They're totally different, but I know for a fact that Dostoevsky himself (as well as pretty much every Russian writer) considered Pushkin's talents far more advanced than his. Anyway, Dostoevsky was a novelist and Pushkin was a poet and dramatist, so it's like comparing T.S. Eliot to James Joyce (except in that example the novelist influenced the poet/dramatist rather than vice-versa). And besides, you can't make a statement like that until you read Pushkin in Russian. And without Pushkin there wouldn't have been Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, (possibly) Gogol, Chekhov, Lermontov... Russian lit as we know it would have been totally different.Originally Posted by jon1jt
I put Pushkin and Dostoevsky at the same level really, as when you get to that level of literary merit you can't say who's better. I love Dostoevsky because his mind is totally twisted, just as mine is, but Pushkin's technical skill (roughly 400 sonnets, all with the strange rhyme scheme I mentioned above and all of which flow beautifully? Do you have an idea how astonishing that is?!) as well as storytelling ability are dazzling.
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). It's also not just a random tangent with no purpose but a great literary technique as it gives us the persona of an unreliable narrator who is not only totally biased towards his characters but is sometimes even incompetent as a narrator, as he often goes off and completely forgets the story discussing his foot fetish or which wines he likes most or what ballets he's been to the theater to see lately, getting so wrapped up in tangents that the story happens without him telling us anything. Another cool subtle thing is the recurring motif of waiting for/catching up with the character: he spends some time discussing Eugene's wardrobe and how "he three hours, at the least, / in front of mirrors spent," and by the time he's finished his character has already left, and he says, "we'd better hurry to the ball / whither headlong in a hack coach / already my Onegin has sped off." There's some very interesting narrative quirks in there, and when you think about it this style of narration became very popular in the West in the 20th century, but Pushkin was already doing it nearly 100 years before.
I do remember him mentioning feet every now and again but I don't remember 5 pages of it. I will admit there was more of that sort of thing in Eugene Onegin than in his other writings but I really didn't think it was that distracting, they didn't completely take you out of the story the way they so often can.
