Why are Russians such good writers??

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Anonymous Fri Dec 22 05:32:24 2023 No.22856848 [Reply] [Original]

Why are Russians such good writers??

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 22 05:33:50 2023 No.22856854 What do you mean why? Why wouldn't they be good?

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 22 05:34:03 2023 No.22856855 No non-whites to mess with their collective consciousness.

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 22 05:34:56 2023 No.22856857 >>22856854 They seem to put out more classics than the rest of Europe combined.

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 22 05:35:24 2023 No.22856858 they let their country control their mind

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 22 05:37:51 2023 No.22856868 >>22856855 Pushkin was non-white. Stop the /pol/ schizophrenia.

Anonymous Fri Dec 22 05:40:46 2023 No.22856876

>>22856848

The Russians, being seperated from the west, developed their own culture. There is something deeply religious and ponderous, probably because their country is so inhospitable. Nabokov called it the "Russian Spirit."

In terms of Quality and quantity, the few years that Russians were making literature (Soviet Union censored anything decent enough to seen on the world stage. Two Russian were nominated for the Nobel Literary prize but they both had left the state to avoid the censorship), they are unrivaled. Its baffling how they did it, and I'd like anyone's theories if they have something.

even their films are incredible. Andrei Tarkovsky for example, who was allowed to create in a time where censorship wasn't so harsh.

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 22 05:42:17 2023 No.22856881 >>22856848 Good writing requires suffering and Russians suffered horrendously under communism.

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 22 05:44:17 2023 No.22856887 >>22856881 what post-soviet literature have you read that was any good? Any decent Russian authors post-1920 were emigres.

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 22 05:45:25 2023 No.22856892 >>22856857 All the best Europeans left for America. The only people left there come from a genetic line of lazy cowards that refused to travel to the new world.

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 22 05:46:25 2023 No.22856894 >>22856892 America has produced one notable author, and that was Hemingway.

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 22 05:47:08 2023 No.22856897 >>22856887 Vasily Grossman

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 22 05:48:04 2023 No.22856900 >>22856894 Poe or Dickenson? Lovecraft sucks but he's relevant and interesting.

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 22 05:48:17 2023 No.22856901 >>22856894 Just one? Not true, and Faulkner is better.

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 22 05:49:21 2023 No.22856905 >>22856901 Bullshit.

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 22 06:08:27 2023 No.22856951 It's clear that Russian literature tends to produce a powerfully dense result when translated to English, and this is a key factor in the popularity of the Russian novel.

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 22 06:11:03 2023 No.22856959 >>22856951 This is true. And it all started with Constance Garnett. She fell in love with a Russian guy, learned some Russian and started translating the great Russian writers. There's more to this story but I remember I read an article about it.

Anonymous Fri Dec 22 07:21:52 2023 No.22857084

>>22856848
>Pushkin
Father of Russian modern language, great with form - empty in essence. Now just boring to read
>Gogol
Great, just great. His comedy still actual.
>Turgenev
Was considered to be titled as best writer of his time, but was overshone by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Never read his "Fathers and Sons", but had volume of Ivan Turgenev “Sketches From a Hunter’s Album” - it was unbearable boring to read.
>Dostoevsky
Didn't liked his literature in childhood - disgusting style, disgusting plot, disgusting characters, pathetic christcuckery of orthodox desire to martyr. But now i realize that he was right in many ways and people are just as vile as he wrote, Dostoevsky saw through and wrote as is.
>Tolstoy
Loved his War and Peace in childhood, style was great, but with year i realize that Tolstoy was degenerate and his pacifist views had given nothing but suffering to people following him.
>Chekhov
I considered him the best Russian writer of 19th century. Just the best. His short stories filled with true tragedy that made me cry and comedy that put me to laugher, he always showed world and people as is, without bullshit ideas of "Christian Russian destiny" or Tolstoy "pureness and kindness of simple people". Also - he answered to view of Tolstoy in Ward number 6 and life showed that Checkov was right - you cannot life in peace, build a world inside of you - world outside fuck you up without mercy.
>Bunin
Missed him completely.
>Nabokov
Hack, that had risen on boldness of his critique lectures and épatage.
>Bulgakov
The best Russian writer of 20th century.
>Solzhenitsyn
I wasn't empresses by his One day of Ivan Denisovich and found Cancer Ward as something boring, so i missed The Gulag Archipelago, just as i'd missed Kolyma Tales by Varlam Shalamov
But more i study history that is unbearable in vileness, more i realize that this work should been - Just should been and everyone should read them. You may not like it, but you need just to see, you need as society to get vax of this evil - so you could say "NEVER AGAIN".

