"Tolstoy - unbeaten Russian writer. Leaving aside his precursors Pushkin and Lermontov, all the great Russian writers can build up in the following sequence: first - Tolstoy, the second
- Gogol, the third - Chekhov, fourth - Turgenev. It seems to exhaust the list, and of course, Dostoevsky and Saltykov-Shchedrin, with their low grades would not receive my certificate of merit »B. Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature "
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