WyattGwon-Who's best threads are tiresome. This one attains great heights of silliness. Proust (massively trivial) a better novelist than Tolstoy? Please! Seriously comparing Flaubert with Dostoyevsky? (putting aside the insurmountable apples and oranges thing) Yeah right. (To JBI: perfection is overrated and a pretty cheap aspiration; If you want a perfect French novel, Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris—or Les Miserables—is a better choice.) Has no one recognized Kafka's debt to Gogol and Dostoyevsky? If you are talking about Goethe, why Werther and Elective Infinities (snore) instead of Wilhelm Meister?
Anyway, Russia and France produced lots of great literature and I see no point in this exasperating comparative rating game.
Bely, Aksyanov, Bunin, Babel, Platonov, Nabokov, Grossman? Bulgakov was mentioned at least, if not well appreciated.
JBI-Thank you for your comments, however ridiculous and self centered.
You seem to be of the mind that only authors passing your approval, or writers you like are worth mentioning, and we are all fools for only slightly and not over-praisingly mentioning Balgakov and the like, so I will say, do I need to say more? Your argument speaks to the maturity and seriousness, as well as the respect your opinion seems to hold for others. At least you could have mentioned something about the texts besides the essential quality they have of you liking them (which, by the way, is irrelevant to anybody else).
As for these types of threads being tiresome, I agree with you wholeheartedly - however, you fueling them with statements of everyone is wrong but me, and "this author is better because I say he is" doesn't quite do anything that isn't tiresome either.
I'm pretty much in agreement with JBI here. Proust is massively trivial why? Because you don't like him. Because there are no great battle scene? No car chases and explosions? Impressionism stands as one of the great movements in the whole of art in spite of the fact that the subject matter was largely "tivial": paintings of flowers, still-life, landscapes, friends and family of the artists, Paris nightlife, ballerinas... Flaubert and the whole of perfectionism is overrated why? Again because you say so? And "seriously"... The Hunchback of Notre Dame or Les Miserables as a better example of "perfection"? I can't think of a critic who hasn't suggested that either novel would have greatly benefited from some serious editing. As much as I like both books, they are great, imperfect, sprawling masterworks laden with unnecessary digressions ala Don Quixote. As for Gogol's influence upon Kafka... it is possible, but I can't remember coming across his name in any of Kafka's notebooks. How well translated was Gogol at the time? The obvious influences include The Bible and various Jewish narratives including Yiddish folk tales, Don Quixote, Goethe, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Flaubert, Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Darwin... all mentioned in his notebooks.
Again... I quite like a lot of Russian literature... but the comparative thing is ridiculous... especially when it is based on little more than what the individual likes... and more often than not is based on a limited reading experience... not even having read many of the major works of a culture that one is dismissing as "minor".