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 22 07:25:27 2023 No.22857092 >>22857084 >Now just boring to read I had a blast with Eugene Onegin (Falen tr.).

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 22 08:11:34 2023 No.22857169 >>22857084 Wow /lit/ poster who really read this shit

Anonymous Fri Dec 22 08:20:32 2023 No.22857182

>>22857084
>But more i study history that is unbearable in vileness, more i realize that this work should been - Just should been and everyone should read them. You may not like it, but you need just to see, you need as society to get vax of this evil - so you could say "NEVER AGAIN".
It’s annoying that most Russians are still Stalin worshipers, the GULAG is now just the FSIN, the KGB=the FSB, and the country is run by a KGB agent?

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 22 08:32:55 2023 No.22857199 >>22857182 yea it is kinda annoying

Anonymous Fri Dec 22 12:35:11 2023 No.22857565

>>22856848
>Larger population than anyone else in Europe (even with demographic collapse, Russia today has 140 million people, and Russia historically held Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, the Baltics, Finland, Poland, etc.

>Thus, even though it was poor and backwards the absolute number of wealthy intellegentsia capable of producing and enjoying literature was comparable with other major European powers.

>Unique outlook due to both backwardness and the different traditions of Orthodoxy makes their literature uniquely appealing.

>Fiction became the main route for expression, philosophy never took hold the same way as in the West.

>Continual influx of new ideas due to continual waves of colonization leading to a large mix of Germans, other Slavs, Jews, etc. in Russia as well as Central Asian and Ottoman influenced makes for a fertile blend.

>Historically, being a colonial power in Europe allows them to claim non-Russians as part of their tradition in a way most other countries can't.

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 22 12:36:26 2023 No.22857567 >>22856887 Victor Pelevin is pretty good. I didn't like the werewolf one as much, but Homo Zapiens and the Helmet of Horror are cool. Reminds me of Marquez and Borges a bit, but also Russian.

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 22 12:37:17 2023 No.22857570 beautiful girls surround them is a great motivation

Anonymous Fri Dec 22 12:42:35 2023 No.22857580

>>22856894
Falkner, Melville, Morrison, Twain, Hawthorne, Poe, Eliot, Nabakov, McCarthy, Whitman, William James, Dewy, Rawls, C.S. Peirce, Emerson, Quine, Nozik, Putnam, Kirpke, Kuhn.

The overwhelming number of "big names," in philosophy since WWII (or even WWI) have been Americans. There are some non-Americans, e.g. Carnap, but most who seem like they will become "great names" are American. This is true in scientific theory as well to some extent (Shannon, Wheeler, etc.). Maths too.

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 22 12:45:27 2023 No.22857586 >>22857169 an achievement on this board indeed which lets one get away with superficial opinions

Anonymous Fri Dec 22 12:55:23 2023 No.22857599

>>22857182
Year after year, Russians still vote Stalin the greatest Russian in history. Lenin has always been second. The highest ranking woman is Catherine the great.

The greatest people in Russian history then are a Georgian, a Jew, and a German, all of whom had disdain for Russians. Truly comic.

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 22 13:02:36 2023 No.22857625 >Gogol is a Russian writer because he wrote in Russian. Ethnicity doesn't matter! >Nabokov is a Russian writer because he was Russian, language doesn't matter!

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 22 13:27:47 2023 No.22857690 >>22857625 gogol isnt russian because he wrote in russian. He is russian because if you read his works youll see his patriotism for russia particularly

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 22 13:53:13 2023 No.22857749 >>22857625 > What is 'Mary', 'King, Queen, Knave', 'The Defence', 'The Eye', 'Glory', 'Laughter in the Dark', 'Despair', 'Invitation to a Beheading', 'The Gift' and 'The Enchanter'?

