Russian Literature vs. The World.

[stlukesguild]

I disagree. They certainly didn't destroy Karajan, or Thomas Mann, just two examples amongst many. Artistic culture continued to function very well... through "keeping ones head down" or "absconding". Who was better than Mann or Karajan in the stable democracies?

Karajan was a conductor... not a composer... not the creator of music, but an interpreter. Brilliant as he was, Bruno Walter and Toscanini are just two names that pop to mind of equals in the world of conductors. Thomas Mann left Germany and wrote two further books of real note: Doctor Faustus and The Confessions of Felix Krull. Literature seems to have survived the Nazi destruction of German culture the best. Mann and Hesse have a number of solid heirs: Grass, Boll, Paul Celan, Ingebourg Bachmann, Friederich Durrenmatt, Max Frisch, etc... but compare this to before the war: Kafka, Robert Walser, Rilke, Georg Trakl, Gottfried Benn, Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, Bertolt Brecht, Frank Wedekind, Joseph Roth, Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, Hermann Broch, etc...

But let's look at music. Prior to the Nazis the Germans produced Mahler, Richard Strauss, Max Bruch, Joseph Rheinberger, Engelbert Humperdinck, Hans Pfitzner, Franz Schreker, Joseph Marx, Walter Braunfels, Egon Wellesz, Paul Hindemith, Karl Orff, Erich Korngold, Viktor Ullmann, Ernst Krenek, Kurt Weill, Othmar Schoeck, Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, Alexander Zemlinsky, Franz Lehár, Emmerich Kálmán... How many Austrian or German composers can you name after WWII? Stockhausen? Henze?

As for who was better than Mann or Karajan in the stable democracies... have you been drinking? How many French, American, and British composers should I name? How many French, British, and American poets and novelists? How many of the above writers were blacklisted by Hitler and had their books publicly burned? Hesse and Mann fled to Switzerland. Trakl, Rilke, and Kafka died before the Nazis came into power. Walter Benjamin fled from France to Spain where he committed suicide when he found that he was to be turned over to the Nazi authorities in France. Freud finally fled to Britain. Kafka, Freud and others undoubtedly would have ended up victims of the Holocaust.

The visual arts suffered even worse in Austria and Germany. The early 20th century saw a Germanic Renaissance in art. Vienna and Berlin became major art centers. The Jungenstil/Sessesion in Austria, Die Brucke, Der Blaue Reiter, the New Objectivity, Dada, and the Bauhaus were among the major artistic movements of the first half of the century. Among the Austro-German artists were Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Oscar Kokoschka, Adolf Loos, Otto Wagner, Franz Marc, E.L. Kirchner. Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Erich Heckel, Max Pechstein, Emil Nolde, Otto Dix, George Grosz, Max Becmann, Mies van der Rohe, Oscar Schlemmer, Max Ernst, Kurt Schwitters, Paul Klee, Joseph Albers, etc... German art after the war was almost wholly irrelevant. Not until the mid-1980s did any German artists begin to make a mark on the international art scene... and only one or two have shown any real lasting power.

[JCamilo]

I don't think there is a distaste for French literature in the English speaking world. French literature is by far the most frequently translated into English. Apart from a selection of 5-6 Russian authors, most Russian literature does not even get translated into English. In contrast, most of the major French classics from the middle ages to the present have been translated into English. The USA in particular has a long tradition of francophilia that continues well into the 21st century, which is evident in the ongoing obsession with French intellectuals in American academia.

I'd even go further to suggest that the average English speaker is far more likely to be familiar with The Hunchback, Candide, Cyrano de Bergerac, Charles Perrault's fairy tales, or The Little Prince than any of the Russian classics (other than the fact that War and Peace is quite long).

There is more a competition between french and english tradtions, with the french upper hand until the xix century in way. I would say a continual trade and a love and hate relationship with the need to stabilish the english superiority, we have the french neglected. For example, Hugo - mentioned here as a novelist, yet, his prime fame was as poet and he did had the goethe, tolstoy like status. French also love to behead kings, so they do not fail for the tradition carlyle like national hero writer.

It is however curious how they bring germans or russsians, late cultural centers, and forget the french. Which was one of the earlier national traditions born out of Italian literature and the only one that sustained its breath for centuries. Spain has Quixote, but after the lopes, etc, they were out of the game considerably.

