Russian Literature vs. The World.

[phillipgr]

I've often pondered the reason why Russian Literature is so prominent on the stage of world literature. I do not wonder on account of not think it worthy of such acclimation, rather, I just wonder what has made way for it to produce the masterpieces (some would say they perfected the novel) it is known for - when many other countries/languages haven't been as successful.

Now this obviously this is just my perspective and I am not formally qualified in world literature, or anything of the like, I just have a keen interest.

I wonder if anyone can enlighten me?

[mal4mac]

I've often pondered the reason why Russian Literature is so prominent on the stage of world literature. I do not wonder on account of not think it worthy of such acclimation, rather, I just wonder what has made way for it to produce the masterpieces (some would say they perfected the novel) it is known for - when many other countries/languages haven't been as successful.

Now this obviously this is just my perspective and I am not formally qualified in world literature, or anything of the like, I just have a keen interest.

I wonder if anyone can enlighten me?

Tolstoy had to be born somewhere! The Russians were just lucky enough to get him. Read a biography of Tolstoy and and it may give some indication as why he was so great - he was lucky to to be born into the aristocracy, had some good tutors, extensive military experience, mixed with 'the right' intellectuals, and spent a lot of time with the peasantry on his estate. So he achieved a remarkable broadness of experience, and was lucky enough to be a really talented writer. There are other great Russian writers of course, who had similar advantages, but I think Tolstoy takes first place.

But, anyway, I think your thesis is wrong. An equal case could be made for several other countries, e.g., Britain, France, and Germany (Shakespeare, Dickens, Goethe, Schopenhauer, Montaigne, Zola...)

[JBI]

Most written languages have strong literary traditions. Generally, the number of readers and writers in a particular language tend to generate a good amount of literature of quality.

In general, a lot has to do with literary community - who is reading, who is writing, what their goals are, etc. If I was to hypothesize, the big outpour of Russian literature from one period is perhaps caused by a rather interesting shift in Russian politics in culture, lets say after Napoleon, and before the Russo-Japanese War.

Simply, the spirit of the age was there, the same way the spirit of the age, if you will, was present in France, particularly Paris, and in England in the 1590s.

Timing is generally everything, especially for prose and theatre, the shift in society, mixed with the political and economic shifts brings a period with room for vernacular thought - hence, you have great novelists, that basically work by crossing two levels of society, and examining them against each other. This is all helped by strong presidents from the most admired neighbor, France.

That being said, I do not think Russian literature is particularly better, or anything like that. Simply put, I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that there are lots of Russian people, and also the fact that it is prose that is being read - the same can be said for French novelists, for instance. Pushkin, as it is, is not as popular universally, despite earning a somewhat excellent readership, given that he is a poet.

In the end it comes to the fact that every social misfit teenager seems to relate with social misfits in Dostoevsky, as they do with Beat writers, and in particular, the book On the Road (which is so the angstful teenage boy book, that it is ridiculous).

Dostoevsky is also said to benefit from being translated, I am not sure of that, as I do not read Russian, but perhaps that has something to do with it.


But simply put, my father grew up in Israel, there were lots of Russians even before the big post-soviet wave of immigrants, and they brought with them their literature - War and Peace was translated. Englishmen had a political presence there, but their acceptance from my understanding was more lukewarm (despite big names being translated).

Such an understanding of translation is needed.

[Alexander III]

If I was asked, I would deem Tolstoy to be the greatest novelist and a central figure upon which 20th century novels (modernism) was based. I also would comment that Pushkin is one of the great romantic poets. However this does not seem to make russia particularly special compared to other nations. Furthermore russian lit really kicks of with Pushkin, so Russian lit is roughly as young as American lit and can hardly compare with the extent of Italian, French, English, Persian ect.

When you say "many other countries have not been successful" which are you thinking about? As this might allow us to offer you a better response if you tell us what you are comparing russian lit against.






In the end it comes to the fact that every social misfit teenager seems to relate with social misfits in Dostoevsky, as they do with Beat writers, and in particular, the book On the Road (which is so the angstful teenage boy book, that it is ridiculous).

Dostoevsky is also said to benefit from being translated, I am not sure of that, as I do not read Russian, but perhaps that has something to do with it.


I have not read any Dostoyevsky, so I refer judgment, but the things you criticizes of Dost, could be said of The Sorrows of Young Werther, Rene and Child Harold's Pilgrimage

[JBI]

If I was asked, I would deem Tolstoy to be the greatest novelist and a central figure upon which 20th century novels (modernism) was based. I also would comment that Pushkin is one of the great romantic poets. However this does not seem to make russia particularly special compared to other nations. Furthermore russian lit really kicks of with Pushkin, so Russian lit is roughly as young as American lit and can hardly compare with the extent of Italian, French, English, Persian ect.

When you say "many other countries have not been successful" which are you thinking about? As this might allow us to offer you a better response if you tell us what you are comparing russian lit against.






I have not read any Dostoyevsky, so I refer judgment, but the things you criticizes of Dost, could be said of The Sorrows of Young Werther, Rene and Child Harold's Pilgrimage

Except scale. Werther is not as popular in English as Dostoevsky, and Byron is not popular at all for that work anymore (who reads poetry these days, lets face it?). Dostoevsky has the benefit of being in translation, and therefore in the vernacular of English in any given time period, or, in other words, always modern.

[Jono]

It might have something to do with the fact that the "Golden Age" of Russian literature was a fairly recent phenomenon, occurring as it did in the second half of the nineteenth century, meaning it is recent enough to still retain relevance and accessibility, while long enough ago to have achieved widely-acclaimed "classic" status. Russian literature in fact barely existed before Pushkin, Lermentov et al, and did not achieve much recognition outside of Russia until Turgenev, Tolstoy and Dostoevskii came along.

Then there is the fact that Russian society and politics in the 19th and early 20th centuries (The Golden and Silver eras of Russian literature) presented so many problems and enigmas (which, in spite of many attempts, have never really been resolved), which gave Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevskii et al intriguing subjects for their art, as well as great individual life-stories (Pushkin's involvement with revolutionaries and death by duel, Gogol's self-destruction and inability to write a conclusion to Dead Souls, Dostoevskii's exile, Tolsoy's last days etc. etc.)

Finally, there is a tendency among Russia's great writers of much elevated self-importance (Tolstoy is a big offender in this case) which often rubs off in their books. Russia certainly has had, since the 19th century, a great canon of literature, but the argument that it is any more prominent than that of other countries/languages is definitely up for debate- especially when you remember that literature existed before Pushkin!

[JCamilo]

Except scale. Werther is not as popular in English as Dostoevsky, and Byron is not popular at all for that work anymore (who reads poetry these days, lets face it?). Dostoevsky has the benefit of being in translation, and therefore in the vernacular of English in any given time period, or, in other words, always modern.

Well, Werther made young europeans go in suicide, right? Anyways, it is just to change it: Dostoievisky sentimentalism or teen agnst can be find in Dickens, Baudelaire and Poe. (But that is rather a simplification of Dostoievisky, he is not a teen angst writer).

The thing about Russians is that they break out the european center. They are not french, english, spanish... They seem to be break out of nowhere and not from the german tradition like Goethe, Schiller, Kant did one century before (when they made Germany the center). Sundenly there was Pushkin and Gogol. And with the Soviet Age, it seems to fade away. Most people are amazed at it.

But Catherine the great (and her Peter) were approaching Russia to europe, they did something similar to the germans. Just took more time, and the timing JBI mention is important. They developed when prose was raising, they giants had a time when the giants of english and france where dabbling with the Novel and short stories, modern drama, so they had time for inovation, to assemble uniqueness. When the rest of europe looked for references, the russians were there and they are very interesting, after all, they tell the story of upcoming russian revolution. (Plus, we must consider, the "center" of europe from XVIII onwards is Germany, Russian is close to them.) Also, Spain was completely out of the game (it would be back only when the latin american boom would cause something similar in the xx century that russians caused). A good evidence is that russians writers were not the only world wide artists of the period. The "entire" russian developed art forms to dialogue with the rest of the world (which probally increased even more the gap, or the awareness of the gap, between economic groups).

[stlukesguild]

The Russians and the Americans seem to benefit the most from the period in which there was this renewed focus on "nationalism". The great cultures of Western Europe... France, Britain, Spain, Italy... have already had something of a long tradition in which their cultures were seen as central. The Germans seem to have come upon the scene a bit too early. Goethe is almost more of a European writer in the tradition of the Enlightenment than a national poet. With Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in Russian and Melville, Whitman, and Emerson in the US we are confronted with great writers who embrace an expansive nationalistic myth. In Russia, this is a source of inspiration for music as well and results in a body of music unrivaled anywhere (at the time) outside of Germany.

I would avoid terms such as "better" and "best" when confronting the achievements of late 19th/early 20th century Russian literature (and music) for the simple reason that one might name any number of equally productive periods in the history of the arts. I agree with the notion that the artists were at the right place at the right time... this is always a major boon. They also had the luck to have written in an art form (the novel) which has become our dominant literary form. One might easily argue for the greater achievement of the 19th and early 20th century French and English poets or the short stories of the British, Americans, French, and Germans. To those who see the novel as the highest literary achievement, it is hard to surpass Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.

[mortalterror]

19th century literature:

Russia: Tolstoy, Dostoyevski, Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Turgenev, Chekhov, Goncharov, Ostrovsky

England: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Byron, Tennyson, Browning, Rossetti, Dickens, Austen, Thackery, Eliot, Trollope, the Bronte sisters, Wells, Conrad, Kipling, Hardy

France: Hugo, Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Gautier, Chateaubriand, Stendhal, Dumas, Goncourt, Maupassant, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Lamartine, Mallarme, Verne, Rostand, Nerval

Scotland: Scott, Doyle, Stevenson

Ireland: Wilde, Synge, Yeats, Stoker, Le Fanu,

U.S.: Melville, Twain, Whitman, Poe, Dickinson, Longfellow, Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, James, Wharton, Crane, Cooper, Bierce

Germany: Goethe, Heine, Hoffman, Holderlin, Kleist, Schiller, Buchner, Hauptmann

Italy: Leopardi, Manzoni, Carducci, Foscolo

Spain: Becquer

Norway: Ibsen,

Sweden: Strindburg

Denmark: Andersen

Nicaragua: Dario

Peru: Palma

Brazil: Assis

Austria: Schnitzler

Score
Russia: 9 World: 78
Overall, I'd say England and France did better.

[JBI]

The Russians and the Americans seem to benefit the most from the period in which there was this renewed focus on "nationalism". The great cultures of Western Europe... France, Britain, Spain, Italy... have already had something of a long tradition in which their cultures were seen as central. The Germans seem to have come upon the scene a bit too early. Goethe is almost more of a European writer in the tradition of the Enlightenment than a national poet. With Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in Russian and Melville, Whitman, and Emerson in the US we are confronted with great writers who embrace an expansive nationalistic myth. In Russia, this is a source of inspiration for music as well and results in a body of music unrivaled anywhere (at the time) outside of Germany.

I would avoid terms such as "better" and "best" when confronting the achievements of late 19th/early 20th century Russian literature (and music) for the simple reason that one might name any number of equally productive periods in the history of the arts. I agree with the notion that the artists were at the right place at the right time... this is always a major boon. They also had the luck to have written in an art form (the novel) which has become our dominant literary form. One might easily argue for the greater achievement of the 19th and early 20th century French and English poets or the short stories of the British, Americans, French, and Germans. To those who see the novel as the highest literary achievement, it is hard to surpass Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.

I don't know - 19th century, and even early 20th century German writers and intellectuals seem to be the most international of all writers. Certainly Goethe was the first real multiculturalist of such an importance. Likewise the critical scope of German letters covered great distances. I would say their lack of nationalism had to do with Goethe as a precedent, as well as a duality of cultures, namely, a political culture that seems until the end of the 19th century, more or less unassociated, in terms of high art, with the writers working within it.

Of course, that changes, and Zola even notes it in his last works (pretty much saying he expected WW1), but the critics of Germany are the ones that brought Literary criticism into the 20th century. They also were the scientists who brought science into the 20th century.

As to why then Russians are read more? Well, it's obvious. There are only 3 Russian authors who are read more, namely, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, and Tolstoy. I would break it down like this - Tolstoy was a masterful author, and so, regardless of where he was, and situation, his genius is one of those things that just happen (like a Petrarch being born or something, nobody sees it coming). The next one, Dostoevsky, well, he played with some psychological things that appeal to a certain demographic of people, namely, those who read Nietzsche when they are 16 - that kind of stereotype. Talking to Russians, there is no doubt that Tolstoy was the model author, in every regard, still, Dostoevsky had some interesting characters caught in their identity, and struggling with existential issues, which appeals to young people who can take existentialism, especially its 19th century form, and think it holds all the answers, when really it is rather too simple as a discussion in Dostoevsky, and far more complex than the be all and end all that people when they are young can find in a novel.

As for Chekhov, well, he is not Ibsen as a playwright, but was great, there is no doubt about that. He had also the benefit of being preformed quite a lot even after his death. He was original, and creative, and so, wrote some good plays. As for his stories, that to me seems like another freak accident where somebody can take an existing genre, and remake it so well that they redefine the understanding of such things. He manages to shorten time, and therefore, achieve more, like a drama piece, and that is why he is highly regarded (if not so much by a mass public for his stories as his play).

The other three major players, Turgenev, Gogol, and Pushkin, well, Pushkin did not make it that well outside of Russia, because poetry is not a popular genre. He got translated, and is excellent, and there are people who swear by him, but still, he is not a best seller, because, simply, poetry is not a best seller. He did well, and had the benefit of extreme talent and good timing.

Turgenev is interesting, but ultimately, with the exception of Fathers and Sons, he is rarely discussed, especially here, for the simple reason people do not discuss much. He is, after all, Russian, which works well if you are Tolstoy, but can only take you so far out of Russia, especially with ethnocentric audiences, and anti-Russian sentiment dominating the second half of the 20th century.

And finally Gogol, who is well received for a couple of stories, the simple Diary of a Madman, the Overcoat, and a couple others - he is not a dominant figure, but his stories are dominant stories, making their way into unseen places.


In general, it's the three who made it to the world, not the 6, or a greater number, and that was similar to the way a half dozen French poets got great reception, or a handful of German poets, or artists got recognition. It's not as if other traditions didn't experience the same type of cultural advancement and recognition, it's just them being Russian seems to stand out.

And, beyond that, Dostoevsky gets way too much credit by people, particularly a demographic which exists on these very boards. He wasn't a bad author, but, lets face it, he wasn't the greatest either - his novels are flawed, ignoring his prose. The more perfect novel of the 19th century to me seems to be Flaubert, compared in any language as the bending point - Romanticism meets realism meets modernism - pretty much a century of ideas in one book, but alas, Crime and Punishment has too many kids reading it.

[mortalterror]

JBI, who are some great Chinese writers of the 19th century?

[Alexander III]

And, beyond that, Dostoevsky gets way too much credit by people, particularly a demographic which exists on these very boards. He wasn't a bad author, but, lets face it, he wasn't the greatest either - his novels are flawed, ignoring his prose. The more perfect novel of the 19th century to me seems to be Flaubert, compared in any language as the bending point - Romanticism meets realism meets modernism - pretty much a century of ideas in one book, but alas, Crime and Punishment has too many kids reading it.

While I agree with you in terms of Flaubert, he being the only Novelist of the 19th century whom can aptly rival Tolstoy; well I suppose I would also add Hugo to the list. However I have to disagree with your Dostoyevsky opinion. You view Dost in a similar manner to how many see Salinger. But, I must disagree. First of all the "greatness" of a work of art, is chiefly established by future generations of writers, (here I talk not about the 95% of mediocrity but the 5% of great). Joyce, Woolf, Hemingway, Sartre and Camus all acknowledged Dostoevsky's great influence upon them and his genius. Yet what writer acknowledges Salinger as a major influence? Now you may question Dost, but it is impossible to question his influence upon many of the great modernist writers; so I doubt that if he were a teen angst writer solely, he would have had such a great impact. Surly there must be more to him?

Maybe it is the case that Dost is to you, what Shakespeare was to Tolstoy.

[stlukesguild]

I don't know - 19th century, and even early 20th century German writers and intellectuals seem to be the most international of all writers. Certainly Goethe was the first real multiculturalist of such an importance. Likewise the critical scope of German letters covered great distances. I would say their lack of nationalism had to do with Goethe as a precedent, as well as a duality of cultures, namely, a political culture that seems until the end of the 19th century, more or less unassociated, in terms of high art, with the writers working within it.

That was what I had suggested when I spoke of Goethe as fitting more within the ideals of the Enlightenment... including a more multi-national or at least a sense of being European as opposed to exclusively German. Goethe builds on French and English models... and later draws from Greek, Roman, Italian, and even Persians. Of course I sense this in the music as well. Only Wagner seems to build a distinctly German music. As you suggest, most of the followers of Goethe... even into the 20th century with Rilke, Kafka, Wedekind, Hesse, Mann, etc... seem quite removed from the political nationalism.

Dostoevsky, well, he played with some psychological things that appeal to a certain demographic of people, namely, those who read Nietzsche when they are 16 - that kind of stereotype. Talking to Russians, there is no doubt that Tolstoy was the model author, in every regard, still, Dostoevsky had some interesting characters caught in their identity, and struggling with existential issues, which appeals to young people who can take existentialism, especially its 19th century form, and think it holds all the answers...

A bit harsh... but true. Hermann Hesse acts the same way... and perhaps even Orwell. I guess its a good thing I read Dante, Shakespeare, Homer and Cervantes first and got around to Nietzsche later.

Alex... I wouldn't underestimate Dostoevsky. I have no problem admitting that The Brothers Karamazov remains one of the greatest novels I have read. I do agree with JBI, however, in terms of the almost cult-like following that Dostoevsky has... especially among younger readers. Hell, he was voted the greatest author among LitNetters. The greatest? Really? I would have to say that Tolstoy he isn't even the greatest Russian writer as long as we have Tolstoy... but really... greater than Goethe, Homer, Virgil, Dante... Shakespeare?!

Of course, as JBI also points out, the better/best discussions are ridiculous and have nothing to do with real discussions of literature... which are indeed far too rare. I know there are attempts with the book clubs, the novel of the month, the poetry club, etc... but unfortunately... these always seem to focus on the obvious choices. Rarely do the choices seem to include something interesting or new... but I know I shouldn't complain. If you are really passionate about something, you have to start the thread yourself... and I salute Quasimodo for keeping the discussion on contemporary poets going for so long. Whenever I get the bug up my butt I make an attempt at reviving the discussions on German, French, and Spanish poetry.

