/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.13560705]

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Dislike him. A cheap sensationalist, clumsy and vulgar. A prophet, a claptrap journalist and a slapdash comedian. Some of his scenes are extraordinarily amusing. Nobody takes his reactionary journalism seriously.
The Double. His best work, though an obvious and shameless imitation of Gogol's "Nose."
The Brothers Karamazov. Dislike it intensely.
Crime and Punishment. Dislike it intensely. Ghastly rigmarole.

[Anonymous No.13560857]

Nabokov was tsundere. He secretly loved all these people he talked shit about. He mentioned and referenced Dostoyevsky in a bunch of his books

[Anonymous No.13560861]

>>13560705
It's like when your buddies insult you because deep down they care about you.

[Anonymous No.13562615]

nabbed

[Anonymous No.13562788]

>>13560705
intelligent, nihilistic, and with a wicked sense of humor.

[Anonymous No.13563105]

>>13560705
Nabokov is vapid nonsense and literally on the same level as YA and other genreshit. If Nabokov is "good" then so is fifty shades, except that Nabokov's work is actually even more vapid than that. Nabokov is to literature what the newest pretty gwaphix marketing powerhouse is to bidoo games. All flash, zero substance. Crime and Punishment is nothing but substance AND it has a better plot/ characters even on the surface level than anything Nabokov ever wanked out

Mind you, I appreciate all kinds of literature and art in general with an open mind and don't think YA or genreshit is inherently any lesser than anything

[Anonymous No.13563122]

>>13560857
Nabokov clearly liked pedophiles, he even wrote a book about one!
>>13563105
Absolute fucking brainlet. Nabby is god-tier. Easily in top 10 writers of all time.

[Anonymous No.13563139]

>>13560705
oh hey its this thread AGAIN

[Anonymous No.13563145]

>>13563122
>I have a high iq because i like da pretty words

you literally dont need a brain to "read" nabokov because there is literally nothing there. He writes pretty sentences and thats it. He does nothing experimental or interesting with any aspect of anything, his plots are less than basic and shit, his characters are one note caricatures and quite frankly nothing he did ever involved any imagination or wisdom he wanted to part. His vapidity and lack of soul is masked by the clatter of surgical tools polishing the sentences endlessly until you can go "hmph" at yet another sentence that flows well and leaves nothing to be desired. Reading the entirety of lolita leaves you with less than probably any one page of Crime and Punishment

[Anonymous No.13563154]

Why was Nabokov so pretentious? If someone on /lit/ talked like that I'd dismiss them instantly yet Nabokov is one of the foremost English prose stylists.

[Anonymous No.13563301]

>>13563145
Prose is one of the most important things in literature, and Nabby mastered that down to a T. If you can't see the beauty in what he wrote you are artistically illiterate.
>He does nothing experimental
Pic related.
>his plots are basic and shit
Clearly not. If you were not in agony at the end of Lolita you are a sociopath.
Also, anybody can sum up plots simplistically, look:
Crime and punishment: man kills old woman and, overwhelmed with guilt, does some stupid shit and ends up in prison
>one note caricatures
Would you like to expand on that? The only person that criticism applies to is the character of Lolita, but that's because she's a child.
>one page of Crime and Punishment
Crime and Punishment has some one-dimensional characters as well. Sonya is a typical timid/naive girl. Every time she's brought up it talks about how shy she is.
I liked it on the whole but a lot of it was a bore to get through. There must have been hundreds of pages where Raskolnikov walks around delirious and nothing comes of it. Then we are brought back to his little shack whereupon someone comes in concerned for him and the whole thing repeats itself again. Not to mention the endless dialogue of Russian people being polite to each other. There's not much philosophical wisdom to be gleaned from C&P either, despite what Dostoy enthusiasts might say. At the most we can say that guilt can really take a toll on the human mind and cause us to rupture our family ties and give ourselves away. Of course there are countless people who murder with psychological impunity, but we will be charitable and assume that the book isn't directed towards those people.

So yeah, there are some absolutely brilliant passages in Crime and Punishment but Nabokov is certainly a superior artist to Dostoyevsky.

[Anonymous No.13563306]

>>13563301
>pic related is "experimental" because it has flowery language

and heres a pic for you

[Anonymous No.13563323]

>>13563301
I haven't read Nabokov yet but Sonya was far from one-dimensional

[Anonymous No.13563360]

>>13563323
She absolutely was. She was on par with /lit/'s >tfw no __ gf memes. Dainty, submissive, timorous, kind, naive, she existed just to provide emotional support for Raskolnikov and be used as his verbal punching bag. When I read C&P I wondered if the feminists didn't have a point about female characters being given no depth.
>>13563306
It is the most experimental opening passage in all of literature. Most men would delete that instantly if they had wrote it for fear of it being seen as pretentious.

