Luckily, it seems like the common folk have more sense than this. Recall (pun totally intended) the reaction of SF residents to funding renaming of schools to erase the specter of colonialism instead of funding math programs.

Crime and Punishment, obviously.

But he was a russian empire/orthodoxy apologist through and through, except for a brief period early on (which earned him the gulag).

Western philosophy at the time ended slavery, serfdom and challanged religion and god-given right to rule.

All of which Dostoyevsky tried to defend.

Don't get me wrong - early western democracies weren't perfect or even close. But it was still an enormous improvement over what came before.

Pushkin was extremist and nationalist, he was also seen as such. That is why he was propped up by the regime later on.

There is a reason why Ukrainians demolished specifically his monuments and why Russians are building them. It has zero to do with quality of prose and a lot to do with ... his extremism.

Piłsudski said in early 20th century that "in Russia even anarchists are imperialists" and he was basically right. And remains so to this day.

Russia managed to somehow do imperialism/colonialism and get away with it without reevaluating their past. Probably because they colonized white people.

Well the problem from my POV is that that exact empire he defended was persecuting millions of people, banning their languages, sending their people to forced labour camps, exterminating native people in Siberia, and keeping about 90% of the whole Russian society in serfdom (which in Russia was basically slavery).

You keep being "open-minded" about that, I prefer modernism and liberalism, thank you.

Yes, that's the worst of modern Western culture, the belief that it is superior to any other and you don't even need to hear someone who doesn't share your modern worldviews. The result of such ideas is a culture that will try to destroy everything else and in the end destroy itself.

Dosteovsky was criticized by his contemporaries for propagandizing the political entanglement of the orthodox church and the russian empire. He was condemned for this by non-russian orthodox christians including at least one greek bishop. So even by the standards of his time there was conflict about the political nature of his work.

There's not one "that perspective" in history from which to evaluate anything. The person you're responding to is using modern nomenclature but the problem they're point at is one that was clear to dostoevsky's contemporaries and was raised during his life.

The other products of the same time did criticized them too. Trying to paint the past people as a monolithic mass where everyone loved your hero, simply because you like his book and do not know much of who he really was in the context, is annoying too. Many famous writers are famous because they were political actors first. It was politics that got them famous in the first place. It was also politics that killed their or their opponents lives and careers too.

Also, the good stuff he produced is as much product of the time as the bad stuff. If you can celebrate someone, you should be able to accept also some less adoring evalution.