War and Peace

The other great Russian realist — where Tolstoy uses scale and clarity, Dostoevsky uses compression and psychological chaos. The two together define 19th-century realism's range.

Another epic novel arguing that history is made by the masses, not the powerful — Steinbeck's Okies are Tolstoy's muzhiks, dignified by collective suffering.

The direct heir of Tolstoy's anti-heroic war depiction — a WWI novel that applies Borodino's ground-level horror to industrial warfare.

Contemporaneous historical novel about the same Napoleonic-era upheaval from the French side — Dickens's romantic view of historical forces contrasts sharply with Tolstoy's determinism.

Tolstoy's anti-war argument carried to satirical absurdity — the institutional insanity of war that kills at random, now played as black comedy.

The other candidate for greatest novel ever written — like War and Peace it embeds theological argument within psychological fiction, but where Tolstoy finds peace, Dostoevsky finds irresolvable struggle.