[mande2013]

Well every European nation seems to have at least one great artist it can lay claim to, "backwaters" aside. I feel bad for the Czechs, as they seem to be the exception. If only Kafka had written in Czech. Dvorak has too many detractors, and Alphonse Mucha is a relatively minor figure. Also, their filmmakers pale in comparison to the 'greats' of France, Italy, and Japan.

[mortalterror]

There is more a competition between french and english tradtions, with the french upper hand until the xix century in way. I would say a continual trade and a love and hate relationship with the need to stabilish the english superiority, we have the french neglected. For example, Hugo - mentioned here as a novelist, yet, his prime fame was as poet and he did had the goethe, tolstoy like status. French also love to behead kings, so they do not fail for the tradition carlyle like national hero writer.

It is however curious how they bring germans or russsians, late cultural centers, and forget the french. Which was one of the earlier national traditions born out of Italian literature and the only one that sustained its breath for centuries. Spain has Quixote, but after the lopes, etc, they were out of the game considerably.

That's long bothered me. A little after the sixteen hundreds Spain seems to underachieve in literature compared to it's neighbors Britain and France. Germany plows all of it's energy into creating music. Italy does too to a lesser extent but also creates great food. Spain produces Goya and Velazquez in art, but that still doesn't feel like the focus of their culture. There's a missing weight when I think of them and I wonder if maybe they poured their excess artistic energy into dance or something.

Victor Hugo, Michel de Montaigne, Charles Baudelaire, and Proust... and undoubtedly mortal terror would add Racine.

Agreed, there are many stand out French writers. I'd add Guy De Maupassant, Villon, Rabelais, Balzac, Stendhal (though I can't stand him), Voltaire, Moliere, Alexander Dumas, Chretien de Troyes, Flaubert, Rimbaud, and the anonymous composer of the Song of Roland. I'd definitely say that Rabelais is a match for Cervantes, and Hugo is a match for Dickens or Goethe. When you look at Hugo's breathe of work it's astonishing. He's got great novels, great poetry, and great plays just like Goethe.

[mande2013]

In the 20th century, the Anglosphere dominates in the sphere of letters while exhibiting signs of life in the realm of modern art, as well, while Germany plows its energies into conquering all of Europe. Russia focuses its efforts on extending its communist sphere of influence while also contributing to the development of modern classical music along the way. The French get "humiliated" on the battlefield while being preoccupied with the musings of existential philosophy and 'cinema as art'. Spain produces the Dali, Lorca, Bunuel triumvirate.

[JBI]

In the 20th century, the Anglosphere dominates in the sphere of letters while exhibiting signs of life in the realm of modern art, as well, while Germany plows its energies into conquering all of Europe. Russia focuses its efforts on extending its communist sphere of influence while also contributing to the development of modern classical music along the way. The French get "humiliated" on the battlefield while being preoccupied with the musings of existential philosophy and 'cinema as art'. Spain produces the Dali, Lorca, Bunuel triumvirate.

The anglosphere but not the mother country. The 20th century is a dismal failure in letters for the British isles, who seem to have declined artistically with the wane of empire compared to the rising star of American authors. We should probably distinguish, since in all honesty, British and American literature are so very different.

The same could be said for Quebec and French literature, two very different traditions using the same language.

[mande2013]

The anglosphere but not the mother country. The 20th century is a dismal failure in letters for the British isles, who seem to have declined artistically with the wane of empire compared to the rising star of American authors. We should probably distinguish, since in all honesty, British and American literature are so very different.

The same could be said for Quebec and French literature, two very different traditions using the same language.

Um...Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett? George Orwell and Iris Murdoch also have defenders.

One could also add H.G. Wells, W.B. Yeats, and D.H. Lawrence, but I guess they're more turn of the century than truly 20th century.

I'm including Irish writers since you said the British Isles instead of merely the UK.

[JBI]

Um...Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett? George Orwell and Iris Murdoch also have defenders.

One could also add H.G. Wells, W.B. Yeats, and D.H. Lawrence, but I guess they're more turn of the century than truly 20th century.

I'm including Irish writers since you said the British Isles instead of merely the UK.

I don't count South Ireland, and as we note, those are mostly pre-second world war authors. Also, in the case of Orwell, I do not particularly consider him that good, and, he too, is more of a decline author.