Anonymous Fri Dec 22 13:56:02 2023 No.22857753

>>22857625
Nabokov also wrote in Russian though, and some of the later books he wrote in English like Lolita also have russian version by himself. It makes sense to include him in both American (or english language) and Russian literature. Same thing as Beckett often also being considered a part of anglo literature when he also wrote in French, he belongs to both literatures.
>>22857565
What population collapse? Their population now it's roughly the same as the RSFSR had before the Soviet Union collapsed, you could said the population stagnated but there was no demographic collapse.

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 22 13:58:07 2023 No.22857759 >>22856881 the overwhelming majority of russian classics are pre revolution, what?

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 22 14:22:30 2023 No.22857802 >>22857084 Pushkin reads so different in Russian it's almost impossible to describe. Which is a shame because IMO he was like the von Neumann of literature. Certainly would have been if he lived longer.

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 22 14:29:40 2023 No.22857819 >>22856848 Mostly based but Dosto understands language like a mediocre TV script writer

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 22 14:32:06 2023 No.22857824 >>22857580 >Nabokov >produced in America ??? He immigrated there in his 40s.

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 22 14:33:07 2023 No.22857830 >>22857625 Are you retarded? Nabokov wrote in Russian, too.

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 22 14:42:56 2023 No.22857859 >>22856848 Orthodox Christian intellectual influence, strong education system and passion for literature.

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 22 14:46:07 2023 No.22857870 >>22856894 Hemingway was a hack, midwit writer. This anon >>22857580 highlights our actual great writers and thinkers.

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 22 14:50:20 2023 No.22857878 >>22857824 >>22857830 Nabokov is a God-tier cosmopolitan >>22857870 >Hemingcuck was a hack, midwit writer. Based form-pilled take.

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 22 14:52:24 2023 No.22857882 >>22857870 Keep your Jewish "thinkers", mate. I prefer to read Pound and other actual literature.

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 22 15:39:43 2023 No.22857962 File: 376 KB, 723x596, image.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >ctrl+f andreyev >not a single result

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 22 17:57:16 2023 No.22858301 Where you find shitty weather, you find good writers. Except Canada. That place sucks.

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 22 18:03:11 2023 No.22858319 >>22858301 Shitty weather? Russia has the best weather on the planet. Using your logic, the United Emirates would've had a spectacular arsenal of writers

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 22 18:03:54 2023 No.22858325 >>22856848 I feel like they are more top heavy

Anonymous Fri Dec 22 18:16:56 2023 No.22858373
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>>22856894
Hart Crane
Frank Stanford
Thomas Wolfe
Charles Olson
TS Eliot
Robert Creeley
Pynchon
Washington Irving
William Cullen Bryant
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
James Russell Lowell
Walt Whitman
Henry Miller
H. Thompson
Frank O’Hara
Charles Bukowski
James Fenimore Cooper
Charles Brockden Brown
William Gilmore Simms
Herman Melville
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Henry James
Mark Twain
E. A. Poe
Alan Dugan
William Carlos Williams
Robert Frost
W. Faulkner
Cormac McCarthy
J. London
Toni Morrison
Carson McCullers
Ambrose Bierce
James Baldwin
John Ashbery
Vonnegut
William Carlos Williams
Wallace Stevens
Robert Bly
Tennessee Williams
Marianne Hauser
Philip Roth
Don DeLillo
Arthur Miller
Robert Duncan
Emerson
Thoreau
Alfred Starr Hamilton
William Gass
Hemingway
Fitzgerald
Marianne Moore
Ezra Pound
Robert Lowell
H.D.
Louis Zukofsky
James Schuyler
flannery o'connor
Truman Capote
PKD
David Markson
Gertrude Stein
Emily Dickinson
George Oppen
Langston Hughes
Anne Sexton
Sylvia Plath
Elizabeth Bishop
Adrienne Rich
James Merrill
James Purdy
John Knowles
William Gaddis
Frederick Exley
Donald Barthelme
Richard Brautigan
Steinbeck
Gabrielle Burton
William Lindsay Gresham
Updike
Lewis Sinclair
Upton Sinclair
Malamud
Robinson Jeffers
Walter Abish
Jonathan Edwards
David Foster Wallace
John Kennedy Toole
Durant
Vollman

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 22 18:37:11 2023 No.22858422 >>22857567 I read Omon Ra recently and I thought it was shit.

