. Svidrigailov raised his head, looked at him, and suddenly began laughing.

So yes, this ties into his philosophical/religious point, but also what a deliciously nasty bit of characterization. You could have a character say something like that just to entertain an audience, and there's no way that's not part of why Dostoevsky did it. It's too perfect.