As a pointed comparison, these guys remind me of the last breath of brilliance at the end of Tang China, before the world as people knew it simply came to an end - there is a sadness, and a decline, and a sort of narrative of loss trapped within much of Woolf and perhaps Lawrence too, and certainly Stevie Smith, Auden, etc, and even Orwell to an extent, whose works seem so embodied with a particular political frame to make them so quotable, and so unnecessary to read.

I think anybody would agree the 20th century is a century of Decline for England, who sees her role transformed from super-Empire to average in a rapid succession of revolutions and declines. The same could be said for much of post-WW2 Europe, Modernism is in a sense an Elegy, and post-modernism is a satire on the elegy.

This all can be linked to certain genre trends as well. The novel, in the sense, with its development and then decline, is the very body of national artistic identity. The 19th century being the great age of nationalism necessarily welcomed the great age of the novel. The 20th century being the great destruction caused by nationalism, and then the ebb of nationalist sentiment in most of the world, markedly is the time that the novel itself is brought into question, as the question of nation, and place in the world are hit with the idea of a post-nationalist, or globalized identity. If the novel and the "Great novel" especially in the British and American traditions, is the nationalist vision and genre, certainly the decline of Empire is reflected through the nausea and budding individualism celebrated and ridiculed in Modernist and early post-modernist works.

Basically we can say literature functions in two ways, one in celebrating a sort of superiority, or grand vision, as is the case in Virgil, Dante, Li Bai, Shakespeare, Petrarch and even Hugo, or on the flip side the literature of such a decline, mixed with a sort of social or philosophical realism and understanding of decline. The brutal dialog of Milton's Paradise Lost, as a sort of summary of the failure of the English revolution, and the restoration, or even T.S. Eliot. There is so much negativity there, that it is staggering, yet much beauty is found there.

Now, as nationalism has waned, we have seen a decline, as nationalism is growing rampant again in the world, we will see an increase in national sentiments in literature, particularly now that there is no concrete body of classical heritage that everybody shares - the loss of education in Latin and Greek classics basically destroyed any possibility of a united European cultural heritage. With that in place, it is only natural that the myths of culture and the occupations of writers will swoon with this new growth of nationalist sentiment growing out of the financial instabilities in Europe, and the political instabilities in East and South East Asia, will turn itself to a literature of Nation once again.

I see that in Chinese culture so very clearly, this new sort of cultural jingoism that even reflectively reevaluates authors as somewhat a part of a long national identity, as if Shakespeare's England, hypothetically has anything to do with contemporary England, the very ethnic shaping of culture has transformed so drastically that such an ethnic understanding of anything seems merely a dangerous political game.

[mande2013]

Virginia Woolf, unnecessary to read, really? Oh, nevermind, maybe I read your post wrong, and you simply meant that in reference to Orwell specifically. As for the rest of Europe, there were certainly signs of life well into the sixties, at least if you consider filmmaking a legitimate form of artistic expression, which I do. It does seem, however, that much of 20th century French literature post-Proust was focused more on philosophical musings than on pure artistic expression (i.e. Sartre, Camus, Genet, Gide, Malraux, Simone de Beauvoir, etc.). Someone like Alain Robbe-Grillet, on the other hand, was essentially a filmmaker who wrote novels in the same sense I seem to remember someone once saying Virginia Woolf was a poet who wrote novels.

I sometimes wonder if the artistic success of much of 20th century literature can be attributed to the presence of a certain void to be filled, since the Americans didn't have the sort of cultural legacy that could be taken for granted the way the English, French, Italians, Germans, or even Russians did. I know that may seem silly, but one has to start somewhere in terms of trying to hypothesize about a certain phenomenon.

As far as your comments regarding nationalism are concerned, most great artists don't fancy themselves bringing glory to the heritage of their home nation. They don't even think in those terms. It's the usually the nation that subsequently co-opts them for their own leverage. For instance, I was physically born and raised in the United States, but sometimes I feel as though I came out of the womb with one foot firmly planted in France, since my father's a born and bred Frenchman, making me eligible for French citizenship from birth, and I've been living in France for quite a while now. With that said, if I were to express myself artistically would I have to choose my allegiance? Who lays claim to Nabokov, Kafka, Conrad, T.S. Eliot, DeKooning, Bunuel, Van Gogh, Rothko, Godard, Handel, Beckett, Henry James, Ezra Pound, Chopin and a host of others?

