What did the Russians proclaim about Charles Dickens?

Answer 1

At about the time Dickens's popularing was waning slightly, he became hugely popular in Russia, especially their own authors. There was a tendency to see his novels as appropriate for children and young adults.

Russian writers came into vogue and were generally regarded as superior to Dickens from 1880 through the early part of the twentieth century. This preference is ironic because the Russian novelists both admired Dickens and learned from him. Turgenev praised Dickens's work and even wrote for Dickens's magazine, Household Words, during the Crimean War. Tolstoi wrote of Dickens, "All his characters are my personal friends-I am constantly comparing them with living persons, and living persons with them, and what a spirit there was in all he wrote." Dostoevsky was so impressed that he imitated the death of Little Nell, including the sentimentality, in describing the death of Nelli Valkovsky in The Insulted and the Injured (1862). Supposedly, during his exile in Siberia, he read only Pickwick Papers and David Copperfield. Even if this story is apocryphal, Dickens' influence on Uncle's Dream and The Friend of the Family (1859), written while Dostoevsky was in Siberia, is unmistakable. Ironically, English critics in the 1880s were puzzled by Dostoevsky's similarities to Dickens.

Source: see link