Glad that we're finally moving past the Shakespeare as writing only for performance / Shakespeare as literary poet pendulum, which never worked. Lucas Erne's Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist was probably the transitional book. I'm currently writing something on conceptions of authorship in the 1590s which relies on thinking across the poetry / drama boundary, fortunately now common.
On Dostoevsky, I agree he's probably a bad influence on many but the thing he has over Tolstoy is that he's very funny! Great as Tolstoy is (and I wouldn't want to choose between them) he's basically humorless, at least to this non-Russian reader. Whereas Dostoevsky's black comedy is second to none.
While I appreciate Tolstoy’s style, I prefer Dostoevsky’s ideas. But which is more essential to a novel—its style or its ideas?
Then again, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are not as monolithic as this debate might require them to be. Many who praise Tolstoy for his perfect novels, such as *War and Peace* or *Anna Karenina*, will distance themselves from his later “moralistic” works, which they consider imperfect (or too “idea-driven”).
Meanwhile, people who praise Dostoevsky (such as myself) tend to praise pretty much all of his works—while still acknowledging his imperfections as a novelist or a person. In fact, this lack of expectation makes his moments of eloquence even more stunning.
In criticism the idea of *perfection* doesn’t seem important to Dostoevskyans, but it does seem to bother Tolstoyans. Perhaps they’re most bothered because they know they praised him for something they also know he lacks. Meanwhile, Dostoevsky continues to get posted by more and more imperfect people.
In any case, this was a great conversation. Thanks for bringing up the Dostoevsky-Tolstoy conversation and being willing to accept your own grumpiness. (A very Dostoevskyan move, by the way. 😉)
Nabokov hated Dostoevsky, too, and for similar reasons. He called him "mediocre": "with flashes of excellent humor, but, alas, with wastelands of literary platitudes in between." I once took a class where we very slowly read The Brothers Karamazov together in Russian, with a professor who studied under the great Dostoevsky scholar Joseph Frank. I was hoping that I'd come away with some better appreciation of Dostoevsky's art; instead, I ended up mostly agreeing with Nabokov. I do like Demons, though. Not precisely as a novel, but as a delineation of a certain personality type.
As an idealistic neurotic raw youth I read all of Dostoevsky's major works and was a huge fan, but as I haven't read him in over 30 years I'm not in a position to offer a detailed or well-considered defense. But let me mention three episodes from The Brothers Karamazov that still resonate with me:
-- Ivan's explanation of why he rejects God in the face of the brutal cruelty that children sometime endure.
-- The Grand Inquisitor.
-- Most profoundly for me, Alyosha's reaction when the corpse of Father Zosima quickly starts to decay and smell. This had the biggest impact on me, as it vividly presents the existential dilemma of how to keep going in the world when some of our most fundamental beliefs are called into question. Before Zosima's death, Alyosha believed him to be a saint and also believed that such saintly people do not suffer putrefaction after dying, and the fact of Zosima's corpse degrading like any other corpse caused a crisis of faith for Alyosha. This kind of calling into question can occur with regard to religious, political, or other kinds of fundamental beliefs and it's interesting to me how people rise (or fail to rise) to this challenge.
Anthony Trollope is excellent on mental illness. The depressed cleric Josiah Crawley is a masterpiece in The Last Chronicle of Barset. The obsessional, jealous, and delusional husband in He Knew He Was Right is also.
Trollope also provided a truly excellent portrait of alcohol use disorder in his great novel Dr. Thorne.
I suspect Harry Potter might also have been most influential in the sense of swinging the children's market towards fantasy; possibly adult fiction market as well
Are you fluent in Russian? Did you read Russian reviews of the writers you trying to analyse from their contemporaries?
If not don’t - don’t read Russian literature then! it’s a waste and boring. Every translation I’ve seen is very basic and doesn’t have the colour of the language, feel and thought of the original. As with majority of writing - it’s best in original like Shakespeare. Unless translated by Nabokov or another giant fluent in both languages and cultures
I enjoyed the episode a lot. If you come back please consider doing something from the Henriad.
Walker Percy has a decent case to be placed above Plath as a writer on mental illness. (No I'm not Christian, I'm often asked that when I say I like him)
Getting middlebrow fiction to be the most popular form of children's entertainment seems like a real achievement even in the pre-smartphone modern era. No one needs to go to the mat to defend Potter as the apotheosis of modern English literature, but the performative denigration of it by the would-be arbiters of good taste is every bit as annoying as its purity spiral right wing Christian equivalent. They're good books!
I am only now reading Brothers Karamazov, but I'm inclined to think that the more highly we think of Tolstoy the more we should value Dostoevsky based on LT's reaction at his passing:
"I wish I had the power to say all that I think of Dostoevsky! When you inscribed your thoughts, you partly expressed mine. I never saw the man, had no sort of direct relations with him; but when he died, I suddenly realized that he had been to me the most precious, the dearest, and the most necessary of beings. It never even entered my head to compare myself with him. Everything that he wrote (I mean only the good, the true things) was such that the more he did like that, the more I rejoiced. Artistic accomplishment and intellect can arouse my envy; but a work from the heart — only joy. I always regarded him as my friend, and reckoned most confidently on seeing him at some time. And suddenly I read that he is dead. At first I was utterly confounded, and when later I realized how I had valued him, I began to weep — I am weeping even now. Only a few days before his death, I had read with emotion and delight his ‘Injury and Insult.’”
I don’t grasp why anyone would think it’s better to read Shakespeare than see the plays, although a lot of people do. Perhaps it’s a failure of imagination on my part. OTOH, if Stephen Fry reads any of the plays I will grab them.
I did not read Paradise Lost. I listened to an audiobook. Marvelous. As with any audiobook, it’s important to get the right reader. Mine was Charlton Griffin.
I found Harry Potter to be second rate writing, but Jim Dale’s narration made it a terrific story for car trips with the kids.
John Pistelli at Grand hotel, abyss is currently covering the Tolstoy versus Dostoyevsky debate in the invisible college. We read Anna Karenina over 3 weeks and are currently doing the same with Brothers karamazov.
Glad that we're finally moving past the Shakespeare as writing only for performance / Shakespeare as literary poet pendulum, which never worked. Lucas Erne's Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist was probably the transitional book. I'm currently writing something on conceptions of authorship in the 1590s which relies on thinking across the poetry / drama boundary, fortunately now common.
On Dostoevsky, I agree he's probably a bad influence on many but the thing he has over Tolstoy is that he's very funny! Great as Tolstoy is (and I wouldn't want to choose between them) he's basically humorless, at least to this non-Russian reader. Whereas Dostoevsky's black comedy is second to none.
I haven’t read Erne… must put it on my list !
While I appreciate Tolstoy’s style, I prefer Dostoevsky’s ideas. But which is more essential to a novel—its style or its ideas?
Then again, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are not as monolithic as this debate might require them to be. Many who praise Tolstoy for his perfect novels, such as *War and Peace* or *Anna Karenina*, will distance themselves from his later “moralistic” works, which they consider imperfect (or too “idea-driven”).
Meanwhile, people who praise Dostoevsky (such as myself) tend to praise pretty much all of his works—while still acknowledging his imperfections as a novelist or a person. In fact, this lack of expectation makes his moments of eloquence even more stunning.
In criticism the idea of *perfection* doesn’t seem important to Dostoevskyans, but it does seem to bother Tolstoyans. Perhaps they’re most bothered because they know they praised him for something they also know he lacks. Meanwhile, Dostoevsky continues to get posted by more and more imperfect people.
In any case, this was a great conversation. Thanks for bringing up the Dostoevsky-Tolstoy conversation and being willing to accept your own grumpiness. (A very Dostoevskyan move, by the way. 😉)
Nabokov hated Dostoevsky, too, and for similar reasons. He called him "mediocre": "with flashes of excellent humor, but, alas, with wastelands of literary platitudes in between." I once took a class where we very slowly read The Brothers Karamazov together in Russian, with a professor who studied under the great Dostoevsky scholar Joseph Frank. I was hoping that I'd come away with some better appreciation of Dostoevsky's art; instead, I ended up mostly agreeing with Nabokov. I do like Demons, though. Not precisely as a novel, but as a delineation of a certain personality type.
Agree that Amis is overrated overall, but I thought that Time's Arrow was brilliant, maybe the only good piece of Holocaust fiction.
As an idealistic neurotic raw youth I read all of Dostoevsky's major works and was a huge fan, but as I haven't read him in over 30 years I'm not in a position to offer a detailed or well-considered defense. But let me mention three episodes from The Brothers Karamazov that still resonate with me:
-- Ivan's explanation of why he rejects God in the face of the brutal cruelty that children sometime endure.
-- The Grand Inquisitor.
-- Most profoundly for me, Alyosha's reaction when the corpse of Father Zosima quickly starts to decay and smell. This had the biggest impact on me, as it vividly presents the existential dilemma of how to keep going in the world when some of our most fundamental beliefs are called into question. Before Zosima's death, Alyosha believed him to be a saint and also believed that such saintly people do not suffer putrefaction after dying, and the fact of Zosima's corpse degrading like any other corpse caused a crisis of faith for Alyosha. This kind of calling into question can occur with regard to religious, political, or other kinds of fundamental beliefs and it's interesting to me how people rise (or fail to rise) to this challenge.
Anthony Trollope is excellent on mental illness. The depressed cleric Josiah Crawley is a masterpiece in The Last Chronicle of Barset. The obsessional, jealous, and delusional husband in He Knew He Was Right is also.
Trollope also provided a truly excellent portrait of alcohol use disorder in his great novel Dr. Thorne.
I suspect Harry Potter might also have been most influential in the sense of swinging the children's market towards fantasy; possibly adult fiction market as well
Are you fluent in Russian? Did you read Russian reviews of the writers you trying to analyse from their contemporaries?
If not don’t - don’t read Russian literature then! it’s a waste and boring. Every translation I’ve seen is very basic and doesn’t have the colour of the language, feel and thought of the original. As with majority of writing - it’s best in original like Shakespeare. Unless translated by Nabokov or another giant fluent in both languages and cultures
https://artdaily.cc/news/173389/Love-them-or-hate-them--this-couple-reign-in-Russian-literature
You’ve inspired me to re-up rereading their translation of The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories.
Nabokov taught courses in Russian literature in translation, so sis t seem to share your view as to “don’t read it.”
Edit: *…doesn’t seem to share….*
I enjoyed the episode a lot. If you come back please consider doing something from the Henriad.
Walker Percy has a decent case to be placed above Plath as a writer on mental illness. (No I'm not Christian, I'm often asked that when I say I like him)
Getting middlebrow fiction to be the most popular form of children's entertainment seems like a real achievement even in the pre-smartphone modern era. No one needs to go to the mat to defend Potter as the apotheosis of modern English literature, but the performative denigration of it by the would-be arbiters of good taste is every bit as annoying as its purity spiral right wing Christian equivalent. They're good books!
I am only now reading Brothers Karamazov, but I'm inclined to think that the more highly we think of Tolstoy the more we should value Dostoevsky based on LT's reaction at his passing:
"I wish I had the power to say all that I think of Dostoevsky! When you inscribed your thoughts, you partly expressed mine. I never saw the man, had no sort of direct relations with him; but when he died, I suddenly realized that he had been to me the most precious, the dearest, and the most necessary of beings. It never even entered my head to compare myself with him. Everything that he wrote (I mean only the good, the true things) was such that the more he did like that, the more I rejoiced. Artistic accomplishment and intellect can arouse my envy; but a work from the heart — only joy. I always regarded him as my friend, and reckoned most confidently on seeing him at some time. And suddenly I read that he is dead. At first I was utterly confounded, and when later I realized how I had valued him, I began to weep — I am weeping even now. Only a few days before his death, I had read with emotion and delight his ‘Injury and Insult.’”
I don’t grasp why anyone would think it’s better to read Shakespeare than see the plays, although a lot of people do. Perhaps it’s a failure of imagination on my part. OTOH, if Stephen Fry reads any of the plays I will grab them.
I did not read Paradise Lost. I listened to an audiobook. Marvelous. As with any audiobook, it’s important to get the right reader. Mine was Charlton Griffin.
I found Harry Potter to be second rate writing, but Jim Dale’s narration made it a terrific story for car trips with the kids.
John Pistelli at Grand hotel, abyss is currently covering the Tolstoy versus Dostoyevsky debate in the invisible college. We read Anna Karenina over 3 weeks and are currently doing the same with Brothers karamazov.