If Great Dead Writers Were on Facebook - 1

I've had a great (in my humble opinion) idea today: What if the great writers from all over the world before the Internet's time had Facebook accounts? What would they write about? Would they probe or crowdsource ideas for their novels, short stories, and plays? Witness events that could give them food for thoughts and plots? Boast about their new books just published?

I wanted to start with the Russian writers because that's what I know best as a part of my heritage. My imagination ran wild and I had several potential posts burning to come out.

Instead of creating fake accounts, I decided to use the power of the newly unleashed ChatGPT-5 to see if its image creative capacity has improved. I came up with pretty good prompts, I thought, and the result is here for the first five writers. I will set them up individually for each writer.

1. Dostoyevsky

How could I avoid Crime and Punishment? Dostoyevsky was an incorrigible, relentless and shameless gambler who picked up all sorts of near-writing jobs to pay off his gambling debts. I imagined that he'd worked as a court reporter on occasion (I'm too lazy to verify if it really happened and fact-checking is not the purpose of this exercise anyway). As if he had to report on all sorts of crimes for a newspaper in Saint Petersburg, where he lived most of his life. So, here's the post:

2. Tolstoy

One of my favorite Tolstoy's works is Anna Karenina, although I do re-read War and Peace every 4-5 years. Tolstoy has been always known as a generous and compassionate soul, creating a commune at his Yasnaya Polyana estate, giving peasants an opportunity to go to school, and advocating for peace in the world. Despite the fact that he was quite empathetic to people who were lower than him on the social ladder, recent deep dives into Tolstoy's life by modern researchers suggest, based on the way he treated his wife and other women in his circle, that he was quite a misogynist. I asked ChatGPT to create a post with a hint of misogyny in it:

3. Chekhov

Chekhov was a doctor by training and profession who started to write, by his own admission, to make supplemental income to support his family (doctor's wages were always abysmal in imperial Russia). I can imagine that his famous Cherry Orchard play was sparked by some real cherry orchard he had to pass on a regular basis while getting to his remote patients by horse carriage. If you want to learn more about Chekhov's life and start as a writer, there's a 2015 French biopic movie titled Anton Chekhov 1890 that covers about five most productive years of his life.

4. Pushkin

Alexander Pushkin to the Russian literature and language is what Shakespeare is to English. Most Western readers know little about him because his poetry was largely untranslatable (Boris Pasternak was probably the only master who translated Pushkin's poetry into English true to both its form and essence). But Pushkin also wrote some prose, and one of his most famous short stories is The Queen of Spades.

5. Grin

Alexander Grin is probably one of the most underappreciated Russian writers who wrote in the romanticism tradition during the most difficult times between revolutions and wars of the beginning of the 20th century. I wrote about him more in a Book Club story. Scarlet Sails is arguably his most famous work, with a good English translation available.

ChatGPT-5 must have become tired of my requests, as the last image was cut off at the top and bottom (it's not my unskilled cropping job). So I'll give it a break for now while I come up with some other ideas for this series.

Thank you for taking this ride with me. Please let me know what you think of this series. Suggestions for other writers and their works to be included in here are most welcome as well.