[JCamilo]

Pushkin is not just a poet. His prose works are widely know, his short story about Salieri the most popular culprint for the envy version of "Salieri", his dramas well know. He is one of the top 20 best selling authors of all time, being translated (according the index translated more than Victor Hugo. If his poetry was translatable, he would probally make Verlaine look less popular).... he may not have the actual popularity of Dostoievisky or Tolstoy, but when we start to think how france and england with all their tradition can produce authors that would make E.M.Foster claim in the 20's that no novel in english had the power or quality of Brothers K, Crime and Punishement, Anner Karenina and War and Peace. It is not just numbers, it how dominant those guys sundenly are.

To talk about Tchekhov you must bring Poe, Maupassant, Borges, Kipling... Just out of nowhere. In terms of prose they are impressive in such unlikely way, unexpected, with the most unlikely idiom. Compare this to portuguese and we can have a notion how to marginal literature had this momment....

[JBI]

JBI, who are some great Chinese writers of the 19th century?

There are quite a few ones of note, Li Ruzhen, for instance, and the novel 7 Heroes and Five Gallants, but, in terms of available in translation, few particular ones are available (I would need to check online to see what is available). In general though, the19th century was a great century for scholarship in Chinese literature, and for some prose fiction, not particularly for experimental development and genre writing (those developments happened in the 17th century, and then in the 20th century to a far greater extent). Then again, there was a great development in Drama, and opera, of which, I apologize, I am rather unable to particularly talk about with any real certainty.


Generally though, from what I understand, the time after the Opium Wars marked a time when scholarship and translation were essential, rather an inward leaning, rather than expansive inventiveness - later blamed for China's lack of development by 20th century writers. the 17th and 18th centuries are quite rich in terms of literary inventiveness, but I guess after the Qianlong text of all classic texts (basically the "official" accepted list of classics of any noteworthiness) inventive letters became rather stagnate, kind of like the Age of Johnson in England. What came out of it though was a particularly remarkable amount of scholarly work, that is, editions, histories, political works, and translations, as well as anthologies and commentaries.

Still, one cannot help but think of that as a rather dry period of reluctant transition, though it did end in explosion with the 20th century.

[Jono]

... Pushkin did not make it that well outside of Russia, because poetry is not a popular genre. He got translated, and is excellent, and there are people who swear by him, but still, he is not a best seller, because, simply, poetry is not a best seller. He did well, and had the benefit of extreme talent and good timing.
-Russian sentiment dominating the second half of the 20th century.

...

And finally Gogol, who is well received for a couple of stories, the simple Diary of a Madman, the Overcoat, and a couple others - he is not a dominant figure, but his stories are dominant stories, making their way into unseen places.

Pushkin has not done well outside of Russia, not because poetry is an "unpopular genre" but because poetry does not translate well. Within Russia he is most certainly a bestseller- within Russia Pushkin has an equal, if not even greater, status as that of Shakespeare in English literature, Dante in Italian and Goethe in German- he is simply regarded as the greatest ever Russian writer and in many ways the father of Russian as a literary language, especially poetry (which, perhaps because of the role it played in the dissident movement during communist times- Achmatova etc., has a larger audience in Russia than it does in the UK or the States).

And Gogol has a similar position in Russian prose. He might have never completed his greatest work, but both Russia and particularly the Ukraine he is held in very high esteem indeed.

[JCamilo]

Pushkin is not unpopular or little translated outside Russia. I would say, Pushkin faces two problems to be so representative...

First, Dostoievisky and Tolstoy carry each other. They are two sides of the same coin. One would say the flaws of one are the merits of the other and in a way, Tolstoy became a dostoievisky character in the end, while Dostoievisky always tried to be Tolstoy. (And Tchekhov carry both with him).

Second, Pushkin does not represent as well the socialist-czarist tension that was so relevant in the early XX century when we think about Russia.

[blazeofglory]

I have read plenty of Russian literature. Russian literature is unmatched by any others. Today we have no equals of Russian literature. Can any other writers equate with Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekov? They are inimitable writers . It is through Russian literature I got introduced to world literature. In fact even England could not birth any literary giants who can equate with Russian writers. It has Charles Dickens but in no respects he can be compared with Dostoevsky or Tolstoy

[Mr.lucifer]

I have read plenty of Russian literature. Russian literature is unmatched by any others. Today we have no equals of Russian literature. Can any other writers equate with Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekov? They are inimitable writers . It is through Russian literature I got introduced to world literature. In fact even England could not birth any literary giants who can equate with Russian writers. It has Charles Dickens but in no respects he can be compared with Dostoevsky or Tolstoy

Let me give a shot. Tolstory considered Hugo's Les miserables to be the greatest novel, dickens was a model for tolstoy and dostoevksy. Flaubert could give both a run for their money with madame bovary. Others include, gogol, balzac,proust,joyce,cervantes,de maupassant,de Queiroz,de assis, etc.

[blazeofglory]

Let me give a shot. Tolstory considered Hugo's Les miserables to be the greatest novel, dickens was a model for tolstoy and dostoevksy. Flaubert could give both a run for their money with madame bovary. Others include, gogol, balzac,proust,joyce,cervantes,de maupassant,de Queiroz,de assis, etc.


I agree Dickens might have been a role model for even Tolstoy. But he exceeded that model and he distinguished himself.

Tolstoy has ascended higher and higher.

[Mr.lucifer]

I agree Dickens might have been a role model for even Tolstoy. But he exceeded that model and he distinguished himself.

Tolstoy has ascended higher and higher.

I'd say cervantes surpasses him.

[stlukesguild]

I have read plenty of Russian literature. Russian literature is unmatched by any others.

At some point in your life you may move beyond the self-centered thinking of the teenager and come to recognize that you are not the measure of all things. The Russians have produced some marvelous literature... but so have any number of other nations:

The French have Montaigne, Rabelais, Ronsard, Voltaire, Moliere, Racine, La Fontaine, Cornielle, Rousseau, Tocqueville, Hugo, Balzac, Zola, Flaubert, Dumas, Huysmans, Maupassant, Stendhal, Alain-Fournier, Nerval, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Mallarme, Valery, Antaole France, O.V. de Milosz, Pierre Louys, Paul Claudel, Andre Breton, Paul Eluard, Jean Genet, Marcel Proust, Jean Anouihl, Edmond Jabes, E.M. Cioran, Jean Paul Sartre, Jean Cocteau, Marguerite Yourcenar, Jean Giono, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Michel Fournier, maurice Blanchot, St. Jean Perse, Yves Bonnefoy

The Germans can lay claim to Nibelungenlied, Wolfram von Eschenbach, Sebastian Brant, H.J.C von Grimmelshausen, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Friedrich von Schiller, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Johann Gottfried Herder, Immanuel Kant, Gottfried Leibniz, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel, Goethe, Holderlin, Moricke, Heinrich Hesse, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Kleist, Gottfried Keller, Buchner, Frank Wedekind, Adalbert Stifter, Annette von Droste-Hulshoff, Franz Grillparzer, Friederich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamen, Ranier Maria Rilke, Georg Trakl, Franz Kafka, Gottfried Benn, Robert Walser, Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann, Hermann Broch, Joseph Roth, Max Frisch, Friederich Durrenmatt, Gunter Grass, Heinrich Boll, Paul Celan, Ingeborg Bachemann, etc...

The Italians have Guido Cavalcanti, Dante Alighieri, Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch), Niccolò Machiavelli, Giovanni Boccaccio, Benvenuto Cellini, Marco Polo, Leone Battista Alberti, Matteo Boiardo, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo Buonarotti (yes, the artists were both important writers as well), Baldassare Castiglione, Ludovico Ariosto, Pietro Bembo, Torquato Tasso, Pietro Aretino, Carlo Goldini, Antonio Vasari... it would seem that the writers of the Italian Renaissance alone might easily rival and surpass those of Russia... yet we have yet to mention: Ugo Foscolo, Metastasio, Vittorio Alfieri, Giacomo Leopardi, Gabriele d'Annunzio, Giosuè Carducci, Italo Svevo, Luigi Pirandello, Cesare Pavese, Filippo Marinetti, Salvatore Quasimodo, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Umberto Saba, Eugenio Montale, Giuseppe di Lampedusa, Leonardo Sciascia, Umberto Saba, Primo Levi, Italo Calvino, Tomaso Landolfi, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Umberto Eco, etc...

I won't even stoop to listing the great writers of British literature.

Of course the whole game of who is better is absurd. I don't read Shakespeare because I wish to brag that what I am reading is better than what you are reading. I read Shakespeare for the aesthetic pleasure he brings. I read Verlaine, and Poe, and Augusto Monterroso, and Stig Dagerman, and Cees Nooteboom, and Gore Vidal, and Donald Bartheleme for the same reason.

Seriously, the whole game of who is better than whom is rather tiresome and juvenile... (as JBI has suggested, it seems that many have this misguided idea that literary criticism is nothing more than offering judgment: "Two Thumbs up!" "4 and a half stars out of 5".) ...and it grows even more so when individuals make sweeping statements about what literature is the "greatest" and what literature is not so "great" based solely upon their own limited reading experience. It would be nice to actually discuss a work of literature sometime.

[Venerable Bede]

I think that the notion of declaring one country's literary achievements to be superior to all others is absurd. Just because you may have a preference for Russian authors hardly makes them the undisputed champions of literature. I personally would tend to rank the authors of Great Britain as the highest, merely because I predominately read British works, but I would not make such a claim, because everyone has their own preferences and their own ideas on what is the "greatest." It's fine if you like the Russians better than anyone else, just don't declare their superiority as a given fact.

[Desolation]

I can't help but wonder...How many of us here have actually read any of these works in Russian? Perhaps JBI is really onto something when he speaks of the benefit of translation.

Personally, I LOVE Dostoevsky and Tolstoy enough to label Russian literature among my favorites, but I honestly haven't been able to get into any of the others (Gogol, Turgenev, Chekhov, Bulgakov, and Solzhenitsyn being the others that I've tried reading, none of whom I have ever been able to complete a novel/story by). And even Dostoevsky and Tolstoy tend to suffer from incredibly weak endings to their novels...Everyone finds Christ, falls in love, has children, and lives happily ever after. That's a cultural thing, though, I'm guessing.

While I wouldn't say that they're the "Greatest," I'm going to have to give my vote of favoritism to the French.

[mal4mac]

Personally, I LOVE Dostoevsky and Tolstoy enough to label Russian literature among my favorites, but I honestly haven't been able to get into any of the others (Gogol, Turgenev, Chekhov, Bulgakov, and Solzhenitsyn being the others that I've tried reading, none of whom I have ever been able to complete a novel/story by).

What have you tried to read by Solzhenitsyn? I couldn't make much headway with "Gulag", but I found his "proper novels" "One Day..." and "First Circle" to be superb page turners. I had difficulty giving up to get some sleep...

How can you not finish a Chekhov short story!? Besides the fact they are wonderful, most are very short and very straightforward. Was it the plays you gave up on? I forced myself to read the Seagull online in a bad translation and could imagine someone giving up on that...

I read The Master And Margarita by Bulgakov last year and found it to be an unputdownable page turner, really funny and inventive.

I found Turgenev's Fathers and Sons a short, easy read, perhaps not as good as I hoped, but it had enough going on to keep me interested - maybe not up to the standards of the best of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, but certainly not one to give up on...

[JCamilo]

He may have read very little, russian literature is balanced by a Schopenhauer pessimism. How Ivan illitch, the idiot, the overcoat, the cherry garden, Onegin can be classified as happily ever after or anything as that? Even the idea of endings is something Tchekhov often challenged, cutting sometimes the end of his short stories when he demmed it as unecessary...

[Jono]

I can't help but wonder...How many of us here have actually read any of these works in Russian? Perhaps JBI is really onto something when he speaks of the benefit of translation.


I disagree with JBI's point about "the benefit of translation"; the job of the translator is to render as close an approximation of the meaning and style as possible in the target language- thus if the author is using archaic terms or grammatical structures, it is the translator's duty to convey that to the reader.

Compared to English, Russian has changed far less as a literary language since the nineteenth century (the influence of Pushkin again - Russian kids even today are taught his works by rote). It is interesting that JBI points out Dostoevsky for his observation, as he actually has quite a complex and difficult prose style which I think is quite well conveyed by the translations that I have read of his works, while Tolstoy has a far more simple and liberated style, making both the original Russian and more recent translations feel like they could have been written yesterday.

[Desolation]

What have you tried to read by Solzhenitsyn? I couldn't make much headway with "Gulag", but I found his "proper novels" "One Day..." and "First Circle" to be superb page turners. I had difficulty giving up to get some sleep...

How can you not finish a Chekhov short story!? Besides the fact they are wonderful, most are very short and very straightforward. Was it the plays you gave up on? I forced myself to read the Seagull online in a bad translation and could imagine someone giving up on that...

I read The Master And Margarita by Bulgakov last year and found it to be an unputdownable page turner, really funny and inventive.

I found Turgenev's Fathers and Sons a short, easy read, perhaps not as good as I hoped, but it had enough going on to keep me interested - maybe not up to the standards of the best of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, but certainly not one to give up on...

The novels that I've tried by the authors named are Dead Souls (enjoyable, funny, but for some reason I couldn't find the motivation to finish it), Fathers and Sons, The Master and Margarita, and One Day. I plan on going back and reading all of them to the end at some point. After all, I'm only 21 and have a lifetime of reading before me to catch up on all the classics. But, at this point, I just couldn't get through them for one reason or another.

In the case of Chekhov...I guess that it just comes down to the fact that I don't particularly like short stories. This goes for just about anyone. Franz Kafka and Jorge Luis Borges are two other prominent examples of writers that I really admire, but whose short stories I had a bit of trouble with. I don't know, I'm just partial to long novels. I find them easier to read and finish than short stories and novellas.


He may have read very little, russian literature is balanced by a Schopenhauer pessimism. How Ivan illitch, the idiot, the overcoat, the cherry garden, Onegin can be classified as happily ever after or anything as that? Even the idea of endings is something Tchekhov often challenged, cutting sometimes the end of his short stories when he demmed it as unecessary...

The most prominent examples, to me, of weak "happily ever after" Russian endings are Crime and Punishment, Anna Karenina, and War and Peace. The three are, nonetheless, among my all-time favorites, but the endings kind of made me cringe. I like the idea of abandoning endings altogether...That's very intriguing.

This is all just my opinion, though. Like I said before, I'm young and not quite so well-read as many people on here, so all of my opinions should be taken with a grain of salt. I certainly don't mean to offend or disrespect anyone's favorite writers/works.

[Jono]

The most prominent examples, to me, of weak "happily ever after" Russian endings are Crime and Punishment, Anna Karenina, and War and Peace.

I question your classification of Anna Karenina as having a "happily ever after" ending considering the fates of Anna, Vronsky and, with the unfazed Oblonsky at its helm, Russian society in general. Even for Levin, despite the fact his spiritual crisis seems resolved, is not necessarily set to live happily ever more (- after all, he is in many ways a autobiographical representation of Tolstoy himself, who despite his spiritual togetherness and family was far from "happy" in his later years.)

As for Crime and Punishment, this assessment is reasonable, but it is not if you discount the Epilogue- which was actually critically very poorly received in Russia (and elsewhere) for Dostoevsky's "Christ solves everything" approach, which I think counters your suggestion that this is a phenomena common to Russia. There aren't so many happy endings in the rest of his work - and remember that while the ending is happy for Raskolnikov, his "Dostoevskian Double" Svidrigailov is ultimately doomed.

[Desolation]

IAs for Crime and Punishment, this assessment is reasonable, but it is not if you discount the Epilogue- which was actually critically very poorly received in Russia (and elsewhere) for Dostoevsky's "Christ solves everything" approach, which I think counters your suggestion that this is a phenomena common to Russia. There aren't so many happy endings in the rest of his work - and remember that while the ending is happy for Raskolnikov, his "Dostoevskian Double" Svidrigailov is ultimately doomed.

I'd be perfectly fine with pretending that the Epilogues for Crime and Punishment and War and Peace didn't exist.

I might just have to rethink Karenina, though.

[JCamilo]

The most prominent examples, to me, of weak "happily ever after" Russian endings are Crime and Punishment, Anna Karenina, and War and Peace. The three are, nonetheless, among my all-time favorites, but the endings kind of made me cringe. I like the idea of abandoning endings altogether...That's very intriguing.

Yes, C&P is an example of Dostoievisky happiness, but the russian prime trait is the variation, he have Myshkin (his most christ -like figure) which end is tragic or the absolute no-conclusive end of Brother Karamozov, where you find the optmistic, the romantic, the pessimistic all together.

In the end, with him, you have a more romantic, melodramatic start. Then he starts to shift, gets bleak, ironical. Even all the happyness of C&P is a bit of cynical.

Similar to Tolstoy, he starts with a epic-romantic novelistic size but slowly he turns his bakc to it. Ivan Illitch for example is a psychological novel about a guy dying and coming to the conclusion his life pretty much sucked. No redemption, anything. He has some very dark short stories too. But at the end, his messianic transformation, he became way simplistic and really some happy stories, with a touch of oriental parables, which everyone reckons is the worst of Tolstoy.

As Gogol, irony all the time. He is a natural born critic. Pushkin has the romantic tragedy on him. Someone humor, but most tragic characters, he is a bit like a XVIII enlightment writer turning romantic. With Turgeniev, Tolstoy and Dostoievisky russians go for the psychological novel, so you will find their dark days.

As Tchekhov, it is really a matter of short stories. Not only this he wrote, but he is neither happy or sad. Tchekhov hated to give conclusions, moral readings, etc. At some point, he started to write stories, when finished he cut the begining and end (or just one) if he tought they would only make the reader not to think and because he considered those aspects were important for him to develop the real action in the middle of the story. His editor and him had many fights about it, so sometimes he had to send the full text, but he had that sense of using only the necessary. But if you dislike short stories, there is not much to do about him. :D


This is all just my opinion, though. Like I said before, I'm young and not quite so well-read as many people on here, so all of my opinions should be taken with a grain of salt. I certainly don't mean to offend or disrespect anyone's favorite writers/works.


