Meanings
- informalThe Russian novelists Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky; their respective oeuvres considered as a single corpus
For all the attention that America's most important critics lavished on “Tolstoevsky,” Slavic experts were all but ignored.
2009, David C. Engerman, Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America's Soviet Experts, page 1503 more examples
The obvious effect is to create courses by popular demand, the most obvious being the Tolstoevsky combination: one semester Dostoevsky, the other, Tolstoy.
1973, Russkiĭ I︠a︡zyk, volumes 27-28, page 16But how Tolstoy felt about Dostoevsky is of less importance to the present chapter – which is not a study in Tolstoevsky – than what is revealed by how he managed those feelings.
1995, Michael C. Finke, Metapoesis: The Russian Tradition from Pushkin to Chekhov, page 109But, if Terra (be it our world, its portrayal in the novels of "Tolstoevsky," or the "Terrible World" of Blok) actually exists, why not also to assume that water has a language?
2006, The Nabokovian, numbers 56-59, page 62
Origin
Blend of Tolstoy + Dostoevsky.
Full word history & related roots →Cite this entry
Tolstoevsky. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 4, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/Tolstoevsky
“Tolstoevsky.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/Tolstoevsky. Accessed November 4, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “Tolstoevsky,” accessed November 4, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/Tolstoevsky.
Source: Tolstoevsky on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.