I've read Brothers' K as well as other Dostoevsky. I have to agree with Nabokov here and say that he is by far the most over-rated Russian writer. That book just goes on forever, and (spoiler alert) it ends with a corpse giving off a magical beautiful scent. As for Dostoevsky's famed psychological depth, his characters sometimes do things they don't mean to do, and it's hard for them to understand this. Whoopdee doo!

Gogol is so much more fun and irreverent. Dostoevsky recycles his opening lines—compare the openings of The Brothers Karamazov with Demons. They're almost the same, word for word. Gogol, meanwhile, is just this font of inventiveness and hilarity. No other Russian writer is funnier or wittier. If you can see the Soviet film version of Crime and Punishment, though, it's really really good.

Tolstoy has a weird political outlook (forgive me my Christian anarchist brothers) but his stories and characters are second-to-none. The million-hour Bondarchuk version of War and Peace is absolutely spectacular and very true to the novel—cutting out all the boring parts, like Tolstoy's endless sermonizing. See it on a big screen with powerful speakers if you can so you can really enjoy the battle scenes with like thousands of extras, as well as the blasting music.