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 22 18:39:13 2023 No.22858428 The Strugatsky brothers deserve a mention as well. I love Roadside Picnic and the Noon books.

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 22 18:47:36 2023 No.22858456 >>22856848 they must be white then

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 22 18:50:49 2023 No.22858467 >>22856894 David Foster Wallace would like a word.

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 22 18:52:32 2023 No.22858474 >>22856848 >No Platonov Nigger

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 22 18:53:59 2023 No.22858477 >>22857084 Thoughts on Grossmann, Paustovsky, Lermontov, Solovyev and Platonov?

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 22 19:12:05 2023 No.22858538 >>22857084 >Gogol Maybe it was just the translation I was reading but Gogol's humor reminds me of college improv.

Anonymous Fri Dec 22 19:24:25 2023 No.22858579

>>22857580
Claude Shannon is probably a sleeper for being seen the way Einstein is in another 75 years. It's hard to think of any individual who more profoundly has effected both all the sciences, the way philosophy is done, and the way we live our lives. By the time the "information revolution," is taught in history books he will be "the guy." This is especially true since the other big paradigm shifts, complexity studies and chaos theory, don't have any one obvious "father," in the same way that information theory does. You have Wiener, Mandlebrot, etc., but it's more a big cast. Plus it's information theory that connects everything from linguistics to economics to astronomy to biology to particle physics under one methodology.

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 22 20:01:32 2023 No.22858695 >>22856855 The fuck are you talking about? When these Russian authors were writing, Western Europe was 100% white, while the Russian empire contained hordes of Asiatics and brown people. So precisely the opposite of what you're making it out to be.

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 22 20:02:53 2023 No.22858697 >>22857759 They suffered a whole lot before communism too

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 22 20:32:19 2023 No.22858780 >>22856848 Because russians have all the good qualities of great writers AND all the bad ones.

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 23 04:05:12 2023 No.22860090 >>22856848 I havent read the Russians. Are they really worth reading? and what would be a good book to start with?

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 23 04:23:01 2023 No.22860140 File: 109 KB, 941x1021, 1701791415273680.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>22858373 >Bukowski

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 23 05:28:39 2023 No.22860280 >>22856848 >Be Russian in the 18-20th centuries >Middle class, lucky enough to dodge serfdom/collectivization >Only options in life are to become a government bureaucrat, solider, or writer

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 23 05:35:12 2023 No.22860297 >>22858695 >Western Europe was 100% white False. Sub-Saharan Africans have been residing in Europe since at least the Renaissance. https://www.blackpast.org/global-african-history/black-presence-pre-20th-century-europe-hidden-history/

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 23 06:11:35 2023 No.22860367 >>22856848 cold nothing to do

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 23 07:18:37 2023 No.22860521 Are modern russian writers any good?

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 23 07:34:19 2023 No.22860549 File: 167 KB, 625x1000, 81Boe3f18aL._AC_UF894,1000_QL80_.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>22860521 I only know Vladimir Sorokin, who writes these surreal/bizarre sci-fi novels or whatever but /lit/ seems to hate him.

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 23 11:05:03 2023 No.22861014 >>22856855 Slavs also have the most Yamnaya and Scythian dna

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 23 11:06:41 2023 No.22861018 >>22858373 How do people even know John Knowles? Where did you read him?

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 23 11:12:26 2023 No.22861029 >>22857962 ahem, it is "Andrejeff"

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 23 12:24:24 2023 No.22861155 >>22856887 Sorokin

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 23 12:26:58 2023 No.22861159 >>22860549 /lit/ hates everyone

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 23 12:32:58 2023 No.22861176 >>22856848 They are not particularly good writers, they are just strong in numbers. There are as many russians as there are brits, frenchmen and italians combined. If we just compare per capita outputs, then it's nothing special.

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/lit/ - Literature