Russian authors

[Darcy88]

I'm not sure why I neglected to mention Chekhov in my prior post in this thread. He really is a master. His short stories are artistic masterpieces.

[neilgee]

I felt the same way about Brothers Karamazov. It's often touted as his greatest work but it just did nothing for me. Every now and then I consider rereading it, to see if something will click on a second read but I can never muster up the motivation.

Idril, you seem to be the only poster I didn't reply directly to and yet you're the only one to reply! You obviously know your Dosteyevsky so well that I felt out of depth replying directly to you, I couldn't add to anything you said (that is a compliment as well as my excuse) and regarding the Karamazov brothers novel you are bang on for me, I'm glad i'm not the only one to feel that way about TBK.

[bIGwIRE]

I felt the same way about Brothers Karamazov. It's often touted as his greatest work but it just did nothing for me. Every now and then I consider rereading it, to see if something will click on a second read but I can never muster up the motivation.

Which translation did you read? I know it is a minor difference, but it is a difference. The first time I read Karamazov it was the Constance Garnett translation. The second time I read the Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky dual translation. I did enjoy the Peaver/Volokhonsky alot more. They seemed to ponder over how to preserve the "Russian" flavor in the english text more than Garnett.

After reading Karamazov the first time, the novel became a touchstone for me, measuring all I read against it. For many years I would have touted it as the greatest novel ever writen, certainly my favorite. Even today, its in the top twenty for me. Everything Dostoevsky wrote is in my barrister, many in several translations.

He lived such a tragic real life. Who else could write the epileptic fits of Smerdyakov, except an epileptic? Who could write the consuming addictions of Dimitri without wrestling with them himself? (Dostoevsky was a reported gambling addict, often losing money his young family needed) I love how every one of his characters, no matter how nobel, has a base, human element they can't escape.

I only wish that he hadn't died before he finished his work. Karamazov was supposed to be a trilogy.

[bIGwIRE]

With Dostoevsky, you are right smack dab in the middle of it, you are caught in the vice, it's hard to remove yourself from it, it simply gets inside your head. I am much more likely to reread Tolstoy than Dostoevsky simply because reading Dostoevsky is such an intense psychological experience, at least it is for me, I have to be in the right mood and I have to be in a really good place emotionally or he will put me in a very bad place.

I agree. Dostoevsky is a big emotional investment that you need some time to digest. His novels also leave me wrecked and gutted.

[bIGwIRE]

If you pick up a Tolstoy book looking for a Dostoevskyan experience, you're going to be disappointed and the opposite is true as well. I find Tolstoy to be more readable, and by that I mean the flow of his prose is a little more smooth and natural, whereas Dostoevsky is a little more work. I can fly right through Tolstoy, I finished War and Peace much quicker than it takes me to read a book a fourth of it's size. Tolstoy tells these wonderful stories, you are more of an observer to his tragedies and triumphs, there is an emotional distance.

For example, compare Tolstoy's The Cossacks to Gogol's Taras Bulba. Tolstoy's is so accurate, almost to the point of being sterile. You can learn alot about the iconic Cossack from Tolstoy, despite emotional distance.

However, Gogol wrote in Taras Bulba how the Cossacks would make a raid, bury the treasure by the river, and wake up after the party forgetting where their treasure was, or that they even had one.
To me, this tells us more about the Cossack spirit in just a few words than Tolstoy does in his whole novella.

[Darcy88]

Great thread, I'm struck into a response by so many of the comments on here that I can't use quotations (there would be too many) but Darcy's post which really started it off is interesting because I hope he isn't disappointed when he finally gets to the Karamazov novel. I was. It's a very slow novel, takes time to build up, and after all that (I too took the recommendations very seriously) I thought it didn't quite deliver. Maybe something gets lost in translation on this one, but i thought Crime and Punishment was a better, more timeless work, and Underground Man for that matter.

I really wouldn't wait any longer to read it, loved your analogy about the lover you're a little afraid of, but sometimes (infact often) a fantasy of a lover doesn't live up to the reality and you don't want to wait until you're dying thinking that novel is your consolation and then it lets you down.

And if you do love it as much as you expect to well reading it now will leave you longer to savour the experience and maybe even reread.

As Gurgle implies Soljenitsyn (spelling) is simply brilliant. Cancer Ward is the tale of how he gets out of Stalin's camps because he gets the disease, (it is a direct sequel to his first novel which is a description of life in the camps) while he is in convalescence Stalin dies, he recovers and is released, the description of how he walks the streets and buys food from a street vendor, you really live those first moments of freedom moment by moment with him, extraordinary writing, extraordinary author.

Djameson agree about Ivan Ilyich, did that at Uni and it took the classes' breath away, but never got around to War and Peace, guess I understand Darcy in that respect.

Agree with Charles Darney that Fathers and sons is Turgenev's great novel, I read that several times as part of my degree and it does stand up to the rereading (always the acid test for a great novel, I think).

And Crusoe mentions my favorite Russian novel of them all: The Master and Margarita written in the following century like Soljenitsyn (The emphasis in Russian lit critisism often focuses on the 19th C but there were some great writers in the 20th C too) such a funny book, and what happened to Bulgakov - the personal interventions by Stalin in his career - make him a fascinating author, and in the tradition of great Russian wives Bulgakov's widow risked imprisonment by hiding the manuscript of the Margarita novel for years in a drawer at home after Bulgakov died until things changed after Stalin died too, think it was finally published in the 1960s, although some versions are still censored.

Other Russian novels I loved are Oblomov and Hope against Hope.

If Karamazov lets me down I will cry and then in an act of shrieking desperation cut off all my hair again or do nothing but listen to Lou Reed alone in my room under a blanket rocking back and forth, chain-smoking. I am depending on that book. I have idealized it in my mind, like the hypothetical woman I mentioned before. To me it is a chest I have yet to open, one that's old looking, that just has about it an aura of age and wisdom. I have read the first 200 pages of Karamazov and like you I was not impressed. I am just hoping there's something in the climax to reaffirm my faith in literature and human-kind. The Idiot and The Devils and Crime and Punishment and The Underground Man all irrevocably changed me as a thinker and a man. Especially the Idiot. I am a sort of idiot and so that book really spoke to me on a deep level.

Right now I am mostly reading about war. War is my distraction from heartbreak. Albert Camus once put on a play of Karamazov. I'd like to do the same with the underground man. Make it into a movie starring myself. There are times when I really am that character, when I literally am the Underground Man.

I think Dostoevsky must have suffered much or knew much about suffering. They say he studied insane people. To write so broadly of the human soul he must have experienced both sides, bright and black, healthy and sick. I really wish I could go back and talk to the man. I really think he was not only one of the greatest writers but also greatest thinkers in Western history.

I put him right alongside Homer. I put him above Nietzsche - far, far above. Rating authors thusly is a fruitless exercise but I know of no other way to express how much I prize the works of that amazing Russian novelist.

War and Peace is on my shelf and its one I am going to read soon. I've been eyeing it up for years and it will soon be time.

[Adolescent09]

I'm not going to embellish on my perspective of the few but renowned Russian writers I've read simply because there are scholars here who far exceed my knowledge of Russian literature. I did have the pleasure however of meeting a Russian woman whose name escapes me atm that wrote an essay on Dostoevsky's The Idiot that is longer than the book itself. She went into copious detail about what the characters in the novel portend; all the way from the heroic Prince Myshkin to the less significant side characters like Draya Alexevna.

I read the book years ago and I remember that it contributed to me doing something drastic on these forums that got me hospitalized and placed on antipsychotic meds.

I must say though that I politely disagree with the poster who claimed that Karamzov is a slow-paced novel that takes time to build up. I was hooked from the first page to the very last... especially The Grand Inquisitor and Ivan's demonic dreams, pure genius..

[Darcy88]

I read the book years ago and I remember that it contributed to me doing something drastic on these forums that got me hospitalized and placed on antipsychotic meds.

We poets are deep feeling and thinking people. We are very expressive. We say things that others do not understand. Metaphor and figurative language are often misunderstood by the members of the mass herd.

Unless a person is actually at a risk to harm themselves or others, but people are quick to make that assumption given a badly thought-up phrase taken too literally.

I have nothing against antipsychotic meds, they can work miracles, but they are over-prescribed. Artists act weird sometimes and then the uppity bourgeois narks freak out and try to have us hospitalized. Doesn't matter if we are peaceful people and hurting someone else is the last thing we could possibly do.....they will take us down if given a chance.

The ones who advance culture, however harmless, often appear dangerous to lesser minds.

[djameson]

I just find it very hard to compare the two. They are two very different authors and reading their respective works are very different experiences. If you pick up a Tolstoy book looking for a Dostoevskyan experience, you're going to be disappointed and the opposite is true as well. I find Tolstoy to be more readable, and by that I mean the flow of his prose is a little more smooth and natural, whereas Dostoevsky is a little more work. I can fly right through Tolstoy, I finished War and Peace much quicker than it takes me to read a book a fourth of it's size. Dostoesvky takes a little more thought and time and I think because of that, you feel a more invested, his work is always provocative and challenging and personal, for lack of a better word. Tolstoy tells these wonderful stories, you are more of an observer to his tragedies and triumphs, there is an emotional distance. With Dostoevsky, you are right smack dab in the middle of it, you are caught in the vice, it's hard to remove yourself from it, it simply gets inside your head. I am much more likely to reread Tolstoy than Dostoevsky simply because reading Dostoevsky is such an intense psychological experience, at least it is for me, I have to be in the right mood and I have to be in a really good place emotionally or he will put me in a very bad place. Although, I have to say, The Possessed is a book of his I can reread without feeling overwhelmed and his short stories.

And on that note, Tolstoy writes some amazing short stories. I think his style of writing lends itself very well to that genre whereas Dostoevsky's doesn't. Not that he hasn't written some brilliant stories but I find them a little more 'clunky' than Tolstoy's.

Thank you for this thoughtful reply. I believe you are correct about the respective styles of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky leading to fantastic short stories from the former and, well, less fantastic ones from Dostoevsky. As for War and Peace, I don't know why I've never really been able to manage it. I've made a start of it thrice now, but every time I've bogged in the first 50-70 pages. The first and second times I felt rather bad about it, since I so love his other work, but now I'm just resigned, you might say, to the fact that I'll most likely not ever finish that great work.

[neilgee]

If Karamazov lets me down I will cry and then in an act of shrieking desperation cut off all my hair again or do nothing but listen to Lou Reed alone in my room under a blanket rocking back and forth, chain-smoking. I am depending on that book. I have idealized it in my mind, like the hypothetical woman I mentioned before. To me it is a chest I have yet to open, one that's old looking, that just has about it an aura of age and wisdom. I have read the first 200 pages of Karamazov and like you I was not impressed. I am just hoping there's something in the climax to reaffirm my faith in literature and human-kind. The Idiot and The Devils and Crime and Punishment and The Underground Man all irrevocably changed me as a thinker and a man. Especially the Idiot. I am a sort of idiot and so that book really spoke to me on a deep level.

Whoops, sorry Darcy, I didn't think you would take it so hard. I'm glad there are other, more positive views of the book on here to give you hope, although if you have already tried and couldn't get into it (I didn't realise you had already read 200 pages of it, just got the impression that the book was untouched by you, maybe it was that brilliant comparison to the abstained from, ideal lover) then maybe it's not the best Doysteyevsky novel from your point of view.

There's nothing wrong with that, why place so much hope in that particular novel?

Just because literary 'experts' largely come down in favour of this as one of his best, or the best, doesn't mean you have to conform automatically. Have the courage of your own opinions and feelings! Trust yourself.

Literature is always subjective, for example I couldn't get into The Idiot at all, and the more I read the worse it got. It was a book of the month on another forum and the discussion backed up what I'd always heard about that novel, that you either love it or hate it. There wasn't one person who read that bom who didn't have an extreme view, nobody but nobody was indifferent to the book.

This has been a brilliant thread that has restored my faith in literature forums, for now.

Thank you all who have contributed.

[The Truth]

Any fans of Kharms? I always found his work to be delightfully original and pretty relatable if you're an author.

[bazarov]

Some interesting views, I must say.

[Raven Falcon.]

I've never been able to plunge deep into the jungle of his writing. His prose is unpolished, his interest in environmental description is measly, and his characters are too unflagging.

I base this on The Brother Karamazov.

[The Kid]

The only Russian author whose work I've read is Tolstoy. He is brilliant.

I don't usually read others because of the language barrier. Does anyone else worry that literature becomes corrupted when translated into other languages? I don't know Russian, so I'm hoping the English translations don't rub away some of the gold from Tolstoy's work. I know that some books I have read in Spanish are not the same in English and so this worries me and I have become very cautious when it comes to translations.

[Raven Falcon.]

The only Russian author whose work I've read is Tolstoy. He is brilliant.

I don't usually read others because of the language barrier. Does anyone else worry that literature becomes corrupted when translated into other languages? I don't know Russian, so I'm hoping the English translations don't rub away some of the gold from Tolstoy's work. I know that some books I have read in Spanish are not the same in English and so this worries me and I have become very cautious when it comes to translations.

Try Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky's translation for both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky's works.