Tolstoy vs Dostoevsky: Two Giants Who Refused to Meet

I built cathedrals of prose so vast a reader sees an entire nation breathe; art must teach men how to live simply and love truly.

You paint the surface of the soul, Lev Nikolayevich; I descend into its cellar, where guilt and God wrestle in the dark.

Your cellars are magnificent, but a man cannot dwell in fever forever, Fyodor; salvation is a plow and an honest day, not an underground scream.

And yet your plowman still murders, still doubts, still trembles before death, Lev, and no field on earth will silence that trembling within him.