Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky stand above all the other Russian writers.

The greatest talents of the age, their realistic style transcends immediate social issues and explores universal issues such as morality and the nature of life itself.

Although Dostoevsky is sometimes drawn into polemical satire, both writers keep the main body of their work above the dominant social and political preoccupations of the 1860s and 1870s.

Tolstoy's War and Peace and Anna Karenina and Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov have endured as genuine classics because they draw the best from the Russian realistic heritage while focusing on broad human questions.

Although Tolstoy continues to write into the twentieth century, he rejects his earlier style and never again reaches the level of his greatest works.