Isaac Babel short stories, Leshkov...
Printable View
Isaac Babel short stories, Leshkov...
Borges "arguing against fascism"! Hear lots of bumf here. That's a purdy good one.
Quote:
Originally Posted by OrphanPip
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.Quote:
Originally Posted by Darcy88
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).Quote:
Originally Posted by Eiseabhal
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.Quote:
Originally Posted by Gilliatt Gurgle
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:Quote:
Originally Posted by JBI
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"?
I agree. And the movie was very beautifully done and much more significant to the 20th century than it is admitted today.Quote:
Originally Posted by mona amon
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!
Its amazing how some people can talk out of an orifice that was never intended for such use.:goof:
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?Quote:
Originally Posted by Eiseabhal
Well, I agree in your meaning. However it is false that Borges discovered fascism before the USA.Quote:
Originally Posted by JCamilo
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.
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.Quote:
Originally Posted by 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.
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.Quote:
Originally Posted by mal4mac
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.
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...Quote:
Originally Posted by 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.
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.'
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).Quote:
Originally Posted by mal4mac
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.
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.Quote:
Originally Posted by OrphanPip
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.
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.Quote:
Originally Posted by mande2013
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.
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.Quote:
Originally Posted by mande2013
Amen, amen. Especially for the whatnot. :)Quote:
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. 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.
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.Quote:
Originally Posted by mande2013
I strongly agree in both points.Quote:
Originally Posted by 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.
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.
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. :)Quote:
Originally Posted by mande2013
Accepted !Quote:
Originally Posted by Pompey Bum
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.
Gogol, Zoshchenko, Bulgakov, Chekov, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, some heavy hitters. And some hilarious ones. Zamyatin...