The works of Fyodor Mikhailovich (of course, Dostoevsky!).

The Inspector General? :)

I hope you understand that The Inspector General is a satirical work with its own specific characteristics. But, as with any satire, the laughter is tinged with sadness: for us, these are things of the past, but for Russia at that time, they were real societal ills.

Mysticism is a pretext, I agree, but why does Gogol use something fictional and unreal as a pretext (even if it is drawn from folk legends), while with Fyodor Mikhailovich, it is really easy to believe in the possibility of such a situation? Indeed, why look for emotional experiences in legends when there are so many more in real life: just take up your pen and write them down?

It's good that they are different. :) Everyone has their own style, and each of them saw the world in their own way.
It's like blaming Fyodor Mikhailovich for the fact that the themes of execution and epilepsy appear frequently in his works. But this is also not just like that; the person repeatedly went through and reinterpreted his life experience.
And Gogol had his own life experience and his own demons, if you can put it that way.
You know, you can't always choose how you will write. It comes from within and is rarely fully controlled by consciousness (otherwise, it would be journalism, not literature). As Bogushevskaya sang, "it is not we who play the music - it is the music that plays us."

And in my opinion, Tolstoy still pays too much attention to form. And the fact that half the book is in French confirms this. Too much attention is paid to the insignificant. But that's just my opinion.

Well, that's how they spoke back then. And there's plenty of it in Pushkin and Lermontov. And, by the way, in Tolstoy, it is precisely those characters that he dislikes who speak French the most - he shows in every possible way that this is a falsehood, a puppet-like, lifeless world, where not only thought is frozen, but even the word. After all, heated arguments and lively thoughts come from the heart and pour out in native speech, as can be seen in the dialogues of Bolkonsky and Bezukhov, Natasha and Sonya, etc.
Again, in the Rostov family, everyone speaks in Russian, and they speak quite lively and sincerely.
In general, I've gone off on a tangent and am proving obvious things; we learned this in school. :o