/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.14172167]

Is this shit worth reading?

[Anonymous No.14172170]

>>14172167
Please, I humbly beseech you, end your life and do it soon.

[Anonymous No.14172177]

>>14172167
Yes, it's in my top three, not that that means anything to you.

[Anonymous No.14172188]

Do you have a preferred translation?

[Anonymous No.14172215]

>>14172167
I'm about to start on it and was wondering the same.

[Anonymous No.14172783]

I just finished it this week. 3 months it took.

I really liked it, but I found the secondary characters hard to track and needed a cheat-sheet bookmark to remind me who was who.

Its excellent if you like historical drama and philosphy, and while its long, its very character driven and not super dense like Dusty’s books.

Go for it anon!

[Anonymous No.14172840]

>>14172167
Yes, Tolstoy was the best writer that lived. Dostoyevsky is bullshit compared to him.

[Anonymous No.14172858]

>>14172840
>Yes, Tolstoy was the best writer that lived.
>implying anything beats Goethe's Faust: Part II

[Anonymous No.14172877]

>>14172840
>that pic
Vidya pseud, same thing in MGS2.

[Anonymous No.14173260]

>>14172840
Dostoevsky is the best writer, pleb.
The image you posted doesn't have neither atheistic nor theistic implications, it is criticizing the modern usage of technology and how certain things related to it has replaced God (doesn't matter if he exists or not).
Just stop posting, brainlet.

[Anonymous No.14173316]

>>14173260
>Dostoevsky is the best writer, pleb.
it's ok i anon i was 16 once too

[Anonymous No.14173903]

>>14172167
It's only one of the greatest books ever written, but you have to have above a double-digit IQ in order to read it, so looks like you're out of luck.

[Anonymous No.14174324]

>>14173316
One couldn't understand Dosto properly below age ~18

[Anonymous No.14174335]

>>14172840
Dostoevsky writes Tolstoy under the table

[Anonymous No.14174337]

>>14173903
/thread

[Anonymous No.14174580]

>>14172167
War and Peace, more like Bore and Sleep

[Anonymous No.14174605]

while tolstoy is perfect from a technical perspective, dostoyevsky has more life and spirit.

[Anonymous No.14174636]

>>14174605
maybe him read before making a retarded post like this, pseud

[Anonymous No.14174656]

>>14174605
Every great writer is great in his own way, all bad writers are alike

[Anonymous No.14174662]

Don't go to /lit/ until you finished it unless you want to insult this community

[Anonymous No.14174754]

>>14173260
>>14173316
>>14174335
>>14174605
Dostoevsky is a boring rundown on outdated philosophical ideas for people too stupid to read actual philosophy. Tolstoy perfected the novel.

[Anonymous No.14174761]

>>14172167
Meh.

[Anonymous No.14174773]

>>14173260
>Just stop posting, brainlet

Stopped reading right there.

[Anonymous No.14174860]

My favorite novel of all time. For comparison in tastes, my other top literary works in no particular order are:

Brothers Karamazov
Madame Bovary
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Borges -(short stories)
Kafka - (short stories)
The Inferno
The Illiad (not the Odessy so much)
Catch 22
Brave New World
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Name of the Rose

I prefer it to Anna Karenina

[Anonymous No.14174876]

>>14174636
>>14174754
You know nothing. Your lives are hollow and meaningless. Your mother would laugh were she not weeping.

[Anonymous No.14174915]

>>14174773
Of course you did, that's at the very end of the post, you fucking retard.

[Anonymous No.14175130]

>>14172167
What is the best translation/version of pic related in english?

[Anonymous No.14175717]

>>14172858

Goethe tried to do many things at the same time and wasn’t very good in any of them. His poetic drama is nothing compared to Shakespeare or Aeschylus, and his lyrical poetry is extremely boring (mostly constructed with worn-out imagery and neoclassical moldy verbal furniture); there is nothing of a fiery imagination like the one we see on Blake or Dickinson. His novels don’t have the same real-life exactness one sees in the works of Tolstoy or Chekhov, not are they vast poetic monuments like Moby Dick. Above all: Goethe wasn’t a good creator of remarkable characters. Faust is mostly a voice for Goethes own ideas and philosophies, not an actual dramatic character. Büchner was a far greater dramatist than Goethe.