No worries, opinions are not blows, strong opinions are not strong blows. :D

[Dodo25]

The Germans can lay claim to Nibelungenlied, Wolfram von Eschenbach, Sebastian Brant, H.J.C von Grimmelshausen, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Friedrich von Schiller, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Johann Gottfried Herder, Immanuel Kant, Gottfried Leibniz, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel, Goethe, Holderlin, Moricke, Heinrich Hesse, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Kleist, Gottfried Keller, Buchner, Frank Wedekind, Adalbert Stifter, Annette von Droste-Hulshoff, Franz Grillparzer, Friederich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamen, Ranier Maria Rilke, Georg Trakl, Franz Kafka, Gottfried Benn, Robert Walser, Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann, Hermann Broch, Joseph Roth, Max Frisch, Friederich Durrenmatt, Gunter Grass, Heinrich Boll, Paul Celan, Ingeborg Bachemann, etc...

You obviously know a lot about literature (much more than I), I don't want to start an argument here. I agree with most of what you said, but I want to add that I think it depends on how quality is weighed against quantity.

If it's not about quantity (and not about the philosophers either), meaning if we're looking for literature able to compare favorably to the best of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Pushkin and Solzhenizhyn, then, judging by my limited understanding of German literature, I'd narrow it down (even after including Fontane, Briest and others that were omitted) to Goethe, Schiller, Hesse (Hermann), Mann, Kafka and maybe Dürrenmatt -- these at least have a (small) chance. So while, as you rightly point out, it isn't easy (or even recommended) to play 'who's better', I personally am quite convinced that these Germans are no match for the Russians mentioned above.

Take for instance the comparison of 'Sorrows of Young Werther' to Dostoevsky's 'Notes from the Underground'. I admit this one is a matter for personal taste more than anything (though I personally would favor just about any book over 'Werther'), but as soon as you compare it to 'TBK', 'The Idiot' or 'C&P', it clearly can't compete in terms of scope and depth. 'Faust' is different I suppose, that's why I think Goethe is relevant, but that's one work (counted as one anyway since the parts are small), how is that going to compare to the several Russian masterpieces of even a single author like Dostoevsky or Tolstoy?

I can't comment on Italian or French literature because I haven't read much of that (if even). Concerning English literature, given its long history and the number of people writing English, it shouldn't be a surprise if it could compete with Russian literature, and obviously I think it can (so yeah, Russian literature isn't undoubteldy 'number one'). I basically agree with a lot of what you're saying, I just wanted to agree with the ones saying that the famous Russian novelists really are extraordinary, and that I'd thus be interesting in reading more theories about why Russian literature developed in such a remarkable way.

[JCamilo]

I think you may have a point when you talk about the quality of the top russians be top (and I would say, a russian would probally produce a list of good authors which would make quantity a game), but really...

Goethe (Faust is not exactly small) will walk over Tolstoy. He has two fausts, he has Werther over Ivan Illytch, he has Wilheim Meister, his poetry, Elective Affinities... heck, you cann't dismiss his other texts, the guy is just a walking monster. We must be carefull, we blink and Goethe will be walking over Shakespeare or Dante too.

But the point is... if you narrow, why not narrowing to Schiller vs. Pushkin. Schiller can handle Pushkin pretty easily if you ask me. Goethe can certainly match any single writer. Kafka can match Tchekhov quite well too. (Or Dostoievisky). Hoffman too. And Rilke can match any poetry from any place.

The problem is not dismissing the philosophers (why anyways?) or the nordic sagas... It is just that Russia literature found a bridge to europe thru germany, like all. Germany started to challenged the franco-british center a century before and they did in apalling manner. Schiller and Goethe where huge shadows on all english and french romanticism. We only narrow it because well... in the end of the day, we know little of germans.

[sixsmith]

You obviously know a lot about literature (much more than I), I don't want to start an argument here. I agree with most of what you said, but I want to add that I think it depends on how quality is weighed against quantity.

If it's not about quantity (and not about the philosophers either), meaning if we're looking for literature able to compare favorably to the best of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Pushkin and Solzhenizhyn, then, judging by my limited understanding of German literature, I'd narrow it down (even after including Fontane, Briest and others that were omitted) to Goethe, Schiller, Hesse (Hermann), Mann, Kafka and maybe Dürrenmatt -- these at least have a (small) chance. So while, as you rightly point out, it isn't easy (or even recommended) to play 'who's better', I personally am quite convinced that these Germans are no match for the Russians mentioned above.

Take for instance the comparison of 'Sorrows of Young Werther' to Dostoevsky's 'Notes from the Underground'. I admit this one is a matter for personal taste more than anything (though I personally would favor just about any book over 'Werther'), but as soon as you compare it to 'TBK', 'The Idiot' or 'C&P', it clearly can't compete in terms of scope and depth. 'Faust' is different I suppose, that's why I think Goethe is relevant, but that's one work (counted as one anyway since the parts are small), how is that going to compare to the several Russian masterpieces of even a single author like Dostoevsky or Tolstoy?

I can't comment on Italian or French literature because I haven't read much of that (if even). Concerning English literature, given its long history and the number of people writing English, it shouldn't be a surprise if it could compete with Russian literature, and obviously I think it can (so yeah, Russian literature isn't undoubteldy 'number one'). I basically agree with a lot of what you're saying, I just wanted to agree with the ones saying that the famous Russian novelists really are extraordinary, and that I'd thus be interesting in reading more theories about why Russian literature developed in such a remarkable way.

I agree that that it's not simply a numbers game Dodo, but I think you're being a little dismissive of the Germans, and Goethe in particular. It's probably true that few authors can compete with Dostoyevsky for scope, although the width of an author's purview is by no means correlative to the quality of his work. Indeed, for mine, Dostoyevsky's great weakness is his inability to balance the exposition of his philosophy with the aesthetic demands of fiction. Werther might be a slighter, more intellectually concentrated work, but it speaks to me with far greater intensity than Crime and Punishment. And let's not get started on Kafka, whose parables of anguish and futility make Dostoyevsky seem positively adolescent by comparison. I'm not sure that Solzhenitsyn advances the Russian case any further. I don't agree with J that Goethe 'walks all over Tolstoy', but nor do I agree that Tolstoy is unquestionably superior to Goethe.

[stlukesguild]

If literature were a slugfest, I would most certainly put my money on Goethe unless he were up against Dante or Shakespeare. He would seemingly be more than an equal for anyone else. His oeuvre is huge... and more than impressive even limited to essential works such as The Sorrows of Young Werther, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, Faust I & II, The Italian Journey, Egmont, Goetz von Berlichingen, Torquato Tasso, Elective Affinities, From my Life: Poetry and Truth (Goethe's Autobiography in 4 Volumes), and his large collection of poetry. Hölderlin and Novalis are towering poets of the Romantic era, every bit equal to Pushkin. Kafka might not rival Dostoevski, but he surely rivals Checkoff. Arguably his truncated short fictions are among the most central works of Modernism... to such an extent that his very name has been employed as an adjective: Kafkaesque. That leaves Dostoevsky. Hermann Hesse might not be a rival for him... even though Hesse's oeuvre is severely hampered by the fact that his poetry... which Thomas Mann argued was his finest achievement... is largely unknown outside of Germany. But what of Hesse & Mann? The Russians have some brilliant poets in the 20th century including Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Osip Mandelshtam, and Boris Pasternak... the latter of whom is generally acknowledged as the greatest of them all. Yet none can rival Rilke. Pasternak himself was profoundly impacted by Rilke's poetry. Beyond Rilke, the major 20th century German poets include Paul Celan, Hermann Hesse, Ingeborg Bachmann, etc... This still leaves major figures such as Gunter Grass, Hermann Broch, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Kleist, Schiller, Lessing, Hermann Hesse, Friederich Durrenmatt, Heinrich Boll, Bertolt Brecht, etc... THis doesn't even touch upon the philosophical and critical literature of Germany that has been so influential... even upon writers such as Dostoevsky: Nietzsche, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Walter Benjamen, Theodor Adorno, Sigmund Freud, etc...

France vs Russia? I would argue that this would be a blow out. Only the British in the West might rival them. Proust in surely every bit the equal to Tolstoy... and if he weren't we could throw in Zola for good measure. Flaubert could dispense with Dostoevsky... and if he had any difficulty we'd always have Balzac to back him up. That would leave Victor Hugo... not only the novelist, but the towering critic and poet to do away with Pushkin. Checkoff? Moliere and Cornielle can handle him... and we still have Racine, Jean Genet, Beaumarchais, and half a dozen other major playwrights. What does this leave the Russians? A half dozen 20th century poets (are they any match for Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarme, Rimbaud, Ronsard, and easily a dozen other major poets? Bely, Bulgakov, Solzhenitsyn, and Turgenev vs Montaigne, Rousseau, and Voltaire? With La Fontaine, Stendhal, Maupassant, Valery, Sartre, Camus, Rabelais, Alfred Jarry, Andre Breton, Paul Eluard, and at least several dozen others left in reserve. If the Napoleonic invasion had been a war of French literature vs the Russians the outcome would have been quite different.

Again, I find the competition thing somewhat absurd and a waste of time... I don't think we can easily establish the hegemony of any national body of literature... especially as we become more versed in what exists in the bodies of literature beyond those that are frequently read as part of the usual English-language high-school and college courses. I also ponder over what it all proves? I am almost certain that Shakespeare was the greatest writer who ever lived... but does that mean that I'm not going to read Dante, Tolstoy, Cervantes... or even such "lesser" writers as Poe, Verlaine, Umberto Eco, or Donald Bartheleme ever again? I have little doubt that bach was the greatest composer ever... but I still love Faure, Samuel Barber, Muddy Waters, and the Rolling Stones.

I think what JBI and others have suggested is that it would be far more interesting to discuss what a reader admires about a specific writer than to argue that he is the "greatest"... especially when there is so much that any of us has not read. Mortal Terror and I have repeatedly championed Firdowsi as a rival to Dante among the great epic poets. Others who haven't even read Firdowsi have rolled their eyes. Several members have proclaimed that contemporary poetry is but a bleak failure... and yet from just a brief discussion with them it has become obvious that they haven't even made the least serious attempt to read anything by the leading contemporary poets.

Can we discuss literature in a way that moves beyond an arm-wrestling match of "Is Shakespeare the greatest poet" ?

[mortalterror]

If literature were a slugfest, I would most certainly put my money on Goethe unless he were up against Dante or Shakespeare.

Or Homer, Virgil, Vyasa, Valmiki, Firdawsi...


He would seemingly be more than an equal for anyone else. His oeuvre is huge... and more than impressive even limited to essential works such as The Sorrows of Young Werther, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, Faust I & II, The Italian Journey, Egmont, Goetz von Berlichingen, Torquato Tasso, Elective Affinities, From my Life: Poetry and Truth (Goethe's Autobiography in 4 Volumes), and his large collection of poetry.

There are a couple of guys I think have bodies of work equal to Goethe's. Ovid had his Metamorphoses which I'd place alongside Faust for greatness, then he had the Amores, Heroides, Ars Amatoria, Cures for Love, Tristia, Fasti, and other minor works. Chaucer wrote Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde, The Book of the Duchess, the House of Fame, and the Parliament of Foules. Milton has Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes, Comus, Areopagitica, Lycidas, as well as various sonnets and psalms. Tasso and Spenser are pretty powerful.

Victor Hugo is another match I'd make for Goethe. His novels are far more beloved than Goethes. Between Les Miserables and the Hunchback of Notre Dame there can be no comparison to Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship or Elective Affinities. In addition, he wrote a number of good plays: Hernani, Cromwell, Ruy Blas, Lucrece Borgia, Torquemada, and Le Roi S'Amuse was even adapted by Verdi into the opera Rigoletto. Hugo is also a a master poet: Odes and Diverse Poems, Odes and Ballads, The Orientals, The Chastisements, The Contemplations, and The Legend of the Ages. The man was a triple threat and highly prolific.



Hölderlin and Novalis are towering poets of the Romantic era, every bit equal to Pushkin.

I agree that they are all very good, but what work of Holerlin or Novalis would you say was equal to Eugene Onegin? Pushkin also has major dramas and prose fiction to his credit Boris Godinov, The Queen of Spades, The Captain's Daughter. They reminded me of Tolstoy the prose style was so good.


Kafka might not rival Dostoevski, but he surely rivals Checkoff. Arguably his truncated short fictions are among the most central works of Modernism... to such an extent that his very name has been employed as an adjective: Kafkaesque.

I wouldn't give Kafka the prize for short fiction as long as Hemingway, De Maupassant, Poe, Akutagawa, and Borges are around. But what makes Chekhov great is primarily his plays. The Cherry Orchard, The Seagull, Uncle Vanye, and Three Sisters are probably more important than The Lady with the Dog. A better match for him there would be Ibsen, who fairly crushes him in the drama department.


That leaves Dostoevsky. Hermann Hesse might not be a rival for him... even though Hesse's oeuvre is severely hampered by the fact that his poetry... which Thomas Mann argued was his finest achievement... is largely unknown outside of Germany. But what of Hesse & Mann? The Russians have some brilliant poets in the 20th century including Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Osip Mandelshtam, and Boris Pasternak... the latter of whom is generally acknowledged as the greatest of them all. Yet none can rival Rilke.

Or Cavafy, Eliot, Neruda, and Lorca.


France vs Russia? I would argue that this would be a blow out. Only the British in the West might rival them.

Or if we are going to consider literature from all time periods there are the Ancient Greeks, the Romans, the Tang Chinese, Sanskrit, and medieval Persian. Instead of simply putting Proust or Cervantes up against Tolstoy for greatest novelist we might add Cao Xueqin or Luo Guanzhong.

[JCamilo]

I do not know if Tchkehov is mostly renowed due his plays. When the english modernists talk about him, they metion more often his short stories. When Hemingway laments that Tchekhov was married with Medicine, he says Tchekhov wrote a handful of short stories that were perfect and didnt mention plays. Futhermore, Tchekhov status as short story writer is considerable, often listed alongside Maupassant, Poe, Borges,kafka and cia. while his plays, as good as they are, were not the exactly the same status.

[phillipgr]

Wow, I must remark, I am delighted witht he discussion and dialouge running through this thread. By all means, continue, and I shall read/observe - for I am out of my league haha.

[iverson]

that is complicated. history reason and so on. well, be honest, i do little thing about this.

[tonywalt]

Dostoevsky and Tolstoy do create imbalance, but in total weight of talent Russia is no greater or lesser.

I can easily be swayed, because it's a very subjective topic.

[kelby_lake]

Kafka might not rival Dostoevski, but he surely rivals Checkoff. Arguably his truncated short fictions are among the most central works of Modernism... to such an extent that his very name has been employed as an adjective: Kafkaesque.

Chekhov has also spawned an adjective: Chekhovian. Mainly thrown about when discussing theatre.

Kafka is important to Modernism but Chekhov is important to Naturalism.

[WyattGwyon]

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]

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.

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.

[Mr.lucifer]

Doestosvky is the best cause i say so. Tolstoy is overrated because he bored me, even though he has a good measure of influence on western literature.

[stlukesguild]

Kafka is important to Modernism but Chekhov is important to Naturalism.

"Kafkaesque" is a term that exists beyond the literary world. It has become somewhat synonymous with "Surreal" although Surrealism often suggests something fantastic (ala Dali) where Kafka's fits more within the merger of the mundane and the absurd (ala Magritte). His name is connected in many ways with the absurdity and inhumanity of modern Bureaucracy. I cannot help but think of him when I look at a painting like this:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3523/5708378935_176f465332_b.jpg

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2166/5708945526_174321193f_b.jpg

Of course I wouldn't underestimate Checkoff... although I tend to prefer his marvelous short stories to his plays. My favorite Russian tale, however, might be that most Kafka-esque tale by Gogol: The Nose... made even more memorable as an opera by Shostakovitch.

[stlukesguild]

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".

[JCamilo]

Oh, without quesiton. Kafka knew and owned Dostoievisky book, often mentioning Gogol like Crime and Punishment. He has too much formal traits, not just the storyline plot. I think he mentions reading gogol essays to Max Brood and also that General Inspector was the finest play. Plus, at that time, Russians are already getting popular in the english world, germany was the bridge and a closer link, I have no doubt Kafka could get a gogol.

I do not think this imply that the fantastic of Kafka was necessarily born from Gogol (but the contept for burocracy yes), considering the source of gogol fantastic was german and closeby to kafka.

[mortalterror]

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 actually quite enjoy these types of debates. I wouldn't mind having more of them; but like most discussions, whatever the subject, the quality is largely dependent upon the intellectual level of the speakers involved. When Plutarch does it, it's a masterpiece. When I do it, it's something less. That doesn't mean that I don't have a deep and abiding curiosity or opinions about which writers are best at their respective crafts: Yeats vs Eliot, Goethe vs Hugo, Milton vs Tasso, Petrarch vs Chaucer, Baudelaire vs Whitman, Euripides vs Racine, Dickens vs Dostoyevski, Cervantes vs Tolstoy, etc. The whole history of western literature is based upon agon or contest. Supposedly, it's this constant striving with one another, each attempting to be the best, which motivates and drives us to higher and higher levels of achievement. How could that be tedious?

Because of this thread, I went out and read The Death of Ivan Ilyich the other day, and I don't even like Tolstoy. I just wanted a refresher on what his writing style looked like. It had me thinking about certain parallel themes in Thomas Mann's Death in Venice. The debate between Tolstoy's War and Peace versus Flaubert's Madame Bovary for best novel got me thinking about Chinese literature, because they have these great sprawling massive novels like War and Peace or In Search of Lost Time, but I haven't seen their trim flawless Madame Bovary, and I wondered if they had one. I read a bit more of their poetry as I thought about it and I wondered where they were hiding their epics. They have giant plays and giant novels, so where are their giant poems? Every other society has them, so why not the Chinese?

Unlike JBI or Stlukesguild, I do find these discussions stimulating.

[JCamilo]

But, the real question... how much less than Plutarch ? :D

[mortalterror]

But, the real question... how much less than Plutarch ? :D

Quite a bit, I'm afraid.

Whom shall I set so great a man to face?
Or whom oppose? Who's equal to the place?
-Aeschylus

If I were to name a proper opponent for Plutarch, the great biographer, it would have to either be Giorgio Vasari or Dr. Samuel Johnson.

[Mr.lucifer]

Personally. I'd prefer debating who'd win in a fight.

[JCamilo]

Well, Mortal have seen Kung fu movies, which Plutarch has no idea what is... so I think he has an advantage...

[Sano]

Personally. I'd prefer debating who'd win in a fight.

This. Dostoevsky does look to be stronger than Flaubert, so I'd bet on him.

