Fyodor Dostoevsky / YMMV

Draco in Leather Pants: Readers and audiences noted that Dostoevsky's villains and anti-heroes tend to be way more interesting than the Vanilla Protagonist who are the Designated Hero. Examples include Raskolnikov, Rogozhin, Svidrigailov, Stavrogin, Dimitri Karamazov, Ivan Karamazov and Smerdyakov.
Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Something that would have annoyed Dostoevsky, given that he's a nationalist who considered Russia the greatest nation in the world, hated America and thought continental Europe sucked^note. While Dostoevsky was a popular writer in Russia, the literary establishment generally saw him as inconsistent, and they also felt that his really good writings were his early work rather than his famous great novels. It was the French, the Germans, the English and the Americans who in the late-19th and early-20th Century really embraced him as a genius and one of the greatest novelists and writers in history. Likewise, despite his anti-semitism, Dostoevsky was highly popular and influential among Jewish writers and intellectuals like Franz Kafka (who called him "my blood brother"), Sigmund Freud, and Woody Allen among others.
Growing the Beard: He was a successful and widely-read author from his first novel onward, but most modern readers note a marked difference in quality between his early works and the stuff he published after his political imprisonment and near-execution. Almost all of the work he's famous for today was published in the second half of his career.
Memetic Mutation:
- Dostoevsky was one of the first to create a fashion in Russian literature for profound, religious and philosophical works. In this regard, he is also Trope Maker for this.
- So, as he specialized in heavy social dramas and describing the life of the very bottoms of Russia at the time, he is also strongly associated with Nightmare Fuel in Russians.
Misaimed Fandom: Dostoevsky has always attracted a wide readership of atheists, nihilists, and others with whom he himself would have vehemently disagreed. It's usually not so much that the author's intentions are unclear—he was pretty Anvilicious—but many such readers simply find that his various Straw Atheist and Straw Nihilist characters actually make more compelling arguments for their worldviews than the Orthodox Christians whom we're supposed to side with! His deep psychological insights and the fact that his books are just plain great by most metrics also help. (Also see the Draco in Leather Pants and Germans Love David Hasselhoff entries above.)
Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: This is a characteristic element of almost every his work because of his love for Anti-Hero and The Woobie.
Values Dissonance: In this regard, Dostoevsky is one of the most famous examples in Russian literature because of his very strong by modern standards nationalist views and explicit anti-Semitism. His anti-Semitism is mostly relegated to his non-fiction whereas his fiction hardly ever has it except for the odd non-sequitur. (One unfortunate exception is the character of Lyamshim from Demons, who embodies just about every ugly anti-Semitic stereotype you can think of despite his relatively small role.)

YMMV / Fyodor Dostoevsky

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