Or perhaps "Russian literature" is a concept as vast as the country, and some of it transcends easy labels. Like Bulgakov, Dostoevsky was capable to write at various different levels.
Yes, certainly. I wasn't very clear, but my meaning was that there's a certain Western/American concept of "Russian Literature" as being exclusively long, philosophical, realistic, and depressing - as though The Brothers Karamazov and Anna Karenina are the prototype for everything else.
But it's obviously not true; reducing Russian-language literature to Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Solzhenitsyn is insulting crude. (And even Dostoevsky can be funny!) Bulgakov and Pasternak are at least recognized, but reduced to one work each. Zamyatin ought to be taught next to Orwell and Huxley, but he and a great many others are basically unknown. And all of that's before the conflation of Russian, Soviet, and Eastern Bloc work. Lem, Čapek, and so on aren't even Russian writers but get subsumed in the same category of thought.
It's a frustrating gap in American-read canon all around, and as a particular fan of sci-fi I think the focus on Russian 'literary' over 'genre' work has left a major hole in our perception of SF.