[JBI]

I actually quite enjoy these types of debates. I wouldn't mind having more of them; but like most discussions, whatever the subject, the quality is largely dependent upon the intellectual level of the speakers involved. When Plutarch does it, it's a masterpiece. When I do it, it's something less. That doesn't mean that I don't have a deep and abiding curiosity or opinions about which writers are best at their respective crafts: Yeats vs Eliot, Goethe vs Hugo, Milton vs Tasso, Petrarch vs Chaucer, Baudelaire vs Whitman, Euripides vs Racine, Dickens vs Dostoyevski, Cervantes vs Tolstoy, etc. The whole history of western literature is based upon agon or contest. Supposedly, it's this constant striving with one another, each attempting to be the best, which motivates and drives us to higher and higher levels of achievement. How could that be tedious?

Because of this thread, I went out and read The Death of Ivan Ilyich the other day, and I don't even like Tolstoy. I just wanted a refresher on what his writing style looked like. It had me thinking about certain parallel themes in Thomas Mann's Death in Venice. The debate between Tolstoy's War and Peace versus Flaubert's Madame Bovary for best novel got me thinking about Chinese literature, because they have these great sprawling massive novels like War and Peace or In Search of Lost Time, but I haven't seen their trim flawless Madame Bovary, and I wondered if they had one. I read a bit more of their poetry as I thought about it and I wondered where they were hiding their epics. They have giant plays and giant novels, so where are their giant poems? Every other society has them, so why not the Chinese?

Unlike JBI or Stlukesguild, I do find these discussions stimulating.

There is a difference. The bulk of Western literature is not based on saying who is better, but on comparing to show strengths and weaknesses, especially against a theoretical ideal of one sort or another - that's what we call, after all, history and evaluation.

So when someone like Vasari does it in his lives of the artists, he does it with the simple idea in mind that he will create a tradition (somewhat trivially albeit) from a classical precedent, and then expand on development, theoretical views of art, and then comparison of artists, as a way of demonstrating artwork (throwing in anecdotal and biography of course).

The idea of based on contest seems a half truth, it is more to be based on comparison than direct competitiveness.

[kelby_lake]

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

They may not be perfect novels but they do have something about them. I think that it's practically impossible for a novel to be structurally perfect- there's bound to be some pretty passages that are ultimately unnecessary- but the tone and emotions it provokes can be almost perfect.

[stlukesguild]

They may not be perfect novels but they do have something about them. I think that it's practically impossible for a novel to be structurally perfect- there's bound to be some pretty passages that are ultimately unnecessary- but the tone and emotions it provokes can be almost perfect.

I am not suggesting that they are aesthetic failures any more than Don Quixote... or Shakespeare, for that matter, who is sometimes faulted for his digressions as opposed to Racine.

[WyattGwyon]

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.


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.


Oh okay, though I am quite inclined to agree with your rebuttal, I'll explain some of my thinking starting with the easy bits. The list of Russian authors at the end was to suggest that a discussion aspiring to a comprehensive comparison of Russian literature with that of other cultures should perhaps not ignore so many important authors.

JCamilo has adequately addressed the Kafka and Gogol issue. I will only add a concrete example — Kafka: Man wakes up to find himself an insect. Attempts to go about his business despite this distressing development (and without addressing the deep metaphysical questions one would think might be foremost in his mind.) Gogol: Man wakes up to find his nose is missing. Attempts to go about his business despite this distressing development (and without addressing the deep metaphysical questions one would think might be foremost in his mind.) The second description is of the beginning of The Nose; you know Kafka. It's obvious, no?

Perfection and Hugo: Notre Dame de Paris contains two large digressions. But since they are discreet chapters, there would be no point in editing them out. One simply skips them, just as one skips the every-artwork-that-ever-had-a-whale-as-its-subject chapter in Moby Dick. I would suggest it was expected and conventional to do so. Otherwise, the novel has nothing extra, nothing wasted. The sheer genius of the opening scene, wherein virtually every one of the novel's characters is introduced in the same public setting, the perfect unity of theme and story (spider/fly/sun — Frollo/Esmeralda/Phoebus), the clockwork unfolding of the intricate plot, the sheer poetry of the descriptions. I could go on . . .

Les Miserables is a tougher nut. But consider just the biggest digression, the description of the Battle of Waterloo. It is brilliant in its own right as a historical document but the reason it is novelistically brilliant is that it is all a set up to put Thernadier's role in the battle (picking the pockets of corpses) in relief. Thernadier's self-aggrandizement becomes the butt of a cosmic joke. It's hilarious and devastatingly effective. As for the sewers of Paris: Once again, skip it. It would be conventional to do so. Otherwise . . . well I don't think I need defend the novel's widely acknowledged qualities, many of which it holds in common with Notre Dame de Paris.

In short, I don't think the kind of conventional digressions found in these works count against novelistic perfection.

I will address the rest of the issues in another post as this one is getting long. Stay tuned . . .




France vs Russia? I would argue that this would be a blow out. Only the British in the West might rival them. Proust in surely every bit the equal to Tolstoy... and if he weren't we could throw in Zola for good measure. Flaubert could dispense with Dostoevsky... and if he had any difficulty we'd always have Balzac to back him up. That would leave Victor Hugo... not only the novelist, but the towering critic and poet to do away with Pushkin. Checkoff? Moliere and Cornielle can handle him... and we still have Racine, Jean Genet, Beaumarchais, and half a dozen other major playwrights. What does this leave the Russians? A half dozen 20th century poets (are they any match for Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarme, Rimbaud, Ronsard, and easily a dozen other major poets? Bely, Bulgakov, Solzhenitsyn, and Turgenev vs Montaigne, Rousseau, and Voltaire? With La Fontaine, Stendhal, Maupassant, Valery, Sartre, Camus, Rabelais, Alfred Jarry, Andre Breton, Paul Eluard, and at least several dozen others left in reserve. If the Napoleonic invasion had been a war of French literature vs the Russians the outcome would have been quite different.

Okay, I will indulge this game a bit.

Re: The comparison of Flaubert and Dostoyevsky.
First of all, this seems a dreadful category error to me. Two completely different conceptions of novelistic aesthetics. On one hand, polished perfection of expression in which every word is labored over. The aesthetics of poetry foisted on a foreign domain one might argue. Dostoyevsky would have found this whole notion tedious and absurd and to avoid even thinking about it he attributed the prose of most of his major novels to naive narrators within the novel (Devils, Brothers Karamazov, Adolescent, many shorter works as well). He had bigger fish to fry. Like revolutionizing the process of characterization (Rhav: "the first novelist to have fully accepted and dramatized the principle of uncertainty or indeterminacy in the presentation of character") and the relation between author and subject (Bakhtin: the dialogic stance, polyphony, heteroglosia.) A whole new conceptual vocabulary had to be generated to even describe Dostoyevsky's innovations. The psychological realism resulting from these (and other) innovations influenced or cast a shadow over countless later novelists, dramatists, and writers of screen plays. Can anything remotely like this be said of Flaubert? If influence is a relevant criterion, there is no comparison.

Proust and Tolstoy? Similar category error. Same outcome. Bely is probably a more apt comparison. If I ever finish his seven novels I'll be in a position to render an opinion on how he stacks up.

One final comment: You seem to know your French literature much better than your Russian, hence, I suspect, the failure to mention numerous important Russian novelists and poets. If you insist on running your war game, you might want to avoid Napoleon's errors: Understand the lay of the land a bit more thoroughly, don't send your troupes into a foreign domain they don't comprehend and with which they will have no idea how to deal (alluding here to whole new vistas of theory and aesthetics), and more fully assess the depth of your opponent's reserves.

This being said, I would be hard-pressed to render an opinion on the general issue of French versus Russian literature. But then I'm a pacifist in this regard and love both.

One more thing: My answers on perfection and Hugo, Kafka, etc. ended up in a response to JBI above.

[JCamilo]

Look, the problem is that there is a story about a man who sundenly wakes up and find himself sick, poor, attacked by his family and friends and abadoned by God. It is Job. Kafka knew this one as well. Of course, I wont, after mentioning Kafka's closest friend afirmation dismiss a link between Kafka and Gogol. It is not just the fantastic (which both belong to the romantic germanic tradition anyways) but also the ironic criticism of burocracy. One could point Kafka's jewish style against Gogol (and general russian) anti-semetism, but then, Kafka is mofe jew when he denies it. The thing, is that sometimes the precussor is not exactly better. Oscar Wilde is a precussor of Borges, Charlotte Bronte of Virginia Woolf, Marlowe of Shakespeare, etc. Showing a link between Kafka and Gogol only shows a link between Kafka and Gogol. Nothing else.

As Dostoievisky and Flaubert? Why not? It is not wonder both are precussors of Joyces, Woolfs, etc. Because there is strength in both. What about the cynical view of society (of course, with Flaubert a violent negation and Dostoievisky a christian-socialist mix), the work with their voice hidding behind every character? All depends the point of view, but I would deny Dostoievisky would find Flaubert boring. The closest we can have as novelist is Tolstoy and Dostoievisky admired the count and many times complained he would write as him if he had the time the count had.

About perfection, this is silly. If a huge work is perfect and also brillant (i would say some works are perfect, but just normal.) it is the Comedy. And it is not perfect. Hugo is very good, that is all.

[L€lä RËmØ MÅðçÂ]

I love to read japanese books, not only the manga. I also tend to love spanish.

[WyattGwyon]

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?



My distrust and low opinion of perfection (I didn't say anything about perfectionism I don't think) is part of an intuitive sense of novelistic aesthetics that this discussion may help me to refine. The main issue is this: Beautiful, poetic prose, word-polishing, whatever you want to call it—that quality in the name of which Nabokov (Essays on Russian Literature) laid Dostoyevsky low and elevated Turgenev—the very quality Nabokov cultivated in his own prose and for which he rated Bely's Petersburg as one of the four greatest works of 20thc. literature, has never struck me as an essential value in the composition of novels. In poetry, certainly, but not in narrative literature. To cite an extreme example: Consider Gaddis's JR. It is virtually all dialogue and probably more than half of it is in sentence fragments or ludicrously ungrammatical. Nary a polished sentence throughout. And yet it is a masterpiece of a novel. It records with frightening precision the tenor of its times, the modes of expression adopted by many of its inhabitants, and the state of their consciousnesses. These, to me, are, arguably, more essential qualities one should expect from novels. Not that I mind poetic prose. Petersburg, in the excellent English translation I read, was gorgeously poetic and a great novel by the values I consider more central as well. "Give me chaos and the true expression of life as it is spoken and lived and save the poetry for . . . well, poetry," is a statement I don't even really believe but which I nevertheless feel like shouting when I read many novels with flawless poetic prose.

And yes, the car chases and explosions in Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Hugo are vastly preferable to flowers and ballerinas.



All depends the point of view, but I would deny Dostoievisky would find Flaubert boring. The closest we can have as novelist is Tolstoy and Dostoievisky admired the count and many times complained he would write as him if he had the time the count had.

You misunderstood me. I wasn't saying Dostoyevsky would find Flaubert boring, I was saying he would have found writing in that style intolerable—perhaps even if he was so disposed and capable of it.

[JCamilo]

I dont disagree the polishing of language is not a prime element of novels or romances. I doubt Stlukes would, as he know so well Borges and his critic towards Cervantes, exactly due to that. I do not think it is even the prime of poems (after the is poems and romances together), but I won't deny that a Novel gets better if the prime elements where better treated by the writer. Now, Dostoievisky is no Proust or Flaubert, but he is hardly dense. Brothers K advantage of Madame Bovary is that the language is better treated in action with the characters, Madame B advantage is that language is better treated as structure. In this; neither are perfect (and both prime suspects of greatest novel ever. Nobody calling it would be insane.).

When Borges got older he gave up the claim Quevedo would write a Better quixote. He said something like "That was the only Quixote possible". Nabokov is attacking Dostoievisky style (and with some reason) but frankly, those things do not move a single line from Brother K towards perfect. It is close as it could be. As some point the second part of Lolita is poorer, but what they do not see, the second part had to be that way for the first Part make any sense. Nakobok was a prisioner of his style. It had to be that way.

I would lay to say the greatest stylist of Russian literature is Chekhov and nobody else. Seems to me that he had to write short stories to allow his style to not get those flaw that a romance or novel would bring to it, when people would think his style was superior to his novel. His solution to combine Dostoievisky and Tolstoy was this one. Not fighting with them, being something anew. And fully aware, style is substance.

[sarsnake]

I would say that you haven't read much since Russian lit is mostly known for negative, unfinished endings and downright depressing vibe. Sure, Crime and Punishment ends well, but I wouldn't say it's a Hollywood type of happy go lucky novel. In fact, Dostoyevsky's style is quite heavy and depressing to many people.
Turgenev's "A House of Gentlefolk" doesn't end well, neither does Eugene Onegin or anything written by Chekhov, or Anna Karenina (I mean she kills herself!).

So, read these before passing a wrong judgement.

Couple of things, I read Russian fluently as it's my first language, so I have few thoughts to add here. Pushkin loses a lot being translated simply because Russian language is very rich compared to most languages out there (I speak three); Pushkin's strength is mostly in language and rhyme use which is lost when you translate it to English (a language which is more logical, concise and less expressive than Russian). Pushkin really shines in Russian, and unless one is able to read Russian they will never know it. He is also responsible for a Russian language reform and hence highly regarded in Russia from a linguistics point of view.
Not to diminish his achievements in any way, I just wanted to point out that he does not benefit from translation at all.

Next, none of the Russian authors benefit from being translated (frankly, I don't think any authors do). Because translation inevitably loses the original "hue", it always does.

And lastly, literature is an emotional thing; it depends what touches any given reader so it's impossible to declare that someone is better than others. It just depends on the reader and what they find better for them; so this argument is kind of futile.

What I like about most of the Russian authors, especially Chekhov and Bulgakov, is that no word is wasted, so to speak. Every word is carefully placed there. Chekhov can express million emotions with one short sentence. My personal preference leans towards densely packed reading, as opposed to Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath where there are 10 pages describing a turtle crossing the road....to me it's boring. But then it's my personal preference. I will take a one page Chekhov story over it any day.

I also don't get Flaubert's and Dostoyevsky comparison. Flaubert's most known work is Madame Bovary, great book, but I would not put it on the same level as Crime and Punishment, nor in style, subject or language. In fact, to me it's like comparing a soap opera to a Chekhov story. Again, it's my personal preference, but I think majority of litetary critics would not put Flaubert on the same level as Dostoyevsky.

[mal4mac]

But simply put, my father grew up in Israel, there were lots of Russians even before the big post-soviet wave of immigrants, and they brought with them their literature - War and Peace was translated. Englishmen had a political presence there, but their acceptance from my understanding was more lukewarm...

Please add smileys when using irony! This was a late chapter in the English retreat from empire and was hardly lukewarm, ask the British soldiers who were blown up. You might argue the British oppression was lukewarm (compared to Hitler...)

As repeated in Andrew Marr's excellent History of the World, being televised on BBC at the moment, Hitler was totally perplexed with Britain's treatment of Gandhi, "Why don't they just shoot, him?"

Still, oppression is oppression. Do the oppressed praise the literature of the oppressors?

Maybe Russian authors were more accepted in the World because, pre-Communism, Russia didn't aspire to world domination - they had Siberia to expand into...

The Russians have been blessed by pretty good translators, in the UK, from the beginning - Garnett, the Maude's, etc.


.... English (a language which is more logical, concise and less expressive than Russian).

... I also don't get Flaubert's and Dostoyevsky comparison. Flaubert's most known work is Madame Bovary, great book, but I would not put it on the same level as Crime and Punishment, nor in style, subject or language. In fact, to me it's like comparing a soap opera to a Chekhov story. Again, it's my personal preference, but I think majority of litetary critics would not put Flaubert on the same level as Dostoyevsky.

The language of Shakespeare less expressive? You need to back that up with more than "I speak three languages". I can't remember serious polyglots, like Steiner or Nabakov saying such a thing.

I've read Flaubert and Dostoevsky in translation and found both to be excellent in style and subject.

You need to back these statements with some (very) strong arguments, at the moment they just appear like outpourings from Putin's propaganda bureau...

[Alexander III]

Maybe Russian authors were more accepted in the World because, pre-Communism, Russia didn't aspire to world domination - they had Siberia to expand into...



I dont really feel like jumping into this discussion, but this is a huge historical inaccuracy. Imperial russia, particularly in the second half of the 19th century was a huge imperial threat. They were expanding into afghanistan and the english developed their entire strategy in the east to counter attack russia as they were scared they would attempt to steal India from the English. Furthermore Russia was having huge tensions between Japan and the United states for naval dominance of the pacific.

And to look at the first half of the 19th century, let us not forget the Tzar personal lead his army through paris and occupied it. Something which the majority of bonaprtists of the time, never forgave russia for. And most Monarchists never forgot the debit they owed to the tsar.

[Greenazure]

if u have mastered chinese, u will c how supernovaous its literature is! Cao Xueqin!!!!

[mal4mac]

I dont really feel like jumping into this discussion, but this is a huge historical inaccuracy. Imperial russia, particularly in the second half of the 19th century was a huge imperial threat. They were expanding into afghanistan and the english developed their entire strategy in the east to counter attack russia as they were scared they would attempt to steal India from the English. Furthermore Russia was having huge tensions between Japan and the United states for naval dominance of the pacific.

And to look at the first half of the 19th century, let us not forget the Tzar personal lead his army through paris and occupied it. Something which the majority of bonaprtists of the time, never forgave russia for. And most Monarchists never forgot the debit they owed to the tsar.

This hardly amounts to "world domination". They may have been a modest threat in some areas, but were they anything more than modestly successful? "The British were petrified at the idea of a Russian invasion of their crown colony of India, though Russia – badly defeated by Japan in the Russo-Japanese war and weakened by internal rebellion – could not realistically afford a showdown against Britain there.

The British were petrified at the idea of a Russian invasion of their crown colony of India, though Russia – badly defeated by Japan in the Russo-Japanese war and weakened by internal rebellion – could not realistically afford a showdown against Britain there.

Did they take Afghanistan? Did they expand anywere else? Anyway, these were pretty local affairs, did the the sun never set on their empire? Even with that long stretch of Siberia? Belgium seems a more successful World Imperialist - think of the Congo in Africa; also the Dutch - the East India company.

Russia badly defeated by Japan in the Russo-Japanese war and weakened by internal rebellion could not realistically afford a showdown against Britain in India:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Game

Note, the title, it was looked at as a Game, hardly a title you would give to a serious threat.

