/lit/ - Literature

>>19091713
>buddenbrooks
If you want to read similar trash, stick with YA

>>19091732

Let me guess, your favorite book is Blood Meridian.

>>19091732

>thinks buddenbrooks are trash

Next thing you will be calling War and Peace and Anna Karenina trash too

>>19091713

bump

>>19092115
They're trash. Tolstoy's prose is bland crap, at least in translation. It's Flaubert minus the poetry.
I confess, though, that Tolstoy was a very fine structure-builder.

>>19091764
Nabokov hated Thomas Mann too and had an essay in which he exposed Mann's cheap tricks.
It's only a pity he didn't do the same for Tolstoy, who for some reason he considered a master.

>>19093309
His essay exposing Mann is here:

https://www.libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=F251789A6513832637520C00D9570774

>>19093321
>>19093309
Nabokovfags are mentally the same age as Lolita.

Obviously not a book, but if you can't find anything relevant in literature, look into the Heimat films.

>>19093331
Why are Tolstoy and Mann better **writers** than, say, Hunter Thompson?
Why?
Justify it on a purely literary level comparing paragraphs written by the three of them. I agree Mann was a better thinker (not Tolstoy), but that's not the same thing as knowing how to write well.
Show me, for instance, some great and original metaphors invented by Mann or Tolstoy.

>>19093309

Yes, but is Blood Meridian your favorite book? If not, is it The Brothers Karamazov?

>>19093401
Stick to reading your purple dinosaur Barney Nabokov if you think good writing is inventing metaphors kek. You'll grow up and appreciate Mann and Tolstoy someday.

>>19093401
>Show me, for instance, some great and original metaphors invented by Mann or Tolstoy.

Tolstoy was not a poetical writer. What he was great at was at presenting common traits of humanity that we all feel, but that almost no writer points out.

As a young man, Nabokov thought Madame Bovary “2000 metres higher
than Anna Karenina.”3 By the end of the 1940s he had reversed the rankings and had come to think Anna Karenina the greatest of all novels (Meras
interview). He taught it and agreed to annotate it and to retranslate it, and
although that project remained incomplete because of the pressure of other
work, he went on to pay tribute to the novel in his own fiction.
In linewith his generalreestimation of Anna Karenina, Nabokov’sresponse
to its first two paragraphs changed revealingly over twenty years. In late 1939
or early 1940, before arriving in theUnited States, he began to prepare lectures
on Russian literature in the hope he would find a university literature post
much sooner than he did. He jotted down: “Anna Karenin: Grand looseness
of style: The word ‘house’ is repeated 8 times in the course of the first paragraph—17 lines.”4 But in the annotations he began for the Modern Library
Anna Karenina fifteen years later, we find this: “the word dom (house, household, home) is repeated eight times in the course of six sentences. This ponderous and solemn repetition, dom, dom, dom, tolling as it does for doomed
family life (one of the main themes of the book), is a deliberate device on
Tolstoy’s part” (LRL 210). From grand looseness to deliberate design.

>>19093433

But I’m not sure that this is entirely correct. I’ve translated the start of
the novel myself in order to highlight the startling, dogged insistence of Tolstoy’s verbal repetitions that surely can’t all be explained as sounding one’s
theme in the first few bars.

“All happy families are like one another, every unhappy family is
unhappy in its own way”: all right, repetition, but only for the sake of
pointing a contrast.

Then:

All [remember what we were told at school: don’t start consecutive sentences and especially consecutive paragraphs with the same word] was confusion in the Oblonsky household. [I have used
“house” here as a kind of chemical marker for the Russian syllable
“dom”] The wife had found out that the husband was linked [I picked
this word because Tolstoy recycles the same word two sentences
later: normally we would translate “was having an affair”] with the
former French governess in their house, and told her husband that
she couldn’t live in the same house as him. This situation had been
going on for three days now and was felt painfully by the couple
themselves and all the members of their family and the household
staff. All the members of the family and the household staff [a very
characteristic repetition: Nabokov himself defines it, in an unpublished note in quite a different context: “the phantom of Tolstoy’s
style: the bringing over of the last definition of one phrase into the
beginning of the next one, as solid supports for the development of
a logical sequence”5
] felt [and that was the last verb used in the previous sentence] that there was no sense in their cohabitation and that
people who had accidentally converged at any wayside inn were more
linked [there’s that repetition] to one another than they [and here it
comes again], the members of the Oblonsky family and household.
The wife did not come out of her rooms, the husband had not been
in the house for three days now. The children ran all over the house;
the English governess had argued with the [housekeeper]6 and had
written a note to a friend asking her to find her a new place; the cook
had gone out yesterday right at dinner time; the under-cook and the
coachman had given notice.

