Authors Like Fyodor Dostoevsky

Vladimir Nabokov

Russian-American · Lolita (1955), Pale Fire (1962), Speak, Memory (1951)

Nabokov wrote nine novels in Russian and eight in English, taught literature at Cornell for a decade, and collected butterflies seriously enough to publish scientific papers. His lectures on Russian literature, given to undergraduates and published after his death, devote a long chapter to Dostoevsky, whom he called a prophet, a claptrap journalist and a slapdash comedian, with a taste for the cheap effects of melodrama and detective fiction.

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Leo Tolstoy

Russian · War and Peace (1869), Anna Karenina (1878)

Anna Karenina runs two marriages against each other, one destroyed by an affair and one slowly built in the country, across Russian society, farming, politics and faith. War and Peace covers the Napoleonic invasion through several families and stops periodically to argue with historians about how history works. Tolstoy later renounced most of his own fiction, gave away his property and died in a railway station at eighty-two.

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Nikolai Gogol

Russian · The Overcoat (1842), Dead Souls (1842)

“The Overcoat” is a St Petersburg clerk who saves for months for a new coat, is robbed of it, is dismissed by every official he appeals to, and dies — then returns as a ghost pulling coats off shoulders. Dead Souls follows a swindler buying the names of deceased serfs from landowners. Gogol burned the second volume shortly before his death in 1852 and starved himself under the direction of a priest.

Anton Chekhov

Russian · the short stories, Uncle Vanya (1898), The Cherry Orchard (1904)

Chekhov practised as a doctor throughout his writing life, wrote several hundred stories and four plays that reinvented the theatre, and in 1890 travelled across Siberia to the penal colony on Sakhalin to survey the convicts himself. He refused to supply conclusions: his stories end where a lesser writer would explain. He died of tuberculosis at forty-four.

Franz Kafka

Czech-German · The Metamorphosis (1915), The Trial (1925)

Kafka worked at an insurance institute in Prague and wrote at night, publishing little in his lifetime and instructing his friend Max Brod to burn everything, which Brod declined to do. The Trial follows a bank officer arrested one morning by an authority that will not tell him the charge; The Metamorphosis opens with a travelling salesman waking as an insect and worrying about his train. He died in 1924 at forty.

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Albert Camus

French-Algerian · The Stranger (1942), The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), The Fall (1956)

The Stranger is a man who does not cry at his mother's funeral and later kills an Algerian on a beach, told in flat sentences that refuse to supply a motive. The Fall is a monologue delivered in an Amsterdam bar by a former Paris lawyer who is confessing and accusing the reader at the same time. Camus received the Nobel Prize in 1957 and died in a car crash three years later at forty-six.

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Russian · One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), The Gulag Archipelago (1973)

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich covers a single ordinary day of a prisoner in a Soviet labour camp, from reveille to lights out, and was published in the Soviet Union in 1962 with Khrushchev's personal approval, which stunned the country. The Gulag Archipelago, assembled secretly from the testimony of over two hundred survivors, got him deported in 1974. He received the Nobel Prize in 1970.

Flannery O'Connor

American · A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955), Wise Blood (1952)

O'Connor wrote two novels and thirty-one stories about the American South, in which a comic, petty, self-satisfied character meets sudden violence and, in the last paragraph, something that looks like grace. She was a devout Catholic writing largely for an audience that was not, lived with lupus and died at thirty-nine, and was explicit that the violence in her work exists to make her characters available to redemption.

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Cormac McCarthy

American · Blood Meridian (1985), The Road (2006)

Blood Meridian follows a fourteen-year-old runaway into a scalp-hunting expedition on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1840s, led by a figure called the judge who argues, at length and with enormous rhetorical power, that war is the truest condition of existence. The Road won the Pulitzer Prize. McCarthy died in 2023, and a disclosure about his private life published afterwards is covered on his own page here.

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Viktor Frankl

Austrian · Man's Search for Meaning (1946)

Frankl was a Viennese psychiatrist who spent three years in four Nazi camps, including Auschwitz, losing his wife, parents and brother. The book's first half describes the camps from a clinician's vantage and the second sets out logotherapy, his argument that the will to meaning is the primary human drive and that meaning can be found even in unavoidable suffering. It has sold many millions of copies.

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