They suffered a massive defeat at the hands of the Japanese navy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Japanese_War

[kelby_lake]

I think that Russian Literature definitely deserves its place in the world literature canon but so does French Literature. English Literature has a place there, maybe German Literature as well, but I can't think of a big name German writer in the way that Tolstoy, Hugo and Shakespeare are. Then we have classical literature, in particular the Ancient Greeks. Considering the classical influence on many great novels, maybe the prize goes to the Greeks?

[mal4mac]

I think that Russian Literature definitely deserves its place in the world literature canon but so does French Literature. English Literature has a place there, maybe German Literature as well, but I can't think of a big name German writer in the way that Tolstoy, Hugo and Shakespeare are. Then we have classical literature, in particular the Ancient Greeks. Considering the classical influence on many great novels, maybe the prize goes to the Greeks?

What about Goethe? Rather than Hugo, what about Montaigne for top Frenchman?

[kelby_lake]

What about Goethe? Rather than Hugo, what about Montaigne for top Frenchman?

I'm not well-read in German Lit so I'll take your word for it on Goethe. Wasn't Montaigne a critic rather than a fiction writer?

[Paulclem]

Both Tolstoy and Doestoyevsky have benefitted from historical impetus; Tolstoys works were published in the 20th century during WW2 to inspire the troops and instil them with the Russian spirit that he wreferred to. Doestoyevsky, on the other hand does represent the tradition of the dissident voice with House of the Dead and crime and Punishment. This tradition continued with Solzhenitsyn through the 20th century. Of course they are both excellent, but the supreme exemplars of the craft?They are up there with the best.

[Literature5]

I've noticed oppression, though obviously unacceptable, has more often yielded the unparalleled art and expression that we hold highest. Its no secret that the Russians (though perhaps not Tolstoy specifically) haven't had the greatest of histories.

Hence, "I know why the caged bird sings."

[mal4mac]

I'm not well-read in German Lit so I'll take your word for it on Goethe. Wasn't Montaigne a critic rather than a fiction writer?

I'm not a Goethe expert, I've only read "Faust part 1" and "The Sorrows of Young Werther", and only in translation. But if you read any works on the literary canon, Goethe is usually mentioned in the same breath as Dante, Homer, Cervantes, Tolstoy and Shakespeare. Harold Bloom suggests that picking the top Frenchman is very difficult, as there are several possibilities, including Hugo. Montaigne is famous for his "Essays", which include, but are far more than just criticism, so I think it's a bit unfair to call him "just" a critic. But criticism can also rise to the level of literature, Dr Johnson's work, for instance.


Tolstoys works were published in the 20th century during WW2 to inspire the troops and instil them with the Russian spirit that he wreferred to.

Did that happen in other countries? War & Peace as propaganda :) I can imagine Churchill reading it while Hitler sent his forces into the Russian winter... Rieu read his translations of Homer to his family while the bombs were dropping on London, and turned them into Penguins first best sellers just after WW II. I guess any great works dealing with war did well in the 20th century due to historical impetus...

[kelby_lake]

Nah, I would just go all out for Hugo. Sure, there's a lot of good French writers (don't forget there's the playwrights as well), but nobody has written anything like The Hunchback of Notre Dame and probably never will. How many writers actually preserved a piece of architecture? And I haven't started Les Mis yet but that's meant to be even better. Tolstoy has the same problem. Which is better- Anna Karenina or War and Peace?

[Paulclem]

Did that happen in other countries? War & Peace as propaganda :) I can imagine Churchill reading it while Hitler sent his forces into the Russian winter... Rieu read his translations of Homer to his family while the bombs were dropping on London, and turned them into Penguins first best sellers just after WW II. I guess any great works dealing with war did well in the 20th century due to historical impetus...

I've not seen it referred to in the same way. The Russians published excerpts for their soldiers, and perhaps had them read out too. Perhaps these were in the Red Star, the Red army's newspaper. Vassily Grossmann - a red Army correspondant and novellist - referred to it. Of course it was the perfect reading for soldiers describing as it does the Russian spirit, (whose hijacking by the Soviets would no doubt have made Tolstoy turn in his grave), and the defeat of Napolean's forces in 1812. It had a direct link to the Nazi Barbarossa campaign in Russia.

[cafolini]

I've not seen it referred to in the same way. The Russians published excerpts for their soldiers, and perhaps had them read out too. Perhaps these were in the Red Star, the Red army's newspaper. Vassily Grossmann - a red Army correspondant and novellist - referred to it. Of course it was the perfect reading for soldiers describing as it does the Russian spirit, (whose hijacking by the Soviets would no doubt have made Tolstoy turn in his grave), and the defeat of Napolean's forces in 1812. It had a direct link to the Nazi Barbarossa campaign in Russia.

I don't see any link between Napoleon and the Barbarosa launch. Napoleon was a French shot. The Roman Catholics were probably getting ready to coronate Hitler as the new Charlemagne (the third Reich). In order to do it they made themselves independent from Rome and used Mussolini for controlling the internal italy and link with Hitler, while they restablished the Carlos V empire in Spain as National Catholicism, later used by Franco to direct the civil war. It is erroneous to think that Hitler was an atheist. According to him he was actually doing the work God demanded from him and said it several times very clearly. For his cooperation, Franco was to receive dominion over colonies in Africa among which was Gibraltar. But as the Roman Catholics saw that Hitler was going to lose, Franco exited the deal in a meeting with Hitler in Hendaya, saying that Spain would support him morally, but it was too weak financially to cooperate with military efforts (the original deal). To accomodate themselves to the new situation, the Roman Catholics also claimed that the Nazis had gotten upset and bombed The Vatican, of which there is no evidence. Meantime, Mussolini was allowed to continue, unaware of the loss. Eventually he and his girlfriend realized and tried to escape, but were captured by partisans, taken to Milan, executed, and exposed in the streets as enemies of the Roman Catholic church.

[stlukesguild]

I've noticed oppression, though obviously unacceptable, has more often yielded the unparalleled art and expression that we hold highest. Its no secret that the Russians (though perhaps not Tolstoy specifically) haven't had the greatest of histories.

Hence, "I know why the caged bird sings."

There often is this illusion... perhaps due to the romantic notion that an artist must suffer to create an art of depth... but just how much truth is there to it? Looking at this century we discover how the Soviets and the Nazis effectively destroyed artistic cultures that were flourishing prior to their seizing power. The arts in Classical Greece, Rome, Renaissance Italy, 19th century France and England, etc... were born in wealthy, powerful nations where the arts were supported and valued. No culture is without censorship... whether explicit (imposed by church and state) or implicit (implied by self-appointed moral critics and the economy). But wealth and power and support for the arts should not be confused with liberal politics, peace and harmony:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cydkTy6GmFA

[Paulclem]

I don't see any link between Napoleon and the Barbarosa launch. Napoleon was a French shot. The Roman Catholics were probably getting ready to coronate Hitler as the new Charlemagne (the third Reich). In order to do it they made themselves independent from Rome and used Mussolini for controlling the internal italy and link with Hitler, while they restablished the Carlos V empire in Spain as National Catholicism, later used by Franco to direct the civil war. It is erroneous to think that Hitler was an atheist. According to him he was actually doing the work God demanded from him and said it several times very clearly. For his cooperation, Franco was to receive dominion over colonies in Africa among which was Gibraltar. But as the Roman Catholics saw that Hitler was going to lose, Franco exited the deal in a meeting with Hitler in Hendaya, saying that Spain would support him morally, but it was too weak financially to cooperate with military efforts (the original deal). To accomodate themselves to the new situation, the Roman Catholics also claimed that the Nazis had gotten upset and bombed The Vatican, of which there is no evidence. Meantime, Mussolini was allowed to continue, unaware of the loss. Eventually he and his girlfriend realized and tried to escape, but were captured by partisans, taken to Milan, executed, and exposed in the streets as enemies of the Roman Catholic church.

I'm merely referring to the link between the respective invasions of Russia by napoleon in 1812 and the Nazis with their Barborossa campaign. that's the lnk.

[mande2013]

Within France, Balzac is generally considered 'numero uno' among their literary giants, at least when it comes to prose. But then again, maybe I just watch too much French New Wave cinema. Either way, Balzac always comes before Hugo among French intellectuals, but oddly enough, the former seems somewhat neglected in the Anglosphere. Stendhal/Balzac/Flaubert is the nineteenth century narrative fiction triumvirate coupled with Baudelaire/Rimbaud/Verlaine as the poetry triumvirate. Zola, Hugo, and Dumas are respected, but they're generally placed on a second rung, at least in France it seems.

[Pen Name]

The original questioner pondered why Russian Literature was so prominent in the world.

The reason why most great Literature comes about, is usually that there is a swirl of literary activity in that location, Homer in Greece, Cervantes in Spain, Shakespeare in England, they were not in vacuums there was a lively literature around, but also they wrote prose that bordered on poetry, but also played with the words and strove to write well in a natural way.

Hence the disappearance of D.H. Lawrence versus Norman Douglas from the forums, they wrote pretentious claptrap.

A lot of the so called greats of Literature from any Country would be edited by today’s publishers, Frankenstein, Crime and Punishment could both benefit from the editors blue pencil, and I suspect many of you have thought that bit could be cut or shortened from even your favourite read, Homer and Shakespeare are about the only two I have read that could not do with some decent editing.

Also the themes of stories read by an International audience are usually International, and the stories are always about subjects that touch us in some way.

Agatha Christie, not great Literature, set in rural England, someone gets murdered in an English country house. Nothing International there I hear you say, most people do not live in large houses, however we live in neighbourhoods, and know a limited number of people, we gossip, and have a limited amount of philosophical views on the world, but like puzzles simply put.

Guess what most of Chrisite’s stories contain those elements and appeal to millions and are competently written so hence sell millions.

Crime and Punishment ponders the philosophy of a murderer, written well and has a good plot, although rather long it touches the soul and gives the reader things to think about as they go along.

That is what tends to bind all good writing.

I would agree that Russia does not have more than British Isles or France and Germany, but it certainly has more than most of the World. Great Literature thrives in good schooling, hence why USA has a lot of Literature from the late 19th & 20th Centuries.

Russia was late in getting widespread Education, which is why it suddenly blossomed when it did.

[JCamilo]

The reason why Shakespeare and Homer would not need any editing (sic!) is because they are heavily edited already.

[mal4mac]

Within France, Balzac is generally considered 'numero uno' among their literary giants, at least when it comes to prose. But then again, maybe I just watch too much French New Wave cinema. Either way, Balzac always comes before Hugo among French intellectuals...

There isn't a "standout Frenchman", as there is standout author, or two, in Greece, Spain, Germany, England, and Russia. I've just read "Old Man Goriot", reckoned by many to be Balzac's best novel, and, although I found it an excellent novel, I don't rate it above the best of Stendahl, Zola, Flaubert... And do any French authors compare to Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Goethe, Nietzsche, Homer, Plato, Shakespeare, Dickens, or Cervantes?

[mal4mac]

... the Nazis effectively destroyed artistic cultures that were flourishing prior to their seizing power.



I disagree. They certainly didn't destroy Karajan, or Thomas Mann, just two examples amongst many. Artistic culture continued to function very well... through "keeping ones head down" or "absconding". Who was better than Mann or Karajan in the stable democracies?

[phoenixtears]

When comparing worldwide literature, how do you take into account the difference in languages. Because surely a translated version can't be as good as the original, especially in the case of poetry. I personally believe poetry cannot be translated.

[Emil Miller]

I disagree. They certainly didn't destroy Karajan, or Thomas Mann, just two examples amongst many. Artistic culture continued to function very well... through "keeping ones head down" or "absconding". Who was better than Mann or Karajan in the stable democracies?

While I agree that National Socialism didn't destroy artistic culture in Germany, Herbert von Karajan and Thomas Mann are not ideal exemplars of the fact. Karajan was a noted supporter of the party and Mann left Germany and took American citizenship when Hitler became German chancellor . He would most likely have been imprisoned if not executed for his not completely covert homosexuality and he was married to a Jewess; on both counts that made him a highly suspect individual as far as the party was concerned.

[cafolini]

What do you mean when you say that the Nazi's did not destroy artistic culture in Germany. Don't be ridiculous. What was Degenerate Art? How many fell under that idiotic spell promoted originally by Plato?

[JCamilo]

There isn't a "standout Frenchman", as there is standout author, or two, in Greece, Spain, Germany, England, and Russia. I've just read "Old Man Goriot", reckoned by many to be Balzac's best novel, and, although I found it an excellent novel, I don't rate it above the best of Stendahl, Zola, Flaubert... And do any French authors compare to Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Goethe, Nietzsche, Homer, Plato, Shakespeare, Dickens, or Cervantes?

Voltaire, hugo, Balzac, Proust, Baudellaire, rimbaud, verlaine, Montaigne, Flaubert, Maupassant, Racine, Moliere, Rabelais... (Plus, not many people compare to Don Quixote or Homer) There is a reason french and not english replaced Latim among the writers and readers. They did a lot of works, in a lot of areas with imense quality. Only England did as much and for a long as french people and only because the english keep putting down french writers, it appears they have no giants. In terms of novels and romance in XIX they are clearly the masters being copied everywhere and Hugo had a clearly national hero status.

[mande2013]

Voltaire, hugo, Balzac, Proust, Baudellaire, rimbaud, verlaine, Montaigne, Flaubert, Maupassant, Racine, Moliere, Rabelais... (Plus, not many people compare to Don Quixote or Homer) There is a reason french and not english replaced Latim among the writers and readers. They did a lot of works, in a lot of areas with imense quality. Only England did as much and for a long as french people and only because the english keep putting down french writers, it appears they have no giants. In terms of novels and romance in XIX they are clearly the masters being copied everywhere and Hugo had a clearly national hero status.


I was going to say, it seems French literature tends to often be neglected in the Anglosphere in favor of the Russians, which is why it's hard sometimes to come up with a French writer who has the godlike status of Homer, Shakespeare, or even Dostoevsky. The French writers all seem to just blend right into one another, at least in the eyes of most Anglophones. As for Hugo having national herp status, that may have been true at the turn of the twentieth century, but these days Balzac is generally regarded as the superior artist of the two, at least that seems to be the case in France.

In any case, I think part of the Anglo-Saxon distaste for French literature can be attributed to the fact that it often wears its anti-bourgeois sentiments on its sleeve, and 'attacks on the bourgeoisie' don't often go down very well amongst Anglos.

[stlukesguild]

There isn't a "standout Frenchman", as there is standout author, or two, in Greece, Spain, Germany, England, and Russia. I've just read "Old Man Goriot", reckoned by many to be Balzac's best novel, and, although I found it an excellent novel, I don't rate it above the best of Stendahl, Zola, Flaubert... And do any French authors compare to Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Goethe, Nietzsche, Homer, Plato, Shakespeare, Dickens, or Cervantes?

Victor Hugo, Michel de Montaigne, Charles Baudelaire, and Proust... and undoubtedly mortal terror would add Racine.

[OrphanPip]

In any case, I think part of the Anglo-Saxon distaste for French literature can be attributed to the fact that it often wears its anti-bourgeois sentiments on its sleeve, and 'attacks on the bourgeoisie' don't often go down very well amongst Anglos.

I don't think there is a distaste for French literature in the English speaking world. French literature is by far the most frequently translated into English. Apart from a selection of 5-6 Russian authors, most Russian literature does not even get translated into English. In contrast, most of the major French classics from the middle ages to the present have been translated into English. The USA in particular has a long tradition of francophilia that continues well into the 21st century, which is evident in the ongoing obsession with French intellectuals in American academia.

I'd even go further to suggest that the average English speaker is far more likely to be familiar with The Hunchback, Candide, Cyrano de Bergerac, Charles Perrault's fairy tales, or The Little Prince than any of the Russian classics (other than the fact that War and Peace is quite long).

[hawthorns]

There isn't a "standout Frenchman", as there is standout author, or two, in Greece, Spain, Germany, England, and Russia. I've just read "Old Man Goriot", reckoned by many to be Balzac's best novel, and, although I found it an excellent novel, I don't rate it above the best of Stendahl, Zola, Flaubert... And do any French authors compare to Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Goethe, Nietzsche, Homer, Plato, Shakespeare, Dickens, or Cervantes?

First...:sosp:

Second...Yes, many.

[stlukesguild]

I disagree. They certainly didn't destroy Karajan, or Thomas Mann, just two examples amongst many. Artistic culture continued to function very well... through "keeping ones head down" or "absconding". Who was better than Mann or Karajan in the stable democracies?

Karajan was a conductor... not a composer... not the creator of music, but an interpreter. Brilliant as he was, Bruno Walter and Toscanini are just two names that pop to mind of equals in the world of conductors. Thomas Mann left Germany and wrote two further books of real note: Doctor Faustus and The Confessions of Felix Krull. Literature seems to have survived the Nazi destruction of German culture the best. Mann and Hesse have a number of solid heirs: Grass, Boll, Paul Celan, Ingebourg Bachmann, Friederich Durrenmatt, Max Frisch, etc... but compare this to before the war: Kafka, Robert Walser, Rilke, Georg Trakl, Gottfried Benn, Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, Bertolt Brecht, Frank Wedekind, Joseph Roth, Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, Hermann Broch, etc...

But let's look at music. Prior to the Nazis the Germans produced Mahler, Richard Strauss, Max Bruch, Joseph Rheinberger, Engelbert Humperdinck, Hans Pfitzner, Franz Schreker, Joseph Marx, Walter Braunfels, Egon Wellesz, Paul Hindemith, Karl Orff, Erich Korngold, Viktor Ullmann, Ernst Krenek, Kurt Weill, Othmar Schoeck, Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, Alexander Zemlinsky, Franz Lehár, Emmerich Kálmán... How many Austrian or German composers can you name after WWII? Stockhausen? Henze?

As for who was better than Mann or Karajan in the stable democracies... have you been drinking? How many French, American, and British composers should I name? How many French, British, and American poets and novelists? How many of the above writers were blacklisted by Hitler and had their books publicly burned? Hesse and Mann fled to Switzerland. Trakl, Rilke, and Kafka died before the Nazis came into power. Walter Benjamin fled from France to Spain where he committed suicide when he found that he was to be turned over to the Nazi authorities in France. Freud finally fled to Britain. Kafka, Freud and others undoubtedly would have ended up victims of the Holocaust.

The visual arts suffered even worse in Austria and Germany. The early 20th century saw a Germanic Renaissance in art. Vienna and Berlin became major art centers. The Jungenstil/Sessesion in Austria, Die Brucke, Der Blaue Reiter, the New Objectivity, Dada, and the Bauhaus were among the major artistic movements of the first half of the century. Among the Austro-German artists were Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Oscar Kokoschka, Adolf Loos, Otto Wagner, Franz Marc, E.L. Kirchner. Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Erich Heckel, Max Pechstein, Emil Nolde, Otto Dix, George Grosz, Max Becmann, Mies van der Rohe, Oscar Schlemmer, Max Ernst, Kurt Schwitters, Paul Klee, Joseph Albers, etc... German art after the war was almost wholly irrelevant. Not until the mid-1980s did any German artists begin to make a mark on the international art scene... and only one or two have shown any real lasting power.

[JCamilo]

I don't think there is a distaste for French literature in the English speaking world. French literature is by far the most frequently translated into English. Apart from a selection of 5-6 Russian authors, most Russian literature does not even get translated into English. In contrast, most of the major French classics from the middle ages to the present have been translated into English. The USA in particular has a long tradition of francophilia that continues well into the 21st century, which is evident in the ongoing obsession with French intellectuals in American academia.

I'd even go further to suggest that the average English speaker is far more likely to be familiar with The Hunchback, Candide, Cyrano de Bergerac, Charles Perrault's fairy tales, or The Little Prince than any of the Russian classics (other than the fact that War and Peace is quite long).

There is more a competition between french and english tradtions, with the french upper hand until the xix century in way. I would say a continual trade and a love and hate relationship with the need to stabilish the english superiority, we have the french neglected. For example, Hugo - mentioned here as a novelist, yet, his prime fame was as poet and he did had the goethe, tolstoy like status. French also love to behead kings, so they do not fail for the tradition carlyle like national hero writer.

It is however curious how they bring germans or russsians, late cultural centers, and forget the french. Which was one of the earlier national traditions born out of Italian literature and the only one that sustained its breath for centuries. Spain has Quixote, but after the lopes, etc, they were out of the game considerably.

[mande2013]

Well every European nation seems to have at least one great artist it can lay claim to, "backwaters" aside. I feel bad for the Czechs, as they seem to be the exception. If only Kafka had written in Czech. Dvorak has too many detractors, and Alphonse Mucha is a relatively minor figure. Also, their filmmakers pale in comparison to the 'greats' of France, Italy, and Japan.

[mortalterror]

There is more a competition between french and english tradtions, with the french upper hand until the xix century in way. I would say a continual trade and a love and hate relationship with the need to stabilish the english superiority, we have the french neglected. For example, Hugo - mentioned here as a novelist, yet, his prime fame was as poet and he did had the goethe, tolstoy like status. French also love to behead kings, so they do not fail for the tradition carlyle like national hero writer.

It is however curious how they bring germans or russsians, late cultural centers, and forget the french. Which was one of the earlier national traditions born out of Italian literature and the only one that sustained its breath for centuries. Spain has Quixote, but after the lopes, etc, they were out of the game considerably.
That's long bothered me. A little after the sixteen hundreds Spain seems to underachieve in literature compared to it's neighbors Britain and France. Germany plows all of it's energy into creating music. Italy does too to a lesser extent but also creates great food. Spain produces Goya and Velazquez in art, but that still doesn't feel like the focus of their culture. There's a missing weight when I think of them and I wonder if maybe they poured their excess artistic energy into dance or something.


Victor Hugo, Michel de Montaigne, Charles Baudelaire, and Proust... and undoubtedly mortal terror would add Racine.
Agreed, there are many stand out French writers. I'd add Guy De Maupassant, Villon, Rabelais, Balzac, Stendhal (though I can't stand him), Voltaire, Moliere, Alexander Dumas, Chretien de Troyes, Flaubert, Rimbaud, and the anonymous composer of the Song of Roland. I'd definitely say that Rabelais is a match for Cervantes, and Hugo is a match for Dickens or Goethe. When you look at Hugo's breathe of work it's astonishing. He's got great novels, great poetry, and great plays just like Goethe.

[mande2013]

In the 20th century, the Anglosphere dominates in the sphere of letters while exhibiting signs of life in the realm of modern art, as well, while Germany plows its energies into conquering all of Europe. Russia focuses its efforts on extending its communist sphere of influence while also contributing to the development of modern classical music along the way. The French get "humiliated" on the battlefield while being preoccupied with the musings of existential philosophy and 'cinema as art'. Spain produces the Dali, Lorca, Bunuel triumvirate.

[JBI]

In the 20th century, the Anglosphere dominates in the sphere of letters while exhibiting signs of life in the realm of modern art, as well, while Germany plows its energies into conquering all of Europe. Russia focuses its efforts on extending its communist sphere of influence while also contributing to the development of modern classical music along the way. The French get "humiliated" on the battlefield while being preoccupied with the musings of existential philosophy and 'cinema as art'. Spain produces the Dali, Lorca, Bunuel triumvirate.
The anglosphere but not the mother country. The 20th century is a dismal failure in letters for the British isles, who seem to have declined artistically with the wane of empire compared to the rising star of American authors. We should probably distinguish, since in all honesty, British and American literature are so very different.

The same could be said for Quebec and French literature, two very different traditions using the same language.

[mande2013]

The anglosphere but not the mother country. The 20th century is a dismal failure in letters for the British isles, who seem to have declined artistically with the wane of empire compared to the rising star of American authors. We should probably distinguish, since in all honesty, British and American literature are so very different.

The same could be said for Quebec and French literature, two very different traditions using the same language.

Um...Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett? George Orwell and Iris Murdoch also have defenders.

One could also add H.G. Wells, W.B. Yeats, and D.H. Lawrence, but I guess they're more turn of the century than truly 20th century.

I'm including Irish writers since you said the British Isles instead of merely the UK.

[JBI]

Um...Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett? George Orwell and Iris Murdoch also have defenders.

One could also add H.G. Wells, W.B. Yeats, and D.H. Lawrence, but I guess they're more turn of the century than truly 20th century.

I'm including Irish writers since you said the British Isles instead of merely the UK.

I don't count South Ireland, and as we note, those are mostly pre-second world war authors. Also, in the case of Orwell, I do not particularly consider him that good, and, he too, is more of a decline author.

As a pointed comparison, these guys remind me of the last breath of brilliance at the end of Tang China, before the world as people knew it simply came to an end - there is a sadness, and a decline, and a sort of narrative of loss trapped within much of Woolf and perhaps Lawrence too, and certainly Stevie Smith, Auden, etc, and even Orwell to an extent, whose works seem so embodied with a particular political frame to make them so quotable, and so unnecessary to read.

I think anybody would agree the 20th century is a century of Decline for England, who sees her role transformed from super-Empire to average in a rapid succession of revolutions and declines. The same could be said for much of post-WW2 Europe, Modernism is in a sense an Elegy, and post-modernism is a satire on the elegy.

This all can be linked to certain genre trends as well. The novel, in the sense, with its development and then decline, is the very body of national artistic identity. The 19th century being the great age of nationalism necessarily welcomed the great age of the novel. The 20th century being the great destruction caused by nationalism, and then the ebb of nationalist sentiment in most of the world, markedly is the time that the novel itself is brought into question, as the question of nation, and place in the world are hit with the idea of a post-nationalist, or globalized identity. If the novel and the "Great novel" especially in the British and American traditions, is the nationalist vision and genre, certainly the decline of Empire is reflected through the nausea and budding individualism celebrated and ridiculed in Modernist and early post-modernist works.

Basically we can say literature functions in two ways, one in celebrating a sort of superiority, or grand vision, as is the case in Virgil, Dante, Li Bai, Shakespeare, Petrarch and even Hugo, or on the flip side the literature of such a decline, mixed with a sort of social or philosophical realism and understanding of decline. The brutal dialog of Milton's Paradise Lost, as a sort of summary of the failure of the English revolution, and the restoration, or even T.S. Eliot. There is so much negativity there, that it is staggering, yet much beauty is found there.

Now, as nationalism has waned, we have seen a decline, as nationalism is growing rampant again in the world, we will see an increase in national sentiments in literature, particularly now that there is no concrete body of classical heritage that everybody shares - the loss of education in Latin and Greek classics basically destroyed any possibility of a united European cultural heritage. With that in place, it is only natural that the myths of culture and the occupations of writers will swoon with this new growth of nationalist sentiment growing out of the financial instabilities in Europe, and the political instabilities in East and South East Asia, will turn itself to a literature of Nation once again.

I see that in Chinese culture so very clearly, this new sort of cultural jingoism that even reflectively reevaluates authors as somewhat a part of a long national identity, as if Shakespeare's England, hypothetically has anything to do with contemporary England, the very ethnic shaping of culture has transformed so drastically that such an ethnic understanding of anything seems merely a dangerous political game.

[mande2013]

Virginia Woolf, unnecessary to read, really? Oh, nevermind, maybe I read your post wrong, and you simply meant that in reference to Orwell specifically. As for the rest of Europe, there were certainly signs of life well into the sixties, at least if you consider filmmaking a legitimate form of artistic expression, which I do. It does seem, however, that much of 20th century French literature post-Proust was focused more on philosophical musings than on pure artistic expression (i.e. Sartre, Camus, Genet, Gide, Malraux, Simone de Beauvoir, etc.). Someone like Alain Robbe-Grillet, on the other hand, was essentially a filmmaker who wrote novels in the same sense I seem to remember someone once saying Virginia Woolf was a poet who wrote novels.

I sometimes wonder if the artistic success of much of 20th century literature can be attributed to the presence of a certain void to be filled, since the Americans didn't have the sort of cultural legacy that could be taken for granted the way the English, French, Italians, Germans, or even Russians did. I know that may seem silly, but one has to start somewhere in terms of trying to hypothesize about a certain phenomenon.

As far as your comments regarding nationalism are concerned, most great artists don't fancy themselves bringing glory to the heritage of their home nation. They don't even think in those terms. It's the usually the nation that subsequently co-opts them for their own leverage. For instance, I was physically born and raised in the United States, but sometimes I feel as though I came out of the womb with one foot firmly planted in France, since my father's a born and bred Frenchman, making me eligible for French citizenship from birth, and I've been living in France for quite a while now. With that said, if I were to express myself artistically would I have to choose my allegiance? Who lays claim to Nabokov, Kafka, Conrad, T.S. Eliot, DeKooning, Bunuel, Van Gogh, Rothko, Godard, Handel, Beckett, Henry James, Ezra Pound, Chopin and a host of others?

P.S. I certainly wouldn't consider Time magazine to be a prominent intellectual authority, but I think looking at their list of the ten greatest books of all time says something about how literature from different parts of the world is embraced within the English-speaking world. Here's the count by number of included books per country:

Russia: 3
England: 2
France: 2
USA: 2

The tenth inclusion is Lolita, and I'm not sure whether one would want to attribute it exclusively to one nation or not.

[stlukesguild]

I think anybody would agree the 20th century is a century of Decline for England, who sees her role transformed from super-Empire to average in a rapid succession of revolutions and declines. The same could be said for much of post-WW2 Europe, Modernism is in a sense an Elegy, and post-modernism is a satire on the elegy.

Sometimes I suspect that your disdain for Britain is greater than that for the United States. Certainly, you exaggerate Britain's decline. No... Britain is no longer the world empire it once was... but "average"? Depending upon which measure is used, Britain ranks as either the 6th of 7th wealthiest nation in the world. Militarily, Britain is ranked 5th... and would move up into the 4th position if nuclear weaponry was considered. Certainly art is dependent upon the wherewithal to support the arts... but somehow I don't see Britain's fall from the dominant world empire to the 5th or 6th or 7th in the world as spelling doom and decline. I would not be surprised if the British actually invest far more (per capita) into financial support of the arts and education than the United States.

Certainly Britain's artistic achievements over the last century are nothing to be ashamed of. In terms of classical music, Britain probably ranks beneath the Russians and Austro-Germans... but stands rather close to the French and Americans. They probably rank number one when it comes to quality of orchestras and recording. If we look at pop music, only the United States may surpass Britain. Art? The French absolutely own the first half of the 20th century. It is generally accepted that the United States became the center of the art world after WWII. This is true in financial terms... but Britain has remained one of the major players on the contemporary art scene. Pop Art was a British, not an American, innovation. Artists such as Henry Moore, Francis Bacon, David Hockney, R.B. Kitaj, Sean Scully, Lucian Freud, Anish Kapoor, Jenny Saville, etc... have been among the most influential artists of our time... while Damien Hirst and the YBA's embraced by Charles Saatchi can not be ignored... even by those who despise all they stand for.

And what of British films?

The British contribution to 20th century literature is no less important. Does it surpass the literature of the United States over the course of the century? That's debatable. Certainly they rank along the Americans, French, Germans, Russians, and Spanish in terms of importance and achievement.

Basically we can say literature functions in two ways, one in celebrating a sort of superiority, or grand vision, as is the case in Virgil, Dante, Li Bai, Shakespeare, Petrarch and even Hugo, or on the flip side the literature of such a decline, mixed with a sort of social or philosophical realism and understanding of decline.

That's a rather gross simplification. Somehow I doubt that the intentions of all artists are to celebrate the rise of the
nation or of bemoan its decline. Is the wealth of Spanish poetry over the last century, and their contribution to the visual arts (Picasso, Dali, Antonio Lopez-Garcia, Antoni Tapies, Luis Buñuel, Joan Miro, etc...) nothing more than an elegy for an impotent former superpower?

[JBI]

It's not about ranks of economic development, or even military strength, it is about cultural influence, which no historian is going to dispute has been in decline in England.

Take Dickens for example - or even Byron before him - we are dealing with some of the most powerful and lasting artists of the world imagination, which have completely altered the literary history of not just England, but as diverse places as Russia and China - Pushkin, Tolstoy and Lu Xun. This is what I call the golden age of "British national literature", in a sense it is the fuel that Penguin Classics get paid for. It's what every common reader (who is not so common) generally thinks of when they think English literature, or English culture, not some expensive rather innovative but not mainstream known artists whose paintings people cannot identify, nor ever dream of purchasing.

Now, I will turn back to my point, speaking directly to literature, not to painting, which has almost always been disassociated from a sort of cultural reality, given its rather snobbish and elite nature, or music, which in general is very unpredictable and a cause for debate.

In terms of post-ww2 authors, that is, authors coming into maturity after the Second World War, I cannot think of any with a super-global reach with the exception of maybe Lord of the Rings (a clear literature of decline) or Harry Potter, which is very much a Victorian piece of literature. For major novelists, I can think of a few great voices working from the margins - Rushdie, an Indian-ish voice. Naipaul, a Caribbean voice, and maybe a few other contemporaries like A. S. Byatt (a sort of anachronism) and a few other voices. But lets be real. None of them have solidified the cultural pull that Dickens demonstrated during the Victorian era, literature has ceased to play the role it did then, and the decline in literature, as the country transitioned from creative haven to cultural museum can be documented in foreign attitudes toward English culture, which see it as a history rather a living organism.

Don't get me wrong, there are many great authors out there, but do they have the cultural pull their precursors had? Of course not. That is what we mean by decline. They moved from the centre of the cultural literary landscape internationally, creating the foundation of curriculum across the world, to merely a place amongst many cultures. That is what we call a decline by any standards. It is clearly a political change in opinion, and it is also reflected in art somewhat.

As for Spain's decline, it did not happen in the 20th century, as anybody can say, and a sort of cultural resurgence before the rise of fascism seems to be apparent. I don't think any literary historian could fail to note the devastating impact Franco has had on Spanish literature, as it marked the death of a sort of rebirth.

You yourself, perhaps made similar comments about German pre and post Nazi artistic production, which you noted marked a sharp decline with the rise and fall of the third Reich. For Canada, I could draw a similar trajectory with the sort of rise and decline of multiculturalism over the breakdown of ethnic tolerance at the turn of the 21st century.

I want to ask you then which authors do you think have had both cultural resonance as well as major critical appeal in the post 1950s world from England, born and raised as they say, as lord knows the peripheries of empire have brought in a large amount of great work. It's almost hard to name authors who people consider as major forces of literary movements, or as literary developers the way someone like Tennyson so enveloped a national zeitgeist.

As for my dislike of Britain, or of the US, my dislike of Chinese literature's developments is far greater, and I study it somewhat professionally. Culturally speaking China has shown such drastic developments and regressions that it makes the general trajectory look like a soap opera. Did China have a decline to? Well, the Maoist era produced very little of any actual artistic value, beyond some revolutionary songs and a half dozen plays of varying degrees of propaganda. It effectively made politics and literature one body, which is a dangerous movement even today.

If we can call nationalism the great "What I have that you don't" of world history, then certainly the world we live in now seems, in the developed and international "globalized" world anyway, a sort of "What I have left that is unique" culture. That is why James Bond is as important as French labeling on Wines, or Korean soap operas - they hold with them the last essence of nationalism in an increasingly post-nationalist world. The great artistic centers are no longer so ethnically isolated as they were in the 19th century (London is no longer English in the racial sense), and the world is forcing itself to realize that they cannot propagate without sharing, and sharing necessarily invites appropriation.

I learned this the sort of hard way realizing that Chinese people get offended when I write about Chinese literature, unless it is completely to praise how superior it is to anything Western. That I divorce it from the nation that is the contemporary nation of China is found infuriating, when it is described chinese language literature as an "Our literature" or "our cultural heritage" and not a "literature". How do we judge such a form of culture, given that its greatest advocates are actually its greatest isolationists, and are working specifically against sharing it with anybody who is not there to merely pat it on the back and butter it up with flattery. As a foreigner my voice, if containing a critical judgment, is always interpreted as ethnically biased, and my judgment always dismissed (except, thankfully by my professors if not my classmates) as the ravings of an uninformed, ignorant outsider. To be able to see the filthy washroom as a dump, however, is not a prejudiced opinion, but is simply accepted as one by people who have not known otherwise and have never seen a clean one as an example.

I have had similar condemnation from various Korean classmates who have taken my comments on Korean music rather amiss, as they come from a "non-Korean" and therefore an outsider. That my comments were particularly aesthetic in nature, over which songs I didn't care for was irrelevant.

How then do we understand national culture today? The old British literary world was first as the US is now, especially in cinema, a mass power carried across the world by its openness and sort of universal spirit. On one hand we want to have a national body, but on the other the only country that seems to not institutionally promote itself to a ridiculous extent is the United States, who generally, for better or for worse, relies on its national psyche, power of production, and general market size for shooting its works across the world - it swallows and digests anything that hits it, and then sends it back in its own Americanized form. There are now American Chinese food restaurants all over China, for instance, which is a sort of puzzle of cultural exchange and appropriation.

