Discovering Russian Literature discussion

I've come across that quote too, but can't think where. And I may have just seen it mentioned, rather than read the book. It sounds like Tolstoy, but I could be wrong.

Dostoevsky maybe, the diary?

Alright, cause I thought I seen something quite similar, though different after all, in there (looked it up now). It's the article "Dissociation" and in there you find:

"Take, for instance, our contemporary man of letters – one of the 'new people', I mean. He begins his career and will have nothing to do with anything that came before; what he has comes from himself, and he acts by himself. He preaches new things and flatly sets as his ideal a new word and a new man. He knows neither European literature nor his own; he has read nothing, nor will he take up reading. Not only has he not read Pushkin and Turgenev, he has scarcely even read his own people, that is Belinsky and Dobroliubov. He depicts new heroes and new women, and their whole novelty consists in the fact that they confidently take their tenth step having forgotten about the nine preceding ones, and so they suddenly find themselves in the most false situation one can conceive [...]."

Meaning here of course, that they haven't really invented something new.