Yes, let's leave it to Jane Austen and be tolerant of one another's tastes. Most of this is purely subjective in the long run, anyway.
I wasn't going to touch on Gorky only because I found his novel Mother almost as unreadable (and laughable, in a bad way) as Cement or What Is to Be Done?. Which is to say, these are all very didactic novels, novels in the grand Russian tradition of telling people how to live their lives as the author sees fit. To be honest, I just couldn't stand Mother for its sentimentality and preachiness.
On the other hand, I liked Gorky's autobiographical novels, especially Childhood very, very much, and I would highly recommend them to anyone who is curious about working class and/or peasant life in Russia in the late nineteenth century. IMHO Gorky, unlike Chernyshevsky and Gladkov, was a writer of real talent. Unfortunately he often subjugated his artistry to didacticism, i.e., to the moral and social message he was trying to impart, or later in his life, to historical exigencies, which is somewhat but not completely understandable, given the pressures he was under living in the Soviet Union during the Stalin period. Still, he chose freely to return to the Soviet Union and he chose more or less freely to write paeans to the Stalinist regime. The passage about Gorky visiting the Gulag in Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago is more than a little damning. I can't imagine Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, or for that matter Chekhov, behaving in such a spineless and cowardly manner.