I like Tolstoy, Melville, Hamsun and YeCarthy. I especially dislike Dostoyevsky and Nabokov...

>Dosto is far more mature than Tolstoy
Tolstoy wrote about upper class, Dosto wrote about lower class? generally?

What do you mean to say by that? What you said isnt even totally true. Levin was poor. Mishkin was rich.

bump i like this thread

Levin's workers were poor, Levin not so much

maybe check out Thomas Mann, he cites Dosto and Hamsun as his favorite authors, his style is kinda simlar to Tolstoi and his prose is godlike (Nabbi, Melvivlle)

The master and margherita..
Michail Bulgakov

>MY OPINIONS ARE INCENDIARY
get a clue user. Disliking both nabby and dosto at the same time is a paradox by itself, and disliking them for those reasons is pure retardation.

Why don't you like Dostoevsky, you goddamn Bernard?

>dostoyevsky
>a moral man

>cheats on his wife
>pisses his money away because of his gambling addiction while he has a family
>preaches that you should try to emphatize with and understand other people while at the same time he mocks and creates caricatures of liberal activists and writers of his era, also shits on polacks in the idiot, c&p, and tbk because some of them bullied him while he was doing time in syberia or something
Dostoyevsky wasn't that bad when you compare him to some of his contemporaries but he was far from being a moral, well adjusted man

He don't like pessimism, he likes cheerful hedonism shit

Has nothing to do with maturity. Tolstoy was more concerned with portraying high society qua society itself, and he didn’t so better than anyone except perhaps Proust, but he doesn’t hold a candle to the insight Dostoevsky offers into the criminal nature of the human soul. Read Thomas Mann’s essays on both. “Goethe and Tolstoy” is a good place to start. “Dostoevsky in Moderation” is tremendously insightful and much shorter, but you have to understand his thoughts on Tolstoy before you read it.

I disagree, user. Read Nabokov on Dostoevsky. He thoroughly disapproves of him, but more out of jealousy than anything else. For example, he accuses Dostoevsky of writing generic mystery fiction (citing Brothers Karamazov in particular), but look at Lolita—it’s a lot of other things, sure, but it’s largely a mystery novel, too. Nabokov was preoccupied with a fundamental, ontological guilt and extreme states of subjective mania every bit as much as Dostoevsky was, but he felt threatened by Dostoevsky because he portrayed that guilt as underpinned by a fundamental spiritual question that, in its ambiguity, threatens to undermine the oppressive individualism of the tortured soul. Whereas Nabokov—the ultimate atheist aesthete—chose to portray morality as an isolated artifact in a hermetic literary vacuum.

So for somebody who isn’t really interested in that sort of intense, harrowing subjective scrutiny at all, Nabokov and Dostoevsky are equally unappealing.

>I especially dislike Dostoyevsky and Nabokov
That's odd user they're almost complete opposites

>being morally upright
>obsessing and agonizing over the ambiguous existence of morality as it relates to inescapable individualism and subjective experience

Mot the same thing. Much in the same way Nabokov calls Lolita a “highly moral affair” yet asserts that it has “no moral in tow.”

See

I disagree completely but am to drunk right now hopefully I'll remember this tommorow

Cheers. Would love to hear your thoughts. Have a cozy night’s sleep user

yours were the last words I read, and they left such a glowing impression on me, I dreamt of us cuddled up together by the fire

>Reading Nabakov's thoughts on why he doesn't like Dostoevsky???
For the majority of his life, and up until he needed to thoroughly explain his reasoning, Nabakov was trained to hate Dostoevsky by his family (his uncle imprisoned Dostoevsky in the revolution and Nabakov's childhood was essentially demolished by that same revolution). Nabakov's introduction to Dostoevsky were through these stories, rather than his works, so the veracity of Nabakov's claims on Dostoevsky should be heavily doubted.
>I don't like 1984 for it's harrowing subjective scrutiny
>I don't like A Clockwork Orange for it's harrowing subjective scrutiny
>I don't like *insert too many books* for it's harrowing subjective scrutiny.
Maybe I'm misinterpreting your point, but any book considering any ethical claim--normative or otherwise-- would contain some form of subjective scrutiny. I wouldn't classify Nabakov's scrutiny as harrowing as Dostoevsky's but Tolstoy is definitely closer to D than N. Is it that you dislike the each author's specific lens, or just intense, harrowing subjective scrutiny? If the latter, then what sort of subjective scrutiny does Nabakov write to deserve your dislike that Tolstoy or McCarthy doesn't? I'd like to hear how both Brothers K and Lolita fit into Nabakov's definition of 'mystery novel' as well.

