Originally Posted by
mortalterror
Dostoyevski get's a lot of credit, undo credit I think, for being so philosophical with his novels. As I told my Russian literature class in college, "If you want a viable philosophy, read the philosophers. Don't read novelists. That's not their strength and it's not their job." Personally, I think that Hemingway is just as philosophical as Dostoyevski or Sartre, but his philosophy doesn't wear it's intellect on it's sleeve. It's very understated like the rest of his writing. What Dostoyevski does is "Look at me!" writing "Oh, I'm making a big point here!" writing, very labored, very obvious, dare I say an artless kind of writing. Stoicism has it's roots in a world nearly two thousand years old. Existentialism is novel. I will not say contemporary because Stoicism is still very much with us. Existentialism is novel in the way that Postmodernism is novel, in that it is new, it is impractical, it is strange, and retains the charm of things which can be put to almost no practical use. It appeals to youths and frivolous people, those who fancy themselves as artists and minds, those poor deluded "creative souls."
People who are drawn to Dostoyevski's writing are often drawn to his philosophy for many of the same reasons. It's big, unwieldy, complicated and strange. They cannot handle the subtleties of conventional morality, or conventional art, and so are always seeking after the exotic. They must have big novels, gigantic things that press upon the reader their importance, or they are not impressed. They must have melodrama and murders to titillate them; or and this is also true, they must have no action at all. The intemperate live in one extreme or another because ambiguity and moderation are too much for them. I do not find it strange at all that the same people who love Dostoyevski should also love Joyce, and Proust. They praise gibberish and run on sentences. They make a cult of the weird and unwieldy. But I guess that is a discussion for another time.