As for his scientific work, the only thing he achieved was the discovery of - human bone. His theory of colors insisted on a wrong view and it’s more art than science. His paintings and drawings don’t have anything remarkable and are similar to hundreds of other works from hundreds of other artists.

The real great German artist from the period was Beethoven. Is funny to think that he somehow saw himself as inferior, when he was one of the few human beings who truly deserved the title of genius in all of history (nowadays people call the likes of Bob Dylan, Hemingway, Steven Spielberg, Steve Jobs, Pollock, Picasso, Michael Jackson and others “geniuses” - it’s painful to see).

As for the Tolstoy and Dostoevsky controversy, is obvious to anyone who writes that to achieve what Tolstoy achieved demands a far greater knowledge of how people really are, a greater effort of imagination to place oneself inside the skin of all sorts of different characters (Dostoevsky was terrible at writing women, for example: it was always the same prototypes), an enormous capacity to organize a mass of information and weave it into narrative, a great sense of balance and control to sculpt the scenes of the novel, a great deal of self-restriction to prevent oneself to write enormous monologues through the mouths of the characters and deform conversation as conversation really is, and several other difficulties. Tolstoy is by far the greatest writer.

[Anonymous No.14175772]

>>14175717
>to achieve what Tolstoy achieved demands a far greater knowledge of how people really are
My sides
Dostoevsky is the one who encapsulates the human psyche perfectly, you pseud.
You have to go back.

[Anonymous No.14175786]

>>14172840
>brings Dostoevsky for no reason

RENT FREE

[Anonymous No.14175879]

the reason it's confusing anon is that tolstoy had 3 ghost writers while he would go on drunk orgy benders and they had an internal feud over the direction to take the story.

[Anonymous No.14175881]

>>14175772

You are confusing bloated psychological traits with actual truth. To insert several feverish dreams, mind tremors, anxiety attacks, symbolic dreams and other “profound” gestures is just a lazy way of trying to make your characters really human. To actually tell the truth requires more patience, more little touches, a constant attention to detail. You build your characters slowly, scene by scene. Using great semi-“poetic” speeches thundered among frenetic gestures is far easier to do.

[Anonymous No.14175911]

>>14175881
The simple truth is that Tolstoy's works are calm, cold and calculated and that Dostoevsky's are the most human exactly because of the way he writes. You are severely disconnected from your humanity and consider Dostoevsky's style bloated, you probably also think he's overdoing it on purpose and/or being cringy.
I can only pity people like you.

[Anonymous No.14175925]

>>14175717
>Goethe bad
>Beethoven good
>Hemingway bad
>Picasso bad
>Tolstoy > Dostojevski
3.5/5 – decent bait

[Anonymous No.14175932]

>>14172167
>worth
More than your life.

[Anonymous No.14175954]

>>14172167
No. It's well written but the subject matter is fucking boring. No reason to give a fuck.

[Anonymous No.14175957]

>>14175717
Do you have a goodreads I can follow?

[Anonymous No.14175978]

>>14175911

I honestly think you are defending yourself. I think that the kind of literature you write is somewhat similar or inspired by Dostoevsky. You feel you would never be capable of writing something like War and Peace, but something like Crime and Punishment... “well, maybe, if I work hard”. So in the end you are defending the kind of art that you see yourself capable of producing.

[Anonymous No.14175980]

>>14175957
imagine being baited into becoming a caricature.

imagine holding this much power of other human beings and being allowed to use it indiscriminately, shaping the entire world view of complete strangers with no accountability.


imagine a world where this isn't punishable by arduous torturous death because of the endless convolutions this type of hazardous action begets irrevocable social harm.

[Anonymous No.14176000]

>>14175925

Same thing with this guy. Defends what’s far easier to achieve because it is as if he were defending his own mediocrity. He can see himself writing like Hemingway or Dostoevsky, but never like Tolstoy. In a world where Picasso is considered a genius he might one day be called a genius, but he wouldn’t even know where to begin if he were to go and challenge someone as great as Beethoven (or Mozart, Bach, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Newton, Einstein).