Then, as we return to the American concept of literature, and the Russian position in it, it is a puzzle of two sorts - one, we have the Russian specialists, whose knowledge is undoubtedly more in line with tradition, and language, and the generally train of thought of authors, then we have the general public, who seems to greatly like Russian works.

A similar period occurred amongst Chinese intellectuals who generally, if students of modern literature, all are familiar with the major Russian authors, and less familiar with historical British ones. Dostoevsky has become a sort of international psyche, bringing Petersberg to people who have not and will not ever go there, to teenagers who imagine themselves in existential crisis. This is a rather great artistic achievement, considering much writing today seems to be of the hysterical nihilistic sort, and Dostoevsky is very much a post-modern forerunner. Can English lit, in the international world, preform a similar feat? well, it does so in its renaissance form and its Victorian sensibility, but not so much after the First World War, in terms of making it to Asia (India, China, Japan) or The US and Canada (who are dominated primarily by American fiction). The US in the world is clearly the bright star, as Japan was a smaller star before their rather marked decline (though its an up and down game as the Japanese are unbelievably innovative in new forms of culture, such as video games and Animation/manga or even pornography, of which they are now the largest producer).

Now, if we were to want to dump 10 names of any time period of any art medium in almost any place, we probably could. Can we say that they are as colossal as a Rembrandt though, well, perhaps not. Still, if you wanted to say England has had 10 major novelists, you could quite well name them. But I am willing to wager not a single one of these critically acclaimed novelists, or poets, or whoever has been as internationally successful or influential as earlier British forerunners. Artists, maybe, and film makers, also perhaps maybe, but still, in terms of literature, I stand by my point of England has gone through a post-world-war decline in both influence and success.

[JCamilo]

Spain is indeed strange, but sort like Mortal trying to see where their focus went, I say they were focused on building a new world. Get the cities, the interior of churches, etc and you see were dedicated there. The philosophical thinking way behind, of course, with the strong religious control.

Now, Borges had anti-Cervantes feeling, saying Quixote as a National Book was a decline, because he wasn't a great linguistic and the products derivated from it would be naturally inferior. May be the classicist bias towards Cervantes, but he may be hitting right, while the end of baroque gave us classicists, which may not be as good (not the case here), but they are organizers. After Moliere, we have Racine, Montaigne then Voltaire. After Shakespeare and Milton, you had Pope. With enlightment thinkers - which implies in critics, researches, etc - around them. Spain had no such thing, which may have weakned them altough they had the satisfaction to live under the book, Quixote.

[mande2013]

One thing I'll say is across all mediums I feel there's been a precipitous decline in the quality of art from people who came of age in the sixties or thereafter. Even many of the most respected writers alive today, such as Pynchon, DeLillo, Salter, Coetzee, and Cormac hail from the Silent Generation rather than from the Boomer Generation.

[mal4mac]

Now, Borges had anti-Cervantes feeling, saying Quixote as a National Book was a decline, because he wasn't a great linguistic and the products derivated from it would be naturally inferior.

Has anyone else argued this? I don't think you can trust great authors as critics of other great authors, think of Tolstoy's criticisms of Shakespeare! Cervantes had a great influence on the development of the novel in all western cultures. I don't read Spanish, so I'll take your word for him not being a great linguist. But there are many other aspects of the novel, in which he had a great influence for the better... plot development, realism, surrealism, Quixoticism (!), humour, characterisation, meta-narrative,...



I want to ask you then which authors do you think have had both cultural resonance as well as major critical appeal in the post 1950s world from England, born and raised as they say, ...

To consider just in the early part of this period, "The angry young man" movement captured the Zeitgeist. There were several writers worthy of note... Kingsley Amis "Lucky Jim", Alan Sillitoe "Loneliness of the long Distance Runner, John Braine "Room at the Top", John Wain "Hurry on Down", Keith Waterhouse "Billy Liar"... many more... Some, if not all, had praise from major critics, like C.P. Snow.

[JCamilo]

Has anyone else argued this? I don't think you can trust great authors as critics of other great authors, think of Tolstoy's criticisms of Shakespeare! Cervantes had a great influence on the development of the novel in all western cultures. I don't read Spanish, so I'll take your word for him not being a great linguist. But there are many other aspects of the novel, in which he had a great influence for the better... plot development, realism, surrealism, Quixoticism (!), humour, characterisation, meta-narrative,...

Borges was not the kind of guy anyone wanted to fence. Not that winning arguments means someone is right about anything...

Anyways, Borges got a lot of criticism during his life, because they considered this part of his snobery. But the guy was not arguing against Quixote, but about the influence of Cervantes style on the formation of modern spanish language.

[astrum]

This thread reminds me of another Russian literature thread I made several weeks ago: http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?75060-Russian-Literature-and-the-Canon

[cafolini]

Borges was not the kind of guy anyone wanted to fence. Not that winning arguments means someone is right about anything...

Anyways, Borges got a lot of criticism during his life, because they considered this part of his snobery. But the guy was not arguing against Quixote, but about the influence of Cervantes style on the formation of modern spanish language.

In a truly symbolic argument, a genuine argument, only one must always win unless each argues something unrelated to the other. In such case you can't call it argument.

You are correct that he was not arguing against Quixote. That, for Borges, would have been as stupid as using the deductive logic of Saint Agustin. He was arguing against the Protagorian ethics of Spanish modern meanings derived from Quixote. Bottomline, he was arguing against fascism.

[JCamilo]

Those arguments he produced and developed during his youth, It was part of his aesthetics, most because he got extremelly bored of the "isms" of spanish modernism and when young he had a "lack of faith" on classics, in the sense, he often considered there was an acceptance of the classics indepenedent of the reading. In a sense, Borges was telling everyone he read Don Quixote a lot, while mostly didnt. (Borges didn't accepted much Ortega Y Gasset vision of classics, whch was the dominant idea also around his youth, but asking a review - a kind of socratic irony over the classics - allowed him to rebuild Quixote.)

Obviously, Borges do discriminate baroque language of Cervantes, Borges do celebrate english language beyond nationalism (or a national book) and adopted a Classical style, which explains his positions against Cervantes.

[stlukesguild]

It's not about ranks of economic development, or even military strength, it is about cultural influence, which no historian is going to dispute has been in decline in England.

Well... considering that for much of the 18th and 18th centuries the British and the French absolutely dominate Western culture (with the exception of music where the "Austro-Germanic Hegemony" is unrivaled) it is not surprising that British and French influence on culture would wane as others rose in power, wealth... and cultural influence.

Take Dickens for example - or even Byron before him - we are dealing with some of the most powerful and lasting artists of the world imagination, which have completely altered the literary history of not just England, but as diverse places as Russia and China - Pushkin, Tolstoy and Lu Xun.

For better or worse... the Beatles, the Rolling Stones... Lucian Freud.

Honestly, is it not impossible to see who among today's artists will have such impact? Cervantes, Shakespeare, William Blake, Chaucer... all made a huge and wide-ranging impact upon literature... but were their peers aware of this?

This is what I call the golden age of "British national literature", in a sense it is the fuel that Penguin Classics get paid for. It's what every common reader (who is not so common) generally thinks of when they think English literature, or English culture, not some expensive rather innovative but not mainstream known artists whose paintings people cannot identify, nor ever dream of purchasing.

Honestly... how many people really "know" Byron or Blake or Dickens (beyond A Christmas Carol) as something more than a name? If your concept of impact or influence is limited to those works of art that might be seen as part of the "common narrative" of the culture you are speaking of an incredibly small body of work (Homer and the Greek myths, the Bible, Dante, Cervantes, Shakespeare, and a few others)... and we can no longer count of this even. That's a good deal of what T.S. Eliot was bemoaning... the loss of a shared cultural narrative. But is reality... we still have as much... its just that now it comes from popular culture: film, TV, pop music, populist literature like Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, etc... and it seems to me that Britain has contributed more than its fair share to such.

In terms of post-ww2 authors, that is, authors coming into maturity after the Second World War, I cannot think of any with a super-global reach with the exception of maybe Lord of the Rings (a clear literature of decline) or Harry Potter, which is very much a Victorian piece of literature.

What writers from anywhere else have the sort of impact you are speaking of?

Don't get me wrong, there are many great authors out there, but do they have the cultural pull their precursors had? Of course not. That is what we mean by decline. They moved from the centre of the cultural literary landscape internationally, creating the foundation of curriculum across the world, to merely a place amongst many cultures. That is what we call a decline by any standards.

I can agree with you there... in the sense that I don't see any single dominant culture when it comes to literature... and perhaps the arts and culture as a whole. With the onset of WWII, Paris surrendered its hegemony in the visual arts to New York, Hollywood became unrivaled in film, arguably England and France surrendered their dominant role in literature to the US, and the German dominance of music ended and went to Russia and the US. But this American cultural dominance began fraying at the seams by the 1960s. The US still controls many of the markets in publishing and art and film and recorded music... but I don't see a single dominant culture in terms of the work being created.

But has there always been a single dominant culture? I doubt this? And of what degree of importance is it to the actual creation of art? South America has turned out a number of the finest writers of the last half-century: Borges, Cortazar, Garcia-Marquez, Neruda, etc... yet how influential has South American culture been on the world as a whole? Beside Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and perhaps Venezuela, how many could even properly identify the remaining nations of South America? How important was Shakespeare in 17th century Italy, Spain, Germany, or Russia?

As for Spain's decline, it did not happen in the 20th century, as anybody can say, and a sort of cultural resurgence before the rise of fascism seems to be apparent. I don't think any literary historian could fail to note the devastating impact Franco has had on Spanish literature, as it marked the death of a sort of rebirth.

Oddly, the Renaissance in Germany, Russia, and Spain all coincided with the rise of the very oppressive totalitarian regimes that ultimately squashed these same cultural resurgences.

You yourself, perhaps made similar comments about German pre and post Nazi artistic production, which you noted marked a sharp decline with the rise and fall of the third Reich.

Germany seems to have rebound the best of the above three... probably as a result of American Post-War rebuilding efforts, a thriving economy, and an open, democratic government. Spain and Russia continued to suffer under totalitarian regimes for decades after WWII. But I'm not certain how much an open society is to artistic creation. The rulers of the Italian Renaissance were quite the despots. It seems more likely that it is essential that there be both the financial support for the artists and for arts education... and something akin to recognition or acknowledgement. The visual arts and literature declined with the rise of the Soviet system... and one suspects that it was very difficult to carry on writing or creating art under Soviet censorship. But musicianship and the ballet... neither of which could be seen to openly threaten or criticize the Soviet State... thrived.

I want to ask you then which authors do you think have had both cultural resonance as well as major critical appeal in the post 1950s world from England, born and raised as they say, as lord knows the peripheries of empire have brought in a large amount of great work. It's almost hard to name authors who people consider as major forces of literary movements, or as literary developers the way someone like Tennyson so enveloped a national zeitgeist.

But again... what authors from anywhere can you name that meet such criteria? Borges? Calvino? Garcia-Marquez? Gunter Grass? Who is an everyday name?

Now, if we were to want to dump 10 names of any time period of any art medium in almost any place, we probably could. Can we say that they are as colossal as a Rembrandt though, well, perhaps not. Still, if you wanted to say England has had 10 major novelists, you could quite well name them. But I am willing to wager not a single one of these critically acclaimed novelists, or poets, or whoever has been as internationally successful or influential as earlier British forerunners. Artists, maybe, and film makers, also perhaps maybe, but still, in terms of literature, I stand by my point of England has gone through a post-world-war decline in both influence and success.

Again... you are placing in comparison artists in this time and place... and their impact/influence... against artists whose impact and influence has grown over the years... even centuries. Mozart is probably a rather familiar name to the educated across much of the globe... yet during his lifetime he was known in Salzburg, Vienna, Prague and a few other central European cities. The number of scores of his music and/or tickets to his performances were quite likely far less than the number of CDs of John Cage's music have been sold. Of course if we compare Mozart's achievements after a couple of hundred years to Cage, it is something altogether different. This is not to suggest that Cage might eventually rise to the level of influence of Mozart... that's not even funny... but rather it is to suggest that comparing the impact and influence (let alone artistic merit) of a living artist to one whose achievements have had the advantage of centuries to wend their way throughout the culture seems impossible.

[cafolini]

Those arguments he produced and developed during his youth, It was part of his aesthetics, most because he got extremelly bored of the "isms" of spanish modernism and when young he had a "lack of faith" on classics, in the sense, he often considered there was an acceptance of the classics indepenedent of the reading. In a sense, Borges was telling everyone he read Don Quixote a lot, while mostly didnt. (Borges didn't accepted much Ortega Y Gasset vision of classics, whch was the dominant idea also around his youth, but asking a review - a kind of socratic irony over the classics - allowed him to rebuild Quixote.)

Obviously, Borges do discriminate baroque language of Cervantes, Borges do celebrate english language beyond nationalism (or a national book) and adopted a Classical style, which explains his positions against Cervantes.

yes.

Regarding O & G, his thesis was the cornerstone of Spanish fascism and Franco followed it to the letter. But there were many fascists also who did not want to deal with the transparency of O & G. and called him "a stupid divulgator," because they knew the system was pinned to the wall by the thesis.

[OrphanPip]

I think I'm about to say something that is going to be unpopular.

To get back to the popularity of Russian novels of the late 19th century, it has occurred to me that this trend reflects a general shift in attitudes towards the novel that contains an element of misogyny. The English novel until 1900 was, to me at least, women's main artistic form. Many of the major novelists were not women, but when they chose to write they wrote primarily about women. The English classic novels are bourgeois, feminine, and domestic, while the Russian novel is masculine, either bohemian or aristocratic, and broad in theme and topic. Part of what modernism brought with it was a backlash against women artists and artistic forms, the Modernist novelist wanted to be taken seriously as an artist so the concerns of the earlier classics were discarded in favour of a celebration of masculinity in the English novel, even female authors like Woolf trashed their predecessors in favour of a masculinization of their writing. I think an element of that more overt misogyny of the Modernist movement has persisted in the popular evaluation of what a good novel should be and should do. Tolstoy poses a problem for me though because I find him in many ways as a final continuance of the domestic novelistic tradition coming out of France and England that is on the wain in his work. Dostoevsky fit better into the post-Modernist expectations of English readers, so he has been elevated as a result of popular derision heaped on the English classics of the period.

[Ecurb]

The most popular English novelist in the first half of the 19th Century was Sir Walter Scott (I read somewhere he was by far the most popular English novelist of all time in terms of percentage of novels sold during his career) He cannot, I think, be accused of writing feminine novels. With a few exceptions, in his novels women were more important as motivations for the male characters than as characters of their own.

The feminine novel was, perhaps, a reaction to the masculine Epic. The adventures of Akilles or Odysseus made for great epics, but the novel (see Jane Austen) showed that domestic adventures can be as much literary fun as epic ones. I agrre that modernism brought the celebration of the individual (streams of consciousness in Joyce and Proust, for example). It moved the novel from one masculine ideal (the epic) toward another (the epic internal journey). If 19th century novels were more socially or culturally driven, and if we call that more feminine and the two forms of epic I mentioned earlier more masculine, then Pip seems to have a good point. I'm not sure where the Russians fit, though. Although he wasn't a novelist, Chekov was one of the perhaps 5 great Russian literary figures, and the most modern, but I wouldn't call him a masculine writer (assuming we can use the terms 'masculine' and 'feminine' in this way).

[JCamilo]

Tolstoy would be a lesser problem if you treat him with Walter Scott, Victor Hugo, which are Epic Novelists writing for a national romance, something JBI mentions (let's include Melville here too). Then you have the burgoise novels, which i think is where the "women" novels came to fit, but why this? Education, this is a public that was added to the game. I bet the female reading was still very small in russia, since they still struggling between the court and rural areas... so you have writers than join both as Tchekhov, city's court writers as Pushkin, or city small workers as Dostoievisky and it is thos workers who are added as reading public.

I think those dualities helped those writers to bring up a new narrative form, which is the cause of their popularity wiht modernists, and dostoievisky is that praised for the Bakhtin reasons: he is all about dialogue of ideas.

[mande2013]

I don't know. Nineteenth century French literature is very different from English literature from that era, at least in my opinion.

[JBI]

To reply to St. Lukes as a general theme, Byron, Dickens, Zola, etc. were all hugely famous and wide reaching during and immediately after their lives, as they are today. Their fame has been relatively consistent from populist works to classic, without much of an ebb.

This is a product of the 19th century mostly in the West, in that it allows for cross-cultural publishing. Goethe writes extensively about this, and sort of kicks off the field of "world literature", as he notes translations and texts have become relatively easier to acquire.

If this is not tied to the rise and fall of nationalism and imperial power, I don't know what it is. India reading English classics as a means of becoming more like their "cultured masters" is similar to the Chinese move on Japan during the 7th through 10th centuries, where thousands of books (scrolls mostly, but later codex-formed works) were transported to Japan, though rarely the other way around. The same occurred for thousands of years around East, South-East and even to an extent central Asia.

The amount of influence, in a sense, one cultural or national tradition (being that cultural traditions are an earlier formation than national traditions) is generally the determiner of its esteem in the scheme of things. Generally, England through the 19th century was rivaled only by France, though Germany was picking up speed.

In the 20th century, the answer to world success, and the highest platform for influence is the United States, with maybe Russia as a second. Even something like a super-market, the way we sell things, etc. is rooted in an American mentality (the home fridge for instance was mostly an American cultural product compared to Britain and other places).

When we speak of literature, American fiction of the 20th century, or at least the canonical writers, seem to be some of the most pessimistic works I have encountered. Popular literature, like comic books, however, are incredibly believing and loving of a sort of American dream. But in terms of influence, the old European world generally yielded to the American, and the US has been dominant in art for much of the 20th century, and seems the biggest cultural centre to this day.

As for British authors, seriously I cannot name many who I actually think are "that good" working right now who I know. We are talking born and raised on English soil mind you. I am at a loss.

[OrphanPip]

Tolstoy would be a lesser problem if you treat him with Walter Scott, Victor Hugo, which are Epic Novelists writing for a national romance, something JBI mentions (let's include Melville here too). Then you have the burgoise novels, which i think is where the "women" novels came to fit, but why this? Education, this is a public that was added to the game. I bet the female reading was still very small in russia, since they still struggling between the court and rural areas... so you have writers than join both as Tchekhov, city's court writers as Pushkin, or city small workers as Dostoievisky and it is thos workers who are added as reading public.


