Originally Posted by
stlukesguild
The Russians are the best because many (Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn etc) lived during totalitarian regimes who would kill you if they didn't like what you said.
And this is your indictment? Look at the start, you ask a rhetorical question, what does environment have to do with merit? Then you say 'even if it were true...' Even if WHAT were true?
This lacks even a small amount of sense.
Then you go into a diatribe about examples in history to show how very, very smart you are. Nice job, but I can't possibly care because of the poor start.
What does the environment that an artist works under have to do with the merit or lack of merit of his or her work? Even were this true, many other writers lived under equally oppressive conditions and in dangerous times. Dante was banished under penalty of death from his home of Florence as the result of shifts in politics. The great majority of the artists and writers of the Italian Renaissance worked for rapacious, violent, and vengeful rulers who were not far removed from the Latin-American drug lords of today... and this doesn't even begin to deal with the Church especially at the height of the Inquisition, the Witch Hunts, and the various religious wars that ripped through Europe. It is quite possible that Chaucer was a casualty of the coup which ousted Richard II and replaced him with Henry Bolingbroke and the bloodthirsty Thomas Arundel, Archbishop of Canterbury and later Lord Chamberlain (Who MUrdered Chaucer? A Medieval Mystery by Terry Jones, Robert Yeager, Terry Dolan, Alan Fletcher, and Juliette Dor). Thomas Kyd was arrested for alleged libelous and heretical writings and brutally tortured before being released. He died a year later at the age of 36. Christopher Marlowe, who shared lodgings with Kyd was also summoned before the courts but died in a bar-brawl (assassination?) with known government agents. Sir Thomas More was executed on trumped up charges of high treason. Sir Walter Raleigh was also executed upon trumped up charges of treason. Any number of other writers have dealt with arrest, banishment, imprisonment, jail time, institutionalization and execution for "crimes" ranging from mental illness, treason, profanity, and obscenity to homosexuality (John Clare, Torquado Tasso, Ovid, Seneca, Oscar Wilde, Holderlin, Verlaine, Jean Genet, etc...).
And Now, I say that much of their intention is cloaked within the deep, penetrating, heavy nature of their work.
Thus much of their intention is cloaked within the deep, penetrating, heavy nature of their work. In this way Dostoevsky criticized the Russian institutions, including the church, while evading execution.
You seem to think I said 'dark, brooding and heavy. You only got one out of three correct and missed my point entirely.
The fact that a work of literature is dark, brooding, and "heavy" in no way assures us that the same work is inherently "better" or more profound than many other "lighter" or humorous books. Of course that's a prejudice common to the young and inexperienced. Dostoevsky and Tolstoy are certainly great writers... but in no way are they (and their other Russian peers) clearly "better" than the strongest writers of France, Italy, Spain, Germany, England, Greece, etc... to say nothing of Indian, China, Japan, Persia, and the whole of the non-Western world.
Moby dick has certainly qualities that rivals any novel even written, even the without doubt, most influential of all, Don Quixote. It is as epic as Tolstoy and as deeply psychological as Dostoievisky at once.
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