>>19093439

What we have here is not so much the sounding of a theme as Tolstoy’s
relentlessly analytical mind in action, his ruthless, uncompromising desire
to define. He likes to turn something over patiently, facet by facet, and
refuses to stop where ordinary decorum expects. Here it leads, I think we
have to admit, to some awkwardness, but this awkwardness is intricately
allied to his own special greatness, his readiness to take things apart, his
ignoring received explanations, his rejecting ordinary limits.

Though he admired Tolstoy above all other novelists, Nabokov was very
different. He was quick to spot the logical flaws in the arguments of others
and held that “next to the right to create, the right to criticize is the richest gift that liberty of thought and speech can offer” (LRL ii). But he was
highly impatient with analysis as a means of arriving anywhere: he thought
that logic could lead you in a straight line all the way around the globe, only
to bring you back to where you started, to mark out once more the closed circle of human thought. And given the odd conclusions Tolstoy could argue
himself into by patient logic—that sex is immoral even within marriage, for
instance, in the afterpiece to “The Kreutzer Sonata”—Nabokov has a point.
Nabokov preferred the aside ofconsciousness, the knight move of mind, the
sidestep of fancy, to the dogged step-by-step of analytical thought.

>>19093452

you know what, I'm tired. Here:

file:///C:/Users/Dr.%20Evandro/Desktop/Stalking%20Nabokov%20%20selected%20essays%20by%20Nabokov,%20Vladimir%20V.%20Nabokov,%20Vladimir%20Vladimirovich%20Boyd,%20Brian%20Nabokov,%20Vladimir%20Vladimirovich%20(z-lib.org).pdf

Look the chapter on Tolstoy and Nabokov. You will see what's the big deal about Tolstoy's style (or lack of it).

It's not verbal fireworks that make him the great writer that he is.

>>19093406
No, my favorite authors are Shakespeare, Dante, Donne, Joyce, Beckett, as well as those who have pushed the novel forward through structural and thematic innovation, such as Cervantes, Sterne, de Assis, Proust etc.

>>19093433
>Nabokov thought Madame Bovary “2000 metres higher than Anna Karenina.”3 By the end of the 1940s he had reversed the rankings

Exactly, and I mentioned that. Nabokov was wrong about Tosltoy and about many other things.
I literally just mentioned ONE essay by Nabokov and now you're treating me as a Nabokov fanboy, which I am definitely not. I've only read two novels by him, which I enjoyed, but no more than I enjoyed, say, Faulkner.

>>19093340

thank you.

Did you watched it whole? What did you find?

>>19093490

Você está enganado sobre Tolstói.

>>19093464
>It's not verbal fireworks that make him the great writer that he is.

If it's not verbal, he's not a great writer. He might be a great psychologist and story-teller, but not a great writer.
Writing is done with words and structure, that's it. Tolstoy's words are journo-tier and his structures are good, but still in imitation of Flaubert's realist style.

>>19093506
>but still in imitation of Flaubert's realist style.

Ele é superior a Flaubert em várias coisas mais importantes. Eu sinceramente duvido que você tenha lido Guerra e Paz ou Anna Karenina do início ao fim.

>>19093501
Tolstoy é um jornalista glorificado.
Tolstoy is a glorified journo, and his 'observations about human nature' are sheer imbecility and kitsch. Just look at the moralistic clichés of Ivan Ilych. It's such terrible kitsch crap.
He was a good imitator of Flaubert, and no more.

>>19093506

Como eu disse antes. Abra o link:

file:///C:/Users/Dr.%20Evandro/Desktop/Stalking%20Nabokov%20%20selected%20essays%20by%20Nabokov,%20Vladimir%20V.%20Nabokov,%20Vladimir%20Vladimirovich%20Boyd,%20Brian%20Nabokov,%20Vladimir%20Vladimirovich%20(z-lib.org).pdf

Leia o capítulo "Tolstoy and Nabokov".

Você vai entender sobre o que estou falando.

E isso vindo de alguém que ama metáforas e julga Shakespeare o maior de todos os escritores.

>>19093523
>olstoy é um jornalista glorificado.