P.S. I certainly wouldn't consider Time magazine to be a prominent intellectual authority, but I think looking at their list of the ten greatest books of all time says something about how literature from different parts of the world is embraced within the English-speaking world. Here's the count by number of included books per country:

Russia: 3
England: 2
France: 2
USA: 2

The tenth inclusion is Lolita, and I'm not sure whether one would want to attribute it exclusively to one nation or not.

[stlukesguild]

I think anybody would agree the 20th century is a century of Decline for England, who sees her role transformed from super-Empire to average in a rapid succession of revolutions and declines. The same could be said for much of post-WW2 Europe, Modernism is in a sense an Elegy, and post-modernism is a satire on the elegy.

Sometimes I suspect that your disdain for Britain is greater than that for the United States. Certainly, you exaggerate Britain's decline. No... Britain is no longer the world empire it once was... but "average"? Depending upon which measure is used, Britain ranks as either the 6th of 7th wealthiest nation in the world. Militarily, Britain is ranked 5th... and would move up into the 4th position if nuclear weaponry was considered. Certainly art is dependent upon the wherewithal to support the arts... but somehow I don't see Britain's fall from the dominant world empire to the 5th or 6th or 7th in the world as spelling doom and decline. I would not be surprised if the British actually invest far more (per capita) into financial support of the arts and education than the United States.

Certainly Britain's artistic achievements over the last century are nothing to be ashamed of. In terms of classical music, Britain probably ranks beneath the Russians and Austro-Germans... but stands rather close to the French and Americans. They probably rank number one when it comes to quality of orchestras and recording. If we look at pop music, only the United States may surpass Britain. Art? The French absolutely own the first half of the 20th century. It is generally accepted that the United States became the center of the art world after WWII. This is true in financial terms... but Britain has remained one of the major players on the contemporary art scene. Pop Art was a British, not an American, innovation. Artists such as Henry Moore, Francis Bacon, David Hockney, R.B. Kitaj, Sean Scully, Lucian Freud, Anish Kapoor, Jenny Saville, etc... have been among the most influential artists of our time... while Damien Hirst and the YBA's embraced by Charles Saatchi can not be ignored... even by those who despise all they stand for.

And what of British films?

The British contribution to 20th century literature is no less important. Does it surpass the literature of the United States over the course of the century? That's debatable. Certainly they rank along the Americans, French, Germans, Russians, and Spanish in terms of importance and achievement.

Basically we can say literature functions in two ways, one in celebrating a sort of superiority, or grand vision, as is the case in Virgil, Dante, Li Bai, Shakespeare, Petrarch and even Hugo, or on the flip side the literature of such a decline, mixed with a sort of social or philosophical realism and understanding of decline.

That's a rather gross simplification. Somehow I doubt that the intentions of all artists are to celebrate the rise of the
nation or of bemoan its decline. Is the wealth of Spanish poetry over the last century, and their contribution to the visual arts (Picasso, Dali, Antonio Lopez-Garcia, Antoni Tapies, Luis Buñuel, Joan Miro, etc...) nothing more than an elegy for an impotent former superpower?

[JBI]

It's not about ranks of economic development, or even military strength, it is about cultural influence, which no historian is going to dispute has been in decline in England.

Take Dickens for example - or even Byron before him - we are dealing with some of the most powerful and lasting artists of the world imagination, which have completely altered the literary history of not just England, but as diverse places as Russia and China - Pushkin, Tolstoy and Lu Xun. This is what I call the golden age of "British national literature", in a sense it is the fuel that Penguin Classics get paid for. It's what every common reader (who is not so common) generally thinks of when they think English literature, or English culture, not some expensive rather innovative but not mainstream known artists whose paintings people cannot identify, nor ever dream of purchasing.

Now, I will turn back to my point, speaking directly to literature, not to painting, which has almost always been disassociated from a sort of cultural reality, given its rather snobbish and elite nature, or music, which in general is very unpredictable and a cause for debate.

In terms of post-ww2 authors, that is, authors coming into maturity after the Second World War, I cannot think of any with a super-global reach with the exception of maybe Lord of the Rings (a clear literature of decline) or Harry Potter, which is very much a Victorian piece of literature. For major novelists, I can think of a few great voices working from the margins - Rushdie, an Indian-ish voice. Naipaul, a Caribbean voice, and maybe a few other contemporaries like A. S. Byatt (a sort of anachronism) and a few other voices. But lets be real. None of them have solidified the cultural pull that Dickens demonstrated during the Victorian era, literature has ceased to play the role it did then, and the decline in literature, as the country transitioned from creative haven to cultural museum can be documented in foreign attitudes toward English culture, which see it as a history rather a living organism.

Don't get me wrong, there are many great authors out there, but do they have the cultural pull their precursors had? Of course not. That is what we mean by decline. They moved from the centre of the cultural literary landscape internationally, creating the foundation of curriculum across the world, to merely a place amongst many cultures. That is what we call a decline by any standards. It is clearly a political change in opinion, and it is also reflected in art somewhat.

As for Spain's decline, it did not happen in the 20th century, as anybody can say, and a sort of cultural resurgence before the rise of fascism seems to be apparent. I don't think any literary historian could fail to note the devastating impact Franco has had on Spanish literature, as it marked the death of a sort of rebirth.

You yourself, perhaps made similar comments about German pre and post Nazi artistic production, which you noted marked a sharp decline with the rise and fall of the third Reich. For Canada, I could draw a similar trajectory with the sort of rise and decline of multiculturalism over the breakdown of ethnic tolerance at the turn of the 21st century.

I want to ask you then which authors do you think have had both cultural resonance as well as major critical appeal in the post 1950s world from England, born and raised as they say, as lord knows the peripheries of empire have brought in a large amount of great work. It's almost hard to name authors who people consider as major forces of literary movements, or as literary developers the way someone like Tennyson so enveloped a national zeitgeist.

As for my dislike of Britain, or of the US, my dislike of Chinese literature's developments is far greater, and I study it somewhat professionally. Culturally speaking China has shown such drastic developments and regressions that it makes the general trajectory look like a soap opera. Did China have a decline to? Well, the Maoist era produced very little of any actual artistic value, beyond some revolutionary songs and a half dozen plays of varying degrees of propaganda. It effectively made politics and literature one body, which is a dangerous movement even today.

If we can call nationalism the great "What I have that you don't" of world history, then certainly the world we live in now seems, in the developed and international "globalized" world anyway, a sort of "What I have left that is unique" culture. That is why James Bond is as important as French labeling on Wines, or Korean soap operas - they hold with them the last essence of nationalism in an increasingly post-nationalist world. The great artistic centers are no longer so ethnically isolated as they were in the 19th century (London is no longer English in the racial sense), and the world is forcing itself to realize that they cannot propagate without sharing, and sharing necessarily invites appropriation.

I learned this the sort of hard way realizing that Chinese people get offended when I write about Chinese literature, unless it is completely to praise how superior it is to anything Western. That I divorce it from the nation that is the contemporary nation of China is found infuriating, when it is described chinese language literature as an "Our literature" or "our cultural heritage" and not a "literature". How do we judge such a form of culture, given that its greatest advocates are actually its greatest isolationists, and are working specifically against sharing it with anybody who is not there to merely pat it on the back and butter it up with flattery. As a foreigner my voice, if containing a critical judgment, is always interpreted as ethnically biased, and my judgment always dismissed (except, thankfully by my professors if not my classmates) as the ravings of an uninformed, ignorant outsider. To be able to see the filthy washroom as a dump, however, is not a prejudiced opinion, but is simply accepted as one by people who have not known otherwise and have never seen a clean one as an example.

I have had similar condemnation from various Korean classmates who have taken my comments on Korean music rather amiss, as they come from a "non-Korean" and therefore an outsider. That my comments were particularly aesthetic in nature, over which songs I didn't care for was irrelevant.

How then do we understand national culture today? The old British literary world was first as the US is now, especially in cinema, a mass power carried across the world by its openness and sort of universal spirit. On one hand we want to have a national body, but on the other the only country that seems to not institutionally promote itself to a ridiculous extent is the United States, who generally, for better or for worse, relies on its national psyche, power of production, and general market size for shooting its works across the world - it swallows and digests anything that hits it, and then sends it back in its own Americanized form. There are now American Chinese food restaurants all over China, for instance, which is a sort of puzzle of cultural exchange and appropriation.

Then, as we return to the American concept of literature, and the Russian position in it, it is a puzzle of two sorts - one, we have the Russian specialists, whose knowledge is undoubtedly more in line with tradition, and language, and the generally train of thought of authors, then we have the general public, who seems to greatly like Russian works.

