Russian Literature vs. The World.

[Pompey Bum]

Well of course their ideas may have helped to establish that relevance, but why should that be cause for suspicion? It's clearly for a reason that certain ideas stuck while others didn't.

I don't really understand the question? What suspicion? Authors are sometimes taken as prescient because their ideas become relevant later. But this is a historical coincidence except insofar as their ideas may have helped to establish that relevance. I think we both agree on that. And we certainly agree that artistic greatness isn't some universal value that one can separate from the forces of history. So let's call it done and just be friends.

[mande2013]

I don't really understand the question? What suspicion? Authors are sometimes taken as prescient because their ideas become relevant later. But this is a historical coincidence except insofar as their ideas may have helped to establish that relevance. I think we both agree on that. And we certainly agree that artistic greatness isn't some universal value that one can separate from the forces of history. So let's call it done and just be friends.

Accepted !

[mande2013]

I know this thread is like a year old, but I just had another two cents to offer, regarding the 'hipness' of Nietzsche, Kafka, Dostoevsky et al. I think when 'we're' young, we seemingly have all the time in the world and are not as unsettled by the seeming 'nihilism' of such figures but as we get older and are faced with our own mortality we're more reluctant to contend with those kinds of ideas and would rather content ourselves with the more reassuring humanist impulses of Dickens, Tolstoy, Austen, etc. that allow us to forget about the more tragic aspects of the human condition which the likes of Kafka basked in. I know some will disagree, but that's just my two cents.

[ryanmurtha]

Gogol, Zoshchenko, Bulgakov, Chekov, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, some heavy hitters. And some hilarious ones. Zamyatin...