Tente você fazer algo parecido. Duvido que você consiga escrever sequer uma novela que mostre seres humanos de uma forma tão crua e realista.

A morte do irmão de Liévin em Anna Karenina é mais assustadora do que qualquer coisa que você encontra em Dante ou McCarthy.

Claro, você não leu, então nem adianta eu falar. Você ainda é jovem e acha que técnica e retórica são as coisas mais importantes em literatura.

Sobre Tolstói: você sequer consegue ver o que ele faz, não consegue entender como ele faz. Se você tentar escrever um relato sobre a morte de uma pessoa por covid-19 você vai produzir algo muito inferior, simplesmente porque não vai conseguir mostrar como as mentes das pessoas funcionam, não vai saber que detalhes expor, quando expor, o que expor.

>>19093517
Duvide do que quiser. A prosa de Tolstói se sustenta no kitsch sentimental e, no caso das obras tardias, em moralismos de místico capado. Anna Karenina é um bom livro, sobretudo arquitetonicamente, mas dispensável quando se tem Flaubert, sendo que o próprio Flaubert já é, no mais das vezes, um regresso em relação a Cervantes e Sterne.
Also, this is an English board.

>>19093550
>Duvide do que quiser.

Be honest, Anon.

>>19093550
>uando se tem Flaubert, sendo que o próprio Flaubert já é, no mais das vezes, um regresso em relação a Cervantes e Sterne.

Tolstoy is superior to all of them. But you will never know until you read the man, so I'm not going to waste my time with you anymore.

>>19093548
>Duvido que você consiga escrever sequer uma novela que mostre seres humanos de uma forma tão crua e realista

Crua e realista? Os personagens de Tolstói frequentemente encaixam-se em clichês, p. ex., os colegas de Ivan naquela abertura medíocre em que comentam a morte dele, ou ainda o Gerássim, típico bom mujique, assim como a 'senpaiília indiferente', enfim, clichês que só supreendem a quem não tem cérebro próprio para ter descoberto essas coisas por si mesmo.
Ademais, o realismo é a morte da inteligência. Se o mérito de Tolstói é ser realista, por que não trocá-lo pelo mundo real? Os méritos da arte existem fora do mundo real. Usar a arte como 'segunda realidade' é vício de gente capada, como você, incapaz de localizar-se corretamente na vida.

>A morte do irmão de Liévin em Anna Karenina é mais assustadora

Se você se assusta com aquele kitsch todo, então você tem a sensibilidade duma criança.

>>19093530
Metáforas são apenas uma parte. Tolstói é ruim porque escreve como um jornalista e bom porque consegue montar estruturas extremamente difíceis. A beleza arquitetônica de Anna Karenina é imensa. A escrita é medíocre. Uma Chartres feita de papel de jornal.
Mas que seja, você não tem cérebro próprio e foi educado com base em ideias comuns acerca dos 'grandes livros', por isso considera Shakespeare o maior (ele não é) e ama Tolstói.

>>19093580
>Tolstoy is superior to all of them. But you will never know until you read the man, so I'm not going to waste my time with you anymore.

Whatever you say, parrot.

>>19093611
>por isso considera Shakespeare o maior (ele não é) e ama Tolstói.

Who is the greatest?

>>19093611
>Tolstói é ruim porque escreve como um jornalista

What does this mean? Simple and direct prose?

>>19093611
>Se você se assusta com aquele kitsch todo, então você tem a sensibilidade duma criança.

What happens in the scene? Do you remember? Could you point to me at least one fo the human details of those chapters?

>>19093611
>Crua e realista? Os personagens de Tolstói frequentemente encaixam-se em clichês, p. ex., os colegas de Ivan naquela abertura medíocre em que comentam a morte dele, ou ainda o Gerássim, típico bom mujique, assim como a 'senpaiília indiferente', enfim, clichês que só supreendem a quem não tem cérebro próprio para ter descoberto essas coisas por si mesmo.

That's not his best work, and it's still quite good. Then there's the sad fact that many people are, indeed, exactly like that.

>>19093611
>Ademais, o realismo é a morte da inteligência. Se o mérito de Tolstói é ser realista, por que não trocá-lo pelo mundo real? Os méritos da arte existem fora do mundo real. Usar a arte como 'segunda realidade' é vício de gente capada, como você, incapaz de localizar-se corretamente na vida.

Boy, you have no idea the kind of writing I love to work on.

Anyway, what's the big deal now? DFW, Pynchon? Joyce? How old are you? 18?