[Anonymous No.14176005]

>>14175978
>this amount of strawmanning (and potentially projection)
Embarrassing

[Anonymous No.14176011]

>>14175980
I just want to see what books he reads so I can add some to my collection calm down

[Anonymous No.14176020]

>>14175957

No, I don’t. But if you want to laugh at me and call me a pleb I can tell you what my favorite book and writers are.

[Anonymous No.14176032]

>>14176020
I don't want to call you pleb I just want books you would recommend I read.

[Anonymous No.14176034]

>>14172188
this isn't the fucking bible or the odyssey, read whichever translation you can find first and just read it as quickly as possible. Jesus gtfo of lit read a fucking book retard.

[Anonymous No.14176063]

>>14176005

It was actually a compliment. That reason was more visceral and defensive, and not a simple failure to see how people really are and really behave.

A scene in his job, where Stiva Oblonsky, when he tells one of his employees that he is doing something wrong, and gently holds the forearm of the man, as if he was saying “look, I like you, there’s nothing wrong with you. Just correct this and all will be perfect. You are important to me” is far more telling (and hard to remember notice in real life, and hard to remember to use when you are on your table writing) than a feverish dream where you see the devil coming to talk to you.

[Anonymous No.14176404]

>>14175911
there is absolutely no way you could describe Tolstoy's novels as
>calm, cold and calculated
when he's probably the single best writer at capturing human emotion. Every 10 pages of Tolstoy I feel like he describes something I've always felt but never could put into words

[Anonymous No.14176513]

>>14175911
>The simple truth is that Tolstoy's works are calm, cold and calculated and that Dostoevsky's are the most human exactly because of the way he writes.

[Anonymous No.14176518]

tolstoy to me wrote majestically about beautiful things
dosto wrote beautiful things about the menacing and daunting

[Anonymous No.14176544]

>>14176518
you've never read any tolstoy in your life, have you?

[Anonymous No.14177020]

im almost fucking done. page 908 and im fucking dying. i want to finish soo badly lol.

[Anonymous No.14177185]

>>14175130 >>14176034

[Anonymous No.14177196]

>>14174580
Gottem!

[Anonymous No.14177259]

>>14175130
>>14172188
Maude

[Anonymous No.14177285]

>>14172167
>>14172215

Yes

[Anonymous No.14177289]

>>14176544
Tolstoy makes death and suicide almost beautiful in AK. He made infidelity seem almost excusable (at first) in the same novel. He can make the grim seem rather pleasant
Dosto puts you in the trenches and when you think it's almost over he shines God's light on his characters

[Anonymous No.14177478]

>>14177289
Do I read War and Peace or Anna Karenin first?

[Anonymous No.14178055]

>>14177478
War and Peace

[Anonymous No.14178068]

>>14177020
>im almost fucking done. page 908
idk about yours but my edition has like 1600 pages

[Anonymous No.14178261]

>>14176000
>Ever comparing Beethoven and Mozart to Bach)
Please, never comment on classical music without an education in it.
T. the guy you’re replying to

[Anonymous No.14178962]

>>14178261

There was a poll made on a book (I think the name of the book was Human Accomplishment) where several musicians and music historians were interviewed and Mozart and Beethoven ranked slightly above Bach. Not saying that one is better than the other, but there are a lot of important musicians that talk very highly of Beethoven. You can see from Bernstein classes that he seems to held Beethoven as the greatest composer of all time.

[Anonymous No.14179566]

>>14178261

[Anonymous No.14180326]

>>14178261
Retarded pseud detected

[Anonymous No.14180334]

>>14178261
I'm a professional musician and it's perfectly acceptable to compare Beethoven to Mozart or Bach.

[Anonymous No.14180540]

>>14172167
Not that fucking translation, fuck those two. Their Anna Karenina isn't awful, but if you want War and Peace, pick up the Maude translation. It's wonderful. Tolstoy is a god among men.

[Anonymous No.14182015]

>>14178068
wtf, post image. my edition is OP's image and it's 1215.

[Anonymous No.14182166]

>>14172167
I'm about 850 pages into the book. It's very good, albeit a little too long in parts. I can say it's worth the read.