[Anonymous No.13563375]

>>13563360
>It is the most experimental opening passage in all of literature.
riverrun

[Anonymous No.13563378]

>>13563360
There is literally nothing "experimental" about Nabokovs shit. He doesnt play with story structure, he doesnt play with character, he doesnt play with literally anything, even the formatting is laughably simplistic and dry "big paragraph, big paragraph, big paragraph, big paragraph, big paragraph..."

All he does is flowery, wank sentences. It works for the opening of lolita and then he fails to live up to his own shit because he already showed his hand right there and it never gets any better, its all just empty wanking about look how pretty da sentences are!!1

[Anonymous No.13563424]

>>13563378
Humbert is a deep character and the situation between him and Lolita is very complex and heartrending. If you weren't left reeling in agony at the end you are simply not human.

[Anonymous No.13563430]

>>13563105
Prose and storytelling ARE substance.

[Anonymous No.13563435]

>>13563424
>Humbert is le deep because he is a pedo

yikes

[Anonymous No.13563441]

>>13560705

Please not this again. You can shit post Guenón, Deleuze and Evola all day - hell even the >Finnegans wake guy is fine - but this just angers me in ways I cannot describe.

[Anonymous No.13563541]

>>13563435
The story is about him coming to the realisation that he hurt her and despairing over it. "Humbert" is the pseudonym he chose for himself because he thought it expressed how pathetic and repugnant he was. He was disgusted by what he did to her.

>Unless it can be proven to me — to me as I am now, today, with my heart and my beard, and my putrefaction — that in the infinite run it does not matter a jot that a North American girl-child named Dolores Haze had been deprived of her childhood by a maniac, unless this can be proven (and if it can, then life is a joke), I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art.

"Articulate art" is what Humbert used to get over the tragedy with Lolita. That is the reason for the pretentious language. In this we see two things: (1) he is clearly hurt by the situation and (2) he is still a deeply egoistic and immoral person, trying to turn the situation into some sort of Shakespearean tragedy of which he is the protagonist, instead of acknowledging what he did to her and dealing with it in the real world.

It begins with him wanting Lolita simply because, as you say, he was a pedophile. But as the book progresses he begins to truly love her.

>Somewhere beyond Bill's shack an afterwork radio had begun singing of folly and fate, and there she was with her ruined looks and her adult, rope-veined narrow hands and her gooseflesh white arms, and her shallow ears, and her unkempt armpits, there she was (my Lolita!), hopelessly worn at seventeen, with that baby, dreaming already in her of becoming a big shot and retiring around 2020 a.d. — and I looked and looked at her, and knew as clearly as I know I am to die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth, or hoped for anywhere else.

His love for her is twisted and unnatural though. When he addresses her at the end his language is paternal. I won't post it here because some anon said he hasn't read the book, but we see in that end passage that the love he feels for her is romantic and fatherly but also egoistic. It's a very complex tangle with profound emotional implications and psychological insights which shouldn't be dismissed as simply a bunch of flowery words.

[Anonymous No.13563836]

>>13563154
Because you’re a conformist NPC in an age of vacuous irony where nothing and nobody serious is taken seriously. So if anyone seriously expressed an intelligent opinion on a serious work, without qualifying it with some sort of meta humor, your program would prompt you to tune them out and quip something so hilariously cynical.
Your conformism is the same reason you think “pretentious” is a valid criticism. The contemporary attitude is that art is totally subjective, and the high arts and the people who appreciate them and disdain, for instance, capeshit, are merely “pretentious” and only affect superiority. So Nabokov’s masterwork ouvre and high IQ takes viscerally repulse your programming.

[Anonymous No.13563848]

>>13563145
God you’re retarded.

[Anonymous No.13563892]

>>13560705
It would be nice if you understood Dostoevsky's approach to art, Nabokov's approach to art, public images they constructed, and how it all resulted in that critic instead of posting it once again.

Nabokov has a lot of quotes like those that are rarely posted. For example, his opinions on contemporary “political” critique and art (e.g. Soviet or Russian emigrant) can make a lot of modern activists whine and rage.

[Anonymous No.13563917]

Pretty much spot on

[Anonymous No.13563954]

>>13560705
Someone could easily make a decent chunk of change and a social statement making a remake of crime and punishment with a student loan addled young adult in a shit career with the desperation of a slave to his existence. It would be fucking perfect for this generation. I'm 100 pages into the idiot right now and I hope it gets as fucking good as that one.