A FRIENDLY REMINDER:

there's always 1 ONE sanctimonious bastard who shits all over the thread

no prizes for guessing who it in in this thread

internet is full of strange things but the most silly and irritating are the people who overvalue their opinions

they add nothing to the question/discussion at hand

they just try to prove that they're the best in this world by dragging us all along into the mud where they can wallow in their piteous existence via cheap namedropping

shame on such people since they prove that reading books does not make a man wiser or more humble and humane

please lets just ignore these silly people


>>19091713
try Berlin Alexanderplatz
that's all i know of since i am not a German but i quite enjoyed that one
it's not necessarily a saga but does convey a pretty good feel of those times

>>19093611
>Ademais, o realismo é a morte da inteligência. Se o mérito de Tolstói é ser realista, por que não trocá-lo pelo mundo real? Os méritos da arte existem fora do mundo real. Usar a arte como 'segunda realidade' é vício de gente capada, como você, incapaz de localizar-se corretamente na vida.

This is extremely difficult to do: to make you see how other people are and feel in all sorts of different scenarios, from a girl getting ready to go to a ball to an embittered old man dying in fear of having lost his son and suffering from remorse for having spent his life treating his daughter badly because he was unable to simply tell her that he loved her so much that he was afraid of losing her to a possible husband.

It's easier to research all sorts of engineering and chemistry books and write something like Pynchon than to really get to know people, than to really understand what other people feel, to get to know what other people think, and - the hardest part - be able to remember these details when you sit down to write.

No realism is "real". It's just a style. But Tolstoy managed to make a huge number of people, in all sorts of situations, seem to be made of flesh and blood. Men and women, girls and young soldiers, babies and old people. Over and over again you feel that "yes, people are just like that" pop of acknowledgment.

Shakespeare, Melville, Dostoevky: they all create memorable characters, yet those characters sound like bigger-than-life manifestations, like some form of bloated humanity. It's amazing, but it's not the same as looking at people and being able to see them exactly as they are. This realization, this perceptions is something extremely difficult to do consistently. So much so that most realistic-style writers fail when they try

>>19093625
>Who is the greatest?

No idea. I don't think there's a greatest.

>>19093648
>Simple and direct prose?

Exactly. The kind of thing anyone can learn to write with enough training. (Your reply: but you have no idea how difficult it is!)

>What happens in the scene? Do you remember? Could you point to me at least one fo the human details of those chapters?

Do you want me to google the details for you? I read it three years ago. From what I remember, the guy was dying and his woman and his brother were there. That was one of the scenes which nearly made me fall asleep. I remember Ivan Ilych much better, which I reread last year.
My favorite scene from Anna K. is the one in which that imbecilic 'philosopher' starts working with the other guys and notices how the others are more agile than him. I found it quite funny. His explanations of his theories were also fine satire, and made me laugh. Keep in mind I am not saying Tolstoy is bad, and if I said so it was in a humorist manner (e.g., glorified journo). I think Tolstoy good, but so is Longfellow.

>Boy, you have no idea the kind of writing I love to work on.

So? Realism is the death of aesthetic intelligence because it can be substituted by reality if you know how to live. You are praising Tolstoy for the single reason (you have given no other) that he ''tells it like it is'', basically, but why not just go and *live it like it is*, then? If art can be substituted by life so easily, what is the point of it? How can it be considered good?
Also, Tolstoy's truths aren't sad truths, but hilarious truisms.

>Anyway, what's the big deal now? DFW, Pynchon? Joyce? How old are you? 18?

No idea.
Why are you so interested in myself and my tastes?
Why do I need to have a 'big deal'?
You sound so insecure that it hurts reading your posts. Have I inadvertently attacked your super heroes? How awful of me. I ask your forgiveness.

>>19093764
>So? Realism is the death of aesthetic intelligence because it can be substituted by reality if you know how to live.

I just found it ironic because my personal style is often densely metaphorical and my plots based more on something like Greek tragedy and romantic comedies than realism.

But that doesn't stop me from seeing the great difficulty of getting to know people, of perceiving all kinds of details about people, of being able to see life as it is in its essence, an essence that will probably always remain the same.

I honestly find it much harder to do something like Tolstoy and Checkhov than like McCarthy or Pynchon (no offense to the latter).

>>19093731
>But that doesn't stop me from seeing the great difficulty of getting to know people, of perceiving all kinds of details about people, of being able to see life as it is in its essence, an essence that will probably always remain the same.

