Russian literature

[Maryana]

I can hardly imaging reading Pushkin in English or German... Some things simply can't be translated. One of the best things about Pushkin is that he sounds strangely modern, despite the fact he lived 200 years ago. And yet you feel that this was written by a person who lived in a different epoch. That's what you can see if you're a native speaker... I am

[blazeofglory]

I have read Russian literature massively and most of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and I feel few have written so grandiloquently the way the Russians did. They are matchless and I rate Russian is the greatest literary world

[Aravona]

I've read one book which comes under Russian literature. Russian Author at least The Secret History of Moscow - Ekaterina Sedia. I very much fell in love with that book, and am greatly inspired now by this thread to wade down to the deep end of the Russian literature swimming pool.

[blazeofglory]

The two Russian writers I find matchless in the history of world literature are Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and no books both in terms of philosophy and style were ever written compared with War and Peace and the Brothers Karamazov. And this is my evaluation.

[blp]

I can hardly imaging reading Pushkin in English or German... Some things simply can't be translated.

As I remember it, this was also Nabokov's view. The greatest prose stylist of all time, but no non-Russian speaker would ever understand why. Something like that.

[Mockingbird_z]

Now I got a crazy idea, having read Pushkin's "Evgeniy Onegin" in oroginal i will have a go and read it in translation. For the sake of experiment.

[byquist]

Tolstoy is special, including Resurrection.

[Babak Movahed]

It's great from Pushkin to Bulgakov. I mean Crime and Punishment is in my opinion the greatest novel of all time and it for sure will be on any top 10 greatest novels list. Dostoevsky can be called (and by many is called) the greatest writer of all time, with Tolstoy not to far behind him on that list.

[testwilliams]

This question has been killing me for hours now. Does anyone know what short story Chekhov wrote the line "and suddenly everything became clear to him" in? I've searched what seems like every quotations and other similar webpage that shows up when I search for it, but still can't find it. All I know is that apparently it's from one of Chekhov's short stories and that Raymond Carver really liked the quote, so much that he pinned it to the wall above his writing desk.

[Mr.lucifer]

I heard that russian literature is still going strong. Kolyma tales is a good example and is perhaps one of the greatest short story collections of all times,perhaps even comparable to chekhov's tales.

[Vlad Dracula]

The Russian culture and mentality is something special and unique!! Lately I had the occasion to meet it and I am really fascinating!

[blazeofglory]

The Russian Renaissance was awe-inspiring and the writers it birthed were insuperable in their creative works. Chekov for instance has always been a matchless storyteller. Dostoevsky remained an unparalleled master on novels. Tolstoy was an epical personality. Even no Americans and Europeans could equal them. They were really deep and profound in their characterization and in their delineation of human natures

[stlukesguild]

blazes... you offer nothing new... just personal opinion confused with fact. Checkoff is a matchless story-teller? Really? One might suggest any number who equal or arguably surpass him (Maupassant, Kafka, J.L. Borges, Thomas hardy, Joseph Conrad, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Ambrose Bierce, Poe, Hemingway, Dickens, Hawthorne, Boccaccio, the author/s of the 1001 Arabian Knights...). Dostoevsky is the greatest novelist? Truly? Many at LitNet might agree with you, but as JBI has pointed out many young or inexperienced readers come across Dostoevsky and Nietzsche an identify with their existentialism and confuse their admiration with aesthetic merit. This is not to suggest Dostoevsky is not a great novelist... but so was Cervantes, Victor Hugo, Flaubert, Lawrence Sterne, Dickens, Murasaki Shikibu Thomas Hardy, Zola, Balzac, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, William Faulkner, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, etc... Indeed, one might quite easily make an argument that Tolstoy was the greatest novelist. As for Tolstoy as the author of epic personality... one might easily argue that Shakespeare, Cervantes, Lawrence Sterne, Dickens, and even Twain created characters that are just as "epic" in development... characters that virtually "live" beyond the confines of the text in which they were created.

Seriously, your adulation of the Russians strikes me as just one more aspect of your continual diatribe to the effect of "They just don't write like they used to."

[Mr.lucifer]

Besides, have you even read any of the asian traditions? I hear theres a wealth of writers that rival the masters of the west.

[tonywalt]

Name a few Asian writers. Actually they seem underepresented on this forum, maybe there are less translations.