>Hamsun and YeCarthy
To the Lighthouse by Woolf

First of all, I should clarify — I'm not OP who dislikes Nabokov and Dostoevsky, the two are actually both in my top five as authors.

I think we may have missed each other on a couple of points. With regards to Nabokov's writings on Dostoevsky, I'm advocating for the same sort of highly critical reading that you are, i.e. one that doubts the ingenuity of the claims and tries to find a reason for them by comparing the two authors. Here's a passage you might be interested in from Nabokov (nytimes.com/1981/08/23/magazine/nabokov-on-dostoyevsky.html?pagewanted=all):

>Let us always remember that basically Dostoyevsky is a writer of mystery stories where every character, once introduced to us, remains the same to the bitter end, complete with his special features and personal habits, and that they all are treated throughout the book they happen to be in like chessmen in a complicated chess problem. Being an intricate plotter, Dostoyevsky succeeds in holding the reader's attention; he builds up his climaxes and keeps up his suspenses with consummate mastery. But if you reread a book of his you have already read once so that you are familiar with the surprises and complications of the plot, you will at once realize that the suspense you experienced during the first reading is simply not there anymore.

Remember that this is the same Nabokov WHO WROTE AN ENTIRE FUCKING BOOK on a chess problem: "The Luzhin Defense." Obviously that work is from earlier in his career, but I haven't read any Nabokov in which the protagonist *isn't* caught in these same sorts of dizzying, complex puzzles. Of course, I don't agree with Nabokov's claim about the two-dimensionality and stasis of Dostoevsky's characters any more than I agree with the numerous critics who harangued Nabokov on the charge that all his protagonists basically resembled himself and lacked any realistic depth (despite his being a master stylist, however, I will admit that dialogue in Nabokov often feels unnatural).

Which brings me to the second point that I think we failed to connect on, which is that of the "harrowing subjective scrutiny" I was talking about. The term "subjective" probably wasn't the best choice because it's so broad, but in particular I was referring to
>fundamental, ontological guilt and extreme states of subjective mania
and
>oppressive individualism,
both of which you'll find in Dostoevsky and in Nabokov to a large degree. Tolstoy touches on these topics, more so in AK (the title character, obviously) than W&P (probably Pierre to the largest extent), but always frames them within the larger context of stunning realism that he's so famous for — the "life writing about life itself." Whereas Nabokov and Dostoevsky, in my opinion, get at the whole "life" question from the bottom up, that is, by starting within the subjective consciousness of isolated individuals and depicting them as they try to break free into a meaningful, non-isolated existence.

>Dusty Dosty is moralizing
>but Leo "insert a ten page sermon into Levin's mouth at the end of the book" Tolstoy is a-ok!
You're retarded

(cont.) The main difference between the two resides in the fact that Dostoevsky sees fundamental spiritual questions as the lynchpin to the solipsism conundrum, whereas Nabokov prefers to accord that honor to aesthetic consideration — art itself. I think Nabokov and Dostoevsky are preoccupied with the same fundamental questions, but the means Dostoevsky uses to answer them are so far removed from Nabokov's literary comfort zone that the latter picks trivial charges to levy against the former — charges of which he himself is guilty — rather than admit his utter inability to reckon with Dostoevsky on his own level.

For what it's worth, Nabokov isn't the only author to fall into this sort of trivial, hyper-jealous criticism. Tolstoy apparently held Shakