/lit/ - Literature

>>13450077
This has to be bait.

Convert to Orthodox Christianity

>>13450086
No, I'm serious.

>>13450088
Never read, but literally this.

>>13450077
Im sorry anon if you have no heart.

>>13450077
>>In the light of the historical development of artistic vision, Dostoyevsky is a very fascinating phenomenon. If you examine closely any of his works, say ''The Brothers Karamazov,'' you will note that the natural background and all things relevant to the perception of the senses hardly exist. What landscape there is is a landscape of ideas, a moral landscape. The weather does not exist in his world, so it does not much matter how people dress. Dostoyevsky characterizes his people through situation, through ethical matters, their psychological reactions, their inside ripples. After describing the looks of a character, he uses the old-fashioned device of not referring to his specific physical appearance anymore in the scenes with him. This is not the way of an artist - say Tolstoy - who sees his character in his mind all the time and knows exactly the specific gesture he will employ at this or that moment. But there is something more striking still about Dostoyevsky. He seems to have been chosen by the destiny of Russian letters to become Russia's greatest playwright, but he took the wrong turning and wrote novels. The novel ''The Brothers Karamazov'' has always seemed to me a straggling play, with just that amount of furniture and other implements needed for the various actors: a round table with the wet, round trace of a glass, a window painted yellow to make it look as if there were sunlight outside, or a shrub hastily brought in and plumped down by a stagehand.

I-is he right?

>>13451082
No, Nabokov is being short-sighted on what a novel is and can be; he's being prescriptive instead of descriptive.

>>13451097
How coy. You know the name, yet you write <that> sooth his nerves. You know what, I'll post the earlier and more important passage that spells the manifest distinction between artists of talent nearing Tolstoy and artists at the level of Dostoevsky:
>We must distinguish between ''sentimental'' and ''sensitive.'' A sentimentalist may be a perfect brute in his free time. A sensitive person is never a cruel person. Sentimental Rousseau, who could weep over a progressive idea, distributed his many natural children through various poorhouses and workhouses and never gave a hoot for them. A sentimental old maid may pamper her parrot and poison her niece. The sentimental politician may remember Mother's Day and ruthlessly destroy a rival. Stalin loved babies. Lenin sobbed at the opera, especially at a performance of ''Traviata.'' A whole century of authors praised the simple life of the poor, and so on. Remember that when we speak of sentimentalists, among them Richardson, Rousseau, Dostoyevsky, we mean the nonartistic exaggeration of familiar emotions meant to provoke automatically traditional compassion in the reader.

Continued:
>Dostoyevsky never really got over the influence which the European mystery novel and the sentimental novel made upon him. The sentimental influence implied that kind of conflict he liked - placing virtuous people in pathetic situations and then extracting from these situations the last ounce of pathos. When, after his return from Siberia, his essential ideas began to ripen - the idea of salvation to be found through transgression, the ethical supremacy of suffering and submission over struggle and resistance, the defense of free will not as a metaphysical but as a moral proposition, and the ultimate formula of egoism-Antichrist-Europe on one side and brotherhood-Christ-Russia on the other - when these ideas (which are all thoroughly examined in countless textbooks) suffused his novels, much of the Western influence still remained, and one is tempted to say that in a way Dostoyevsky, who so hated the West, was the most European of the Russian writers.
>Dostoyevsky's lack of taste, his monotonous dealings with persons suffering with pre-Freudian complexes, the way he has of wallowing in the tragic misadventures of human English words expressing several, although by no means all, aspects of poshlost are, for instance, ''cheap,'' ''sham,'' ''smutty,'' ''highfalutin,'' ''in bad taste.'' dignity - all this is difficult to admire. I do not like this trick his characters have of ''sinning their way to Jesus'' or, as a Russian author, Ivan Bunin, put it more bluntly, ''spilling Jesus all over the place.'' Just as I have no ear for music, I have to my regret no ear for Dostoyevsky the Prophet. The very best thing he ever wrote seems to me to be ''The Double.'' It is the story - told very elaborately, in great, almost Joycean detail (as the critic Mirsky notes), and in a style intensely saturated with phonetic and rhythmical expressiveness - of a government clerk who goes mad, obsessed by the idea that a fellow clerk has usurped his identity. It is a perfect work of art, that story, but it hardly exists for the followers of Dostoyevsky the Prophet, because it was written in the 1840's, long before his so-called great novels; and moreover its imitation of Gogol is so striking as to seem at times almost a parody.

>>13451263
Am I to believe Tolstoy is a sensitive person? And furthermore am I to believe that Nabokov is?