Russian Literature vs. The World.

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Originally Posted by Gilliatt Gurgle

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.

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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...

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.

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.

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.'

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Originally Posted by mal4mac

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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...)

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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).

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.

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Originally Posted by 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.

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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.

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Originally Posted by mande2013

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.

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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

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.

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Originally Posted by 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.

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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.

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Originally Posted by mande2013

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.

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Amen, amen. Especially for the whatnot. :)

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.

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Originally Posted by 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.

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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.

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Originally Posted by mande2013

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

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I strongly agree in both points.

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.

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.

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.