Sheesh. This isn't coming out so well. The actual comparison is about a page, but he's going on about Dostoevski before and after and it's all sort of one thought and it isn't making much sense if I'm only sticking to the page that has Tolstoi in it.
In summary he's saying that Tolstoi was incredibly versatile in style and supremely capable of dealing with all sort of subject matters, and it probably takes a writer to recognize just how much mastery goes into making it all seem so easy. While Dostoevski ploughs through ever the same subject matter, using ever the same techniques - and, in the original, a very direct, unpolished, even boorish language - but these few techniques he has refined "like a farmer his ploughing technique". But Maier happens to care about much the same subject matter (Dostoevski's views on fallen mankind), and of course Dostoevski's mastery at dialogue. He then also defends Dostoevski against some other charges - like his characters are ever so exalted, there's such a lot of drunkenness going on etc pp. And Dostoevski's style is "redundant", something Maier admits: "He often needs fifty pages for something Tolstoi could have told you in one paragraph and in much more artful language and with much more seeming ease. This is because in Dostoevski's great novels the omniscient narrator's or else the nominal first person narrator's voice is very much sidelined" which you could make an argument out of that Dostoevski was simply the much more modern, 20th century, writer. Also Maier doesn't make that argument at all.
Poll
