Russian Literature vs. The World.

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Originally Posted by JBI

... 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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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

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Originally Posted by 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

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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.

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Originally Posted by Mr.lucifer

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.

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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.

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Originally Posted by blazeofglory

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.

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I'd say cervantes surpasses him.

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.

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.

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.

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Originally Posted by Desolation

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).

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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...

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...

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Originally Posted by 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.

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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.

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Originally Posted by mal4mac

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...

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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.

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Originally Posted by 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...

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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.

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Originally Posted by Desolation

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

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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.

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Originally Posted by Jono

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.

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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.