I agree that Tolstoy knew how to perceive little details, but so did (and do) many other novelists, and that has ceased to impress me. I care about what you do with it. Show me something surprising, something which I have never seen before, or stop boring me. I find Tolstoy predictable, kitsch, overly-emotional.
Also, people are not 'just like that'. Notice the incoherence of your statements: you claim it's very difficult to know people, yet you claim that Tolstoy knew them. How can you be so sure that he knew them when knowing them is so difficult? Maybe he did not know them, and you are merely being deluded, in which case your ''he tells it like is'' argument fails. Or would you say he merely verbalizes things we all intuitively know? In this case, is it really necessary to verbalize them?
But whatever. I don't care either way. I have nothing against Tolstoy and his readers. He's merely another imitator in the history of literature, a writer of ''19th century novels'' as conventional as they get, and that doesn't harm anyone. As some other anon once said, Tolstoy wrote ''the best soap operas of all-time''. I agree.
Also, I don't think Tolstoy's people look real at all. They look like caricatures made by a moralistic Christian who couldn't get his own sex life together (this is apparent in that Kreutzer book in which he uses the sonata as a main theme but says nothing interesting about Beethoven) and read too many novels.
Nor do I particularly care about Shakespeare's laughably grandiloquent characters, I care about the lines they speak, and if Prospero's lines had been spoken by a beaver hunter who walked with shoelace tied to his prick and had a big Ozzy tattoo in his arsehole I'd probably like them even more.

>I honestly find it much harder to do something like Tolstoy and Checkhov

It's harder to write a 1000 pages Ron Hubbard book than a Catullus epigram, but that doesn't mean the Hubbard novel is better.

>than like McCarthy or Pynchon (no offense to the latter).

Who even mentioned them? I think McCarthy and Pynchon are both good, and the first falls frequently into kitsch while the latter overwrites his lines to such a point that I cannot resist taking my pencil and crossing out many of the words.
You seem to think that everyone needs a 'master' but no, not everyone is like that.

>>19093796
>my personal style
>my plots
there's nothing of you in there

Pynchon has a style, just like Tolstoy. You're just a sentimental hack without originality who likes the sound of his own voice since he has nothing else to say. Get real, buddy.

NOW FUCK OFF
NOBODY ASKED

>>19093340

I’ve heard of that. If I’m not mistaken it was one of Kubrick’s favorite works

>>19091713

Hot pic

>>19094063

Yes:

>His favourites included Heimat, Edgar Reitz's vast 15-hour film about the inhabitants of a remote German village, and Kieslowski's 10-part Decalogue.

https://www.google.com.br/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/film/2001/mar/26/artsfeatures

>>19093309
Nabocope

>>19093530
>file:///C:/Users/Dr.%20Evandro/Desktop/Stalking%20Nabokov%20%20selected%20essays%20by%20Nabokov,%20Vladimir%20V.%20Nabokov,%20Vladimir%20Vladimirovich%20Boyd,%20Brian%20Nabokov,%20Vladimir%20Vladimirovich%20(z-lib.org).pdf
Do brs really?

>>19093309
Nabokov couldn't expose Tolstoy or he would have exposed himself along. He needed the leverage to sustain his credentials, there is always a limit on what one can play with.

>>19093530
>file:///C:/

>>19093530
Nabobros??

>>19093530
>file:///C:/Users/
>Stalking%20Nabokov
This is just a meme, right? A falseflag maybe?

>>19093309
>at least in translation
Whose translation? No matter the translator none are Tolstoy's prose. You have no idea what Tolstoy's prose is.

>>19091713
>>19083173

>>19093530
Hi Doctor Evandro!
How's life?

>>19094925
>>19094960
i'm guessing he's above 70 and totally senile and therefore should be a tripfag - DR EVANDRO

>>19093523
Olá, Cantarelli.

>>19091713
German here
There are thousands of them, the novel sections in German bookstores feel like they make up half of them. I can’t give you any recommendations though since I don’t care for family sagas (even though, of course, I’ve read Buddenbrooks since it’s one of the books that schools can choose for their curricula)

>>19093309
>author xy bad because nabokov said so
when did this board become so retarded? Where does the obsession with this posturing nut sack come from?

>>19096807
Learn to interpret, of imbecile.

>>19098085
>you

Fix'd.

>>19093464
are you OK today, Dr. Evandro?
is your wife OK? your daughters? your ego?

>>19099133
>implying he has a wife

Hans Fallada