A similar period occurred amongst Chinese intellectuals who generally, if students of modern literature, all are familiar with the major Russian authors, and less familiar with historical British ones. Dostoevsky has become a sort of international psyche, bringing Petersberg to people who have not and will not ever go there, to teenagers who imagine themselves in existential crisis. This is a rather great artistic achievement, considering much writing today seems to be of the hysterical nihilistic sort, and Dostoevsky is very much a post-modern forerunner. Can English lit, in the international world, preform a similar feat? well, it does so in its renaissance form and its Victorian sensibility, but not so much after the First World War, in terms of making it to Asia (India, China, Japan) or The US and Canada (who are dominated primarily by American fiction). The US in the world is clearly the bright star, as Japan was a smaller star before their rather marked decline (though its an up and down game as the Japanese are unbelievably innovative in new forms of culture, such as video games and Animation/manga or even pornography, of which they are now the largest producer).

Now, if we were to want to dump 10 names of any time period of any art medium in almost any place, we probably could. Can we say that they are as colossal as a Rembrandt though, well, perhaps not. Still, if you wanted to say England has had 10 major novelists, you could quite well name them. But I am willing to wager not a single one of these critically acclaimed novelists, or poets, or whoever has been as internationally successful or influential as earlier British forerunners. Artists, maybe, and film makers, also perhaps maybe, but still, in terms of literature, I stand by my point of England has gone through a post-world-war decline in both influence and success.

[JCamilo]

Spain is indeed strange, but sort like Mortal trying to see where their focus went, I say they were focused on building a new world. Get the cities, the interior of churches, etc and you see were dedicated there. The philosophical thinking way behind, of course, with the strong religious control.

Now, Borges had anti-Cervantes feeling, saying Quixote as a National Book was a decline, because he wasn't a great linguistic and the products derivated from it would be naturally inferior. May be the classicist bias towards Cervantes, but he may be hitting right, while the end of baroque gave us classicists, which may not be as good (not the case here), but they are organizers. After Moliere, we have Racine, Montaigne then Voltaire. After Shakespeare and Milton, you had Pope. With enlightment thinkers - which implies in critics, researches, etc - around them. Spain had no such thing, which may have weakned them altough they had the satisfaction to live under the book, Quixote.

[mande2013]

One thing I'll say is across all mediums I feel there's been a precipitous decline in the quality of art from people who came of age in the sixties or thereafter. Even many of the most respected writers alive today, such as Pynchon, DeLillo, Salter, Coetzee, and Cormac hail from the Silent Generation rather than from the Boomer Generation.

[mal4mac]

Now, Borges had anti-Cervantes feeling, saying Quixote as a National Book was a decline, because he wasn't a great linguistic and the products derivated from it would be naturally inferior.

Has anyone else argued this? I don't think you can trust great authors as critics of other great authors, think of Tolstoy's criticisms of Shakespeare! Cervantes had a great influence on the development of the novel in all western cultures. I don't read Spanish, so I'll take your word for him not being a great linguist. But there are many other aspects of the novel, in which he had a great influence for the better... plot development, realism, surrealism, Quixoticism (!), humour, characterisation, meta-narrative,...

I want to ask you then which authors do you think have had both cultural resonance as well as major critical appeal in the post 1950s world from England, born and raised as they say, ...

To consider just in the early part of this period, "The angry young man" movement captured the Zeitgeist. There were several writers worthy of note... Kingsley Amis "Lucky Jim", Alan Sillitoe "Loneliness of the long Distance Runner, John Braine "Room at the Top", John Wain "Hurry on Down", Keith Waterhouse "Billy Liar"... many more... Some, if not all, had praise from major critics, like C.P. Snow.

[JCamilo]

Has anyone else argued this? I don't think you can trust great authors as critics of other great authors, think of Tolstoy's criticisms of Shakespeare! Cervantes had a great influence on the development of the novel in all western cultures. I don't read Spanish, so I'll take your word for him not being a great linguist. But there are many other aspects of the novel, in which he had a great influence for the better... plot development, realism, surrealism, Quixoticism (!), humour, characterisation, meta-narrative,...

Borges was not the kind of guy anyone wanted to fence. Not that winning arguments means someone is right about anything...

Anyways, Borges got a lot of criticism during his life, because they considered this part of his snobery. But the guy was not arguing against Quixote, but about the influence of Cervantes style on the formation of modern spanish language.