The works of two leading late 18th and 19th century American writers, the poet Walt Whitman and the novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky; and two leading Russian writers of the same period, the poet and short story writer Alexander Pushkin and the novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, respectively, sprang from distinct social, economic, and intellectual environments, as well as from different political and cultural milieu. For example, during the 19th century when Russia was still a Tsarist monarchy (and at the time, just beginning to finally more beyond the feudalistic serf and master agricultural way of life), America was celebrating its first full century of democracy. The writing styles and thematic content of these Russian and American authors, respectively, in many ways reflects such distinctions. In short, the Russian authors write more pessimistically about society and the human condition; while the two American authors write (in general at least, although not entirely) about society's and humanity's more promising and positive aspects. .

             For example, the works of Pushkin and Dostoevsky, the Russians are deeply fatalistic, and, especially in Dostoevsky's case, darkly rebellious, as well, against social inequalities within Tsarist Russia. (However, styles and content of these two Russian authors also contain many separate distinctions, for this reason it is likely significant, as well, that Pushkin was born into the Russian aristocracy and Dostoevsky was not). .

             The works of the two American writers Whitman and Melville, however, especially Whitman, are by comparison free-flowing and expansive, dealing, both thematically and in terms of content, with possibility; justice (Billy Budd receives no justice of his own onboard the Bellipotent, but receives the immortal justice of becoming an almost-holy legend for his fellow sailors) and wide open vistas (the land; the sea). The free-form, all-inclusive style of Whitman, for example, in its celebratory, often gleeful expansiveness, implicitly describes the author's subject matter: a diverse; growing, increasingly self-actualized America.