Education plays a role in not just the presence of a female readership but also in the kinds of female authorship available. During the 18th century women who were educated received educations in Romance languages: English, French, and Italian primarily. While educated males learned Latin and Greek. This meant that the major classics that women turned to for reading were not the Roman and Greek epics, but the European romances and major novels. LaFayette's Princess of Cleves along with Cervantes' Don Quixote were the main literary precedents for most women who wanted to become authors (along with a number of vernacular poets). Shakespeare forms another interesting center point for English women writers, because his greatness gave them a space to exercise critical opinion without having to rely on a substantial classical education, which is why Charlotte Lenox was able to become one of the most prominent Shakespeare critics of the eighteenth century when she produced the first extensive analysis of Shakespearean plot sources.

I was certainly overreaching (possibly on purpose) when I said the English novel was solely a feminine form. There were obviously reactionary and counter discourses always at work in the history of the novel's development in English. Pope in his Dunciad and Fielding in the Author's Farce uses women (Lady Novel and the Goddess of Nonsense both being based on Eliza Haywood) to represent the crimes of novelists. Fielding and Swift wrote novels that attempted to bring Classical ideals into prose, but they failed to change the trajectory the artform took after them. The real influential figures were Haywood (best seller of the eighteenth century with Love in Excess) and Richardson (Pamela and Clarissa both massively influential novels about women). Defoe wrote 4 novels with 2 of them being about a female protagonist. Frances Burney and Jane Austen stand at the summit of Georgian novelists. The gothic novel is dominated by a homosexual (Walpole) whose aesthetics emphasize a deliberately camp and effete aesthetic and the most popular author in this form was Anne Radcliffe. The Romantics have a minor backlash against the bourgeois and domestic sensibilities of the English novel, but they produce few novels of real worth in English, and Wollstonecraft's Frankenstein is probably the best of what they produced in prose. The Victorian social and realist novel seems to be split because by the mid 19th century the readership is more evenly divided between middle class men and women, who now both lack a classical education. Women continue to perform strongly in this period with major players like Elliot, the Brontes, and Gaskell. However, even authors of less overtly feminine novels, like Dickens, were publishing much of their work in women's magazines. Women authors start to become increasingly marginalized by the turn of the century. Yet, today women still make up the majority of the novel reading population and the population of authors, despite a new emphasis in 20th century literature that focuses on male authors and stories about men.

[JCamilo]

I frankly thougth you were talking about the XIX novels onwards, the burgoise kind of novel (since you were talking about russians). Yes, Jane wasn't a miracle that came from nowhere. The Enlightment philosophers already included many women (I say readers, because the writers are a consequence of it), guys like Voltaire praticed a sort of feminism and had female readers and partners. The faery tales and other decameron like's models or the 1001 Nights seems to work with female models all the time - I would say inside the court it was an alternative to classic poetry, even because as you pointed, it was often written in romance languages. And you have a group of female writers in France from this group too.

[Darcy88]

I'm reading Doctor Zhivago right now and am finding it to be an immensely worthwhile read. I've only read six other Russian writers: Pushkin, Turgenev, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Chekhov, all of whom I loved. Who else is there that I ought to check out? I'm sure there must be more than seven great Russian writers and I'm just ignorant of them.

[OrphanPip]

Mikhail Bulgakov is worth reading as well. I'm not a big enough reader of Russian literature to name anyone truly obscure.

[mona amon]

I'm reading Doctor Zhivago right now and am finding it to be an immensely worthwhile read.

Love Dr Zhivago! The movie is also really good.

[JCamilo]

Isaac Babel short stories, Leshkov...

[Eiseabhal]

Borges "arguing against fascism"! Hear lots of bumf here. That's a purdy good one.

[Gilliatt Gurgle]

Mikhail Bulgakov is worth reading as well. I'm not a big enough reader of Russian literature to name anyone truly obscure.


... Who else is there that I ought to check out? I'm sure there must be more than seven great Russian writers and I'm just ignorant of them.

My limited exposure to Russian authors includes Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov and one that you might consider giving a try, that being Alexander Solzhenitsyn. My interest in AS has developed over the past few years starting with One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, August 1914-The Red Wheel (just finished) and one that I'm about to move to the front burner; Cancer Ward.

[JCamilo]

Borges "arguing against fascism"! Hear lots of bumf here. That's a purdy good one.

eh? I may not agree his Don Quixote argument is specifically anti-fascist, but Borges argued a lot against Facism, to the point he was attacking Hitler even before the war. He was a sworn enemy of Peron, which is facism in argentina and his "support" to the Junta of 70's or Pinochet does not change it (and they are not exactly facists).

[mal4mac]

My limited exposure to Russian authors includes Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov and one that you might consider giving a try, that being Alexander Solzhenitsyn. My interest in AS has developed over the past few years starting with One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, August 1914-The Red Wheel (just finished) and one that I'm about to move to the front burner; Cancer Ward.

I really rate "One Day..." and, especially, "Cancer Ward..." ... Haven't read August 1914, must give it a try. But careful with the Gualag Archipelago, I couldn't make headway with it, too much detail.

[mal4mac]

As for British authors, seriously I cannot name many who I actually think are "that good" working right now who I know. We are talking born and raised on English soil mind you. I am at a loss.

So have you accepted my list of "angry young men" authors who published in the 1950s , early 1960s, as "that good"? Seems so, as you have now moved your ground to "working now". Here's an interesting list:

http://www.listal.com/list/times-50-greatest

The "now" authors from the Times list, "born and raised on English soil", who I've read and rate as "really good" are: Anita Brookner, A. S. Byatt, Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes. Have you read any of these authors? Can you honestly say that none of them are "that good"?

[cafolini]

Love Dr Zhivago! The movie is also really good.

I agree. And the movie was very beautifully done and much more significant to the 20th century than it is admitted today.

[Eiseabhal]

Yup Borges was a fascist . Duilich m tha siud a cuir dreagh ort. That is what he was. That's ok. Plus I don't live in Argentina and in my army career I only met two men who actually were in The Falklands when we had to fight the poor buggers. You seem to think that being a relatively flexible person means you ain't an arse. Ah well. Life'll teach yu!

[stlukesguild]

Its amazing how some people can talk out of an orifice that was never intended for such use.:goof:

[JCamilo]

Yup Borges was a fascist . Duilich m tha siud a cuir dreagh ort. That is what he was. That's ok. Plus I don't live in Argentina and in my army career I only met two men who actually were in The Falklands when we had to fight the poor buggers. You seem to think that being a relatively flexible person means you ain't an arse. Ah well. Life'll teach yu!

No, I seem to think that someone who railed against nazists before even United States discovered it was evil, professed an individualist-liberal anarchist view, fought and was persecuted by the facists in his country is not a facist. But what to say?

[cafolini]

No, I seem to think that someone who railed against nazists before even United States discovered it was evil, professed an individualist-liberal anarchist view, fought and was persecuted by the facists in his country is not a facist. But what to say?

Well, I agree in your meaning. However it is false that Borges discovered fascism before the USA.

One actual problem with Borges is that he was too much in love with the Spanish language. He wanted to preserve it without the influence of creoles. Roberto Arlt had to make fun of his inflexibility in that regard. Many people got confused and thought that Borges was one of the monsters of the fascist Spanish Royal Academy.

[JCamilo]

Borges was writting against nazis in 1938. So he did wrote about it before USA discovered it was evil.

Borges introduced a lot of neologism and coloquial expression to spanish. Arlt is a bit upset because Borges and Bioy used to mock everyone using lunfardo and other variations to every character in a novel. They considered it not much realistic. And those two mocking someone would let anyone upset. That is the reason he was against Carlos Gardel, it was bit purism, a gaucho talking like a gaucho fine, a man from Buenos Aires? Nope.

[cafolini]

Borges was writting against nazis in 1938. So he did wrote about it before USA discovered it was evil.

Borges introduced a lot of neologism and coloquial expression to spanish. Arlt is a bit upset because Borges and Bioy used to mock everyone using lunfardo and other variations to every character in a novel. They considered it not much realistic. And those two mocking someone would let anyone upset. That is the reason he was against Carlos Gardel, it was bit purism, a gaucho talking like a gaucho fine, a man from Buenos Aires? Nope.

You seem young in your estimation. Fascism was known to the UK and USA long before Borges was born. WWI had a Germany marked strongly by fascism. Long before that fascism was pushed by the Roman Catholics anywhere they could. A lot of the things you are talking about are part of Argentine folklore. I don't mean to put you down because you are obviously learning. Who your teacher is I don't know. But I'm going to close the circularity of this case. Have fun.

[JCamilo]

You could teach me if you are not doing the mistake of talking about Facism when I mention specifically Nazism and If was not talking about USA knowing Nazism was evil and not that it was unknown. This really makes your presumption ridiculous.

At this point, cafolini, just wag.

[Gilliatt Gurgle]

I really rate "One Day..." and, especially, "Cancer Ward..." ... Haven't read August 1914, must give it a try. But careful with the Gualag Archipelago, I couldn't make headway with it, too much detail.

Haha, I had the same experience with Gulag Archipelago; started it, got about a third of the way in, eyes started glazing over, head drooping. I'll have to reserve it for retirement.
August 1914... is the first of his multi part epic, The Red Wheel. Even though it is 800+ pages, this one, unlike GA, reads more like a novel providing factual accounts of Russia's loss at the Battle of Tannenberg, a detailed portrayal of Pyotr Stolypin, the dress rehearsal and buildup to the revolution.
It held my interest.

[mal4mac]

Haha, I had the same experience with Gulag Archipelago; started it, got about a third of the way in, eyes started glazing over, head drooping. I'll have to reserve it for retirement.

What makes you think your eyes won't glaze over and head droop in retirement? Why is it OK to get bored out of your mind in retirement, but not while you are in work? There's an abridged version that looks interesting, I might take a crack at that...

[Gilliatt Gurgle]

Good point; with age come drowsiness-GA would put me in a coma.
btw - nearly finished with Chapter 4 The Patients Worries (Cancer Ward)
So far a much easier, entertaining read.

[Eiseabhal]

I hope to read "November 1916" within the next two years DV. "Lenin in Zurich" showed me that one could "fictionalise" real events and they come alive again. Well John Prebble showed me that first but he claimed to be writing history not fiction.

[Prince Smiles]

Salahuddin Chamchawala's thoughts on the matter at the beginning of Chapter VII: The Angel Azraeel:

Of the things of the mind, he most loved the protean, inexhaustible culture of the English-speaking peoples;he had said, when courting Pamela, that 'Othello, just that one play, was worth the total output of any other dramatist in any other language, and though he was conscious of hyperbole, he didn't think the exaggeration that great.'

[WICKES]

.

But, anyway, I think your thesis is wrong. An equal case could be made for several other countries, e.g., Britain, France, and Germany (Shakespeare, Dickens, Goethe, Schopenhauer, Montaigne, Zola...)

Yes that's true. England alone is the equal and more of Russia (Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton, Dickens, Donne, Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, Keats, George Eliot, Woolf etc).

[Kyriakos]

Well, Russia had a number of great writers in the 19th century, but there are other notable literatures. I am pretty sure the classical Greek one is the most important, and will always be so.

[mande2013]

I think I'm about to say something that is going to be unpopular.

To get back to the popularity of Russian novels of the late 19th century, it has occurred to me that this trend reflects a general shift in attitudes towards the novel that contains an element of misogyny. The English novel until 1900 was, to me at least, women's main artistic form. Many of the major novelists were not women, but when they chose to write they wrote primarily about women. The English classic novels are bourgeois, feminine, and domestic, while the Russian novel is masculine, either bohemian or aristocratic, and broad in theme and topic. Part of what modernism brought with it was a backlash against women artists and artistic forms, the Modernist novelist wanted to be taken seriously as an artist so the concerns of the earlier classics were discarded in favour of a celebration of masculinity in the English novel, even female authors like Woolf trashed their predecessors in favour of a masculinization of their writing. I think an element of that more overt misogyny of the Modernist movement has persisted in the popular evaluation of what a good novel should be and should do. Tolstoy poses a problem for me though because I find him in many ways as a final continuance of the domestic novelistic tradition coming out of France and England that is on the wain in his work. Dostoevsky fit better into the post-Modernist expectations of English readers, so he has been elevated as a result of popular derision heaped on the English classics of the period.

I'm not sure. I'd say the elevation of Dostoevsky vis-a-vis someone like Austen can be attributed just as much if not more to the relevancy of D's work to contemporary existence. Seeing how significantly the world changed after WWI, developing a new paradigm around what was considered valuable in art was inevitable (I don't understand why it's so complicated for some people to just accept the old 19th century paradigms of art were no longer tenable by the 1920s), and I don't necessarily think it had anything to do with misogyny but more to do with themes of the 'lost soul' in the big, bad industrialized world and urban environment. So inevitably, certain figures such as Dostoevsky and Balzac will take on more relevance than an Austen or a Tolstoy. It has nothing to do with being hip and 'radical chic' or what not, despite what frustrated cultural conservatives may like to think. Certain writers will seem more contemporary and relevant to modern existence than others.

But in any case, if the likes of Dostoevsky and Kafka seem to have more 'hip' appeal than say, I don't know, Dickens, Tolstory, or Thackery, it may just be because the former two feel more prescient and have a lot more to say that's directly relevant to contemporary existence. In short, the 'hip' appeal may simply be a result of their increased relevance to life in the modern world the fact that their work is simply maybe aged better, and there's nothing wrong with that IMO.

I'm sorry, but this idea that's insinuated but not flat out stated that it requires a superior intellect to appreciate the subtleties of say the Bronte sisters vis-a-vis the supposed thematic tendentiousness of Dostoevsky is nonsense. If anything, it's usually the conventional Victorian novels that tend to have more *middlebrow* appeal. That's not to say I dislike Victorian literature per se.

[Pompey Bum]

But in any case, if the likes of Dostoevsky and Kafka seem to have more 'hip' appeal than say, I don't know, Dickens, Tolstory, or Thackery, it may just be because the former two feel more prescient and have a lot more to say that's directly relevant to contemporary existence. In short, the 'hip' appeal may simply be a result of their increased relevance to life in the modern world, and there's nothing wrong with that IMO.

I agree with this in principle, although one might argue that Kafka and Dostoyevski's ideas contributed to perceptions of lost 20th century souls. They were part of the process that made the perspective hip. If we use Tolstoy as a kind of control, we can see that even though he (mostly) wrote about a different world, his ideas influenced Gandhi, one of the great minds of the 20th century. (I say "mostly" because Pierre Buzukhov is something of a lost soul; his gritty prisoner of war subplot seems like something out of Boris Pasternak). Tolstoy's ideas also influenced Vasily Grossman.

But it is curious how quick we are to praise a writer like Kafka (Melville's another) as "ahead of his time" when at least to some extent we are talking about a coincidence. Hip is a small thing beside the machinery of history

[mande2013]

But what I'm essentially saying is that the 'hip' factor is largely a product of certain writers' historical relevance. Anyone who has tried to eke out a day to day existence within a large cosmopolitan city in the post-WW II world will acknowledge the prescience of Dostoevsky's and Bazlac's ideas without hesitating. In short, the perspective is 'hip' and 'fashionable' because for a lot of people it's true and accurate and something they can directly relate to in their own lives. This ties into the idea that artistic greatness isn't some universal value that one can separate from the forces of history and politics and what not. In short, Dostoevsky's more 'hip' to modern readers than Austen maybe because he has more relevance to the machinery of history, which of course is a very Adornoesque thing to say, but so be it.

[Pompey Bum]

But what I'm essentially saying is that the 'hip' factor is largely a product of certain writers' historical relevance. Anyone who has tried to eke out a day to day existence within a large cosmopolitan city in the post-WW II world will acknowledge the prescience of Dostoevsky's and Bazlac's ideas without hesitating. In short, the perspective is 'hip' and 'fashionable' because for a lot of people it's true and accurate and something they can directly relate to in their own lives.

I understand. And you are right that what you call the hip factor "is largely a product of certain writers' historical relevance." In fact, it is mainly a product of historical relevance. And that makes the apparent prescience of such authors to some extent coincidental (how could Melville have known he would be received by a world intoxicated with Nietzsche?). But a prescient writer's ideas may have contributed to the very times to which they now apply. (They may even have been parter of a larger historical trendS with antecedents of their own). 20th century Europeans could have sought consolation in religion (as they had for centuries), but many saw themselves as lost souls instead, partly because of the sociology-economic conditions you mention and partly because of the moral and intellectual milieu Kafka and many others had helped to create.


This ties into the idea that artistic greatness isn't some universal value that one can separate from the forces of history and politics and what not.

Amen, amen. Especially for the whatnot. :)

[mande2013]

Well the creation of said intellectual and moral milieu was largely meant as a way to cope with these new economic and social conditions. That doesn't mean one can't draw inspiration from older paradigms of course. We may in fact soon discover that a lot of 20th century material of the Kafka, Joyce, and Beckett variety may not endure and that a new set of circumstances in the 21st century will call for the creation of a new paradigm that has no use for the nihilist school of thought. Will 'high modernism' prove to have been a fad that appears paltry alongside Tolstoy or Flaubert? Who knows. But in all sincerity, Dostoevsky was no nihilist, and I'm certain he'll endure regardless.

[Pompey Bum]

Well the creation of said intellectual and moral milieu was largely meant as a way to cope with these new economic and social conditions.

I understand what you are saying, but history is just more complicated than that. It's bigger than that. And more interactive. Europe's 20th century moral malaise had roots in as seemingly remote an historical event as the publication of Charles Lyle's Principles of Geology in 1830--without which no Darwin, no Huxley, and arguably no Hitler. But it wasn't a lock-step progression. It could have gone many other ways, but as it happened it went that way. Those ideas were part of a larger historical trend that eventually saw workers conclude that there was no God to turn to in their alienation. But the reduction of history to exclusively socio-economic terms ("Marxist history") has not shed much light on their plight. At least not to date.


But in all sincerity, Dostoevsky was no nihilist, and I'm certain he'll endure regardless.

I strongly agree in both points.

[mande2013]

Well of course history is bigger than that, and this rejection of religion as the key to consolation most likely find its roots in the Enlightenment, so even further back than 1830.

[Pompey Bum]

Yes, certainly it does, although the common worker probably wouldn't have been much troubled by it until later. My point is that morality (or psychology if you like) is not a simple reaction to a set of economic conditions. There are many threads that lead to a given point in time (moral, intellectual, economic, technological etc.); they are dynamic and interactive. So prescient authors (artists, scientists, insurance salesmen) are indeed accepted because of their historical relevance, but their ideas may have helped to establish that relevance.

Okay, not insurance salesmen.

[mande2013]

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.

[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...