What about Henry David Thoreau?
Never read any of his stuff. I'll keep an eye out for it.
Long ago that I read Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky but I very much liked Crime and Punishment.
Yes, Dostoyevsky wrote better and some of his best characters were larger than life or at least unusual. Tolstoy was good at depicting the social circles and events of the Russian aristocracy, which was good reading, but his characters were nothing special.
Victor Hugo, Ayn Rand, Margaret Mitchell, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Charles Dickens are all just some authors who are better than Tolstoy.