(From "The Other Lenin" by Alexander Maysuryan. Moscow: 2006.) (Майсурян А. А. Другой Ленин. М., 2006.)
Lenin's opinion towards Nechaev was closely intertwined with Lenin's opinion on the "revolting, yet genius" Dostoevsky. Lenin decided not to read "The Demons" […] Lenin admitted: ["Demons" is] Evidently reactionary filth, like Krestovsky's "Flock of Panurge", I have absolutely no desire to waste time on it. I have no need for such literature; what could it possibly give me? […] I have no free time for this garbage."
Lenin held the author's other works in no higher regard. On "The Brothers Karamazov" along with "Demons" he expressed himself in this way: "I am familiar with the content of both these pungent works, and that is more than enough for me. I just about began reading the "Brothers Karamazov" and then dropped it: the scenes in the monastery made me sick."
Lenin did, though, read the novel "Crime and Punishment". One of his comrades remarked to him in the heat of an argument:
"One could easily arrive at Raskolnikov's "All is permitted" at this rate."
"What Raskolnikov?"
"Dostoevky's, from "Crime and Punishment".
Lenin followed up with unbridled contempt: "All is permitted"?! So we have come down to the sentiments and petty words of a soppy intellectual wishing to drown revolutionary questions in moralising vomit. Just which Raskolnikov are you talking about? The one who whacked the old money-lending bitch, or the one who clapped his forehead against the ground in penitent hysterics at the market-place later on? Perhaps […] that sort of thing appeals to you? […]
Trotsky remarked: "Nothing repulsed Lenin more than the slightest hint of sentimentality or psychological waffling."
This attitude was confirmed by Nadezhda Krupskaya (Lenin's wife): "He was very strict towards himself. But he despised digging and torturous self-analysis in the soul."
Lenin was repelled by overly close attention to the dark sides of human nature; he referred to this as "ugly imitation of the ugly Dostoevsky" in one of his letters. And he added, to explain himself: "It once fell on me to spend the night with a comrade ill with Delirium Tremens (Alcohol withdrawal), and once to "talk down" a comrade trying to commit suicide (after an attempt) and who consequently, in a few years, did end up killing himself… But in both cases these were small pieces of the lives of both comrades. But to seek out such "pieces" in life, in order to join them together […] means to paint horrors, to terrify both one's own imagination and the reader's".
At the same time, Lenin did once note: "Don't forget that Dostoevsky was once sentenced to execution. He was subjected to the barbaric ritual of rank reduction, and it was later announced that Nicholas I had "pardoned" him, exiling him to a labour camp."
With regard to Dostoevsky's works Lenin chiefly thought highly of "House of the Dead". He called this novel "an unsurpassed work of Russian and World literature, which so wonderfully illustrated not only the labour camps, but also the "house of the dead", in which the Russian people lived under the Tsars of the House of Romanov."
In the list of monuments to 20 Russian authors which were to be installed after the revolution, approved by Lenin, we read:
"1. Tolstoy.
2. Dostoevsky…"