Let's speculate, Veeky Forums:

Now I reply to yours too fuckface

Robertson Davies.
Just a whim..

Margaret Mitchell

Interesting. How come?

william gaddis

Wrong.

wrong

One hundred years of solitude

Tao Lin

I think he would love John Williams desu

It is really hard to say which writers Tolstoy would appreciate because he had an unconventional taste in literature. For example, he adored Maupassant, though one would expect that he would simply detest a writer whose only major topic were sexual relationship and adultery.

Norm Macdonald, Thomas Pynchon, Jordan Peterson, Vladimir Nabokov, Ernest Hemingway, Joseph McElroy, Marcel Proust, Cormac McCarthy, Borges

wrong.

No it's just that you're wrong.

Vonnegut.

vonnegut was on #teamdosto though

Doesn't matter. And Tolstoy enjoyed Dosto too. He just knew he Dosto wasn't on his level and felt that he was pursuing a bankrupt tradition.

Perhaps because his concerns are very similar to Tolstoy's, human relationships are front and center with only the vaguest philosophizing in the wings (almost anti-philosophizing as in the case of Kutuzov versus Napoleon in WaP). Also both writers defer much to chance (in events) and intuition (in decision-making) that could be argued furthers making their fictions feel like 'real life,' and therefore Davies a kind of Tolstoyan.
But primarily when I ask myself- Would Tolstoy have felt threatened by the quality of Davies's output (similar)? I can't help but think No. Therefore he would have praised him in a manner similar to the one he used when praising Nikolai Leskov, another clear writer of tales and novels that center on human relationships.

in his lifetime he liked Garshin - mentions him positively in Resurrection - who wrote short stories in quite a tolstoyan mode: i.e. the Signal

thus its probable that Tolstoy would like writers who operate in a similar manner to Garshin - and of course Chekhov who he also praised - Vasily Grossman, John Williams (especially Stoner) possibly people like Raymond Carver and Willa Cather as well.
I don't think Tolstoy ever read Thomas Hardy in his lifetime but i suspect he probably would have also liked him although they diverged substantially in their presentations of the peasantry, religion etc.

He absolutely would have hated writers like D. H. Lawrence, Philip Roth etc.

can you elaborate on that?

Thomas Mann for sure.

>although they diverged substantially
He loved Dickens (famously over Shakespeare) with whom he rarely comes in contact, so why not Hardy? I'll buy that youre more right than not.

Sure I'll try to a little. Tolstoy was famous for putting down other writers all the time. History tends to only remember the cruel quotes. But a lot of the people he put down, like Chekhov and Dostoyevsky for instance, he also had complimentary things to say. Chekhov explains it best. Tolstoy reportedly told Chekhov that Shakespeare was a terrible writer and that Chelhov was even worse. To that Chekhov later observed:

>"What I admire the most in him is that he despises us all; all writers. Perhaps a more accurate description is that he treats us, other writers, as completely empty space. You could argue that from time to time, he praises Maupassant, or Kuprin, or Semenov, or myself. But why does he praise us? It is simple: it's because he looks at us as if we were children. Our short stories, or even our novels, all are child's play in comparison with his works. However, Shakespeare … For him, the reason is different. Shakespeare irritates him because he is a grown-up writer, and does not write in the way that Tolstoy does."

That's where I was coming from. Tolstoy could appreciate writers. But at the end of the day he could not condone them. This is why he is not against Dostoyevsky per se. I've read highly complimentary things he has said about Dosto.

Fascinating.

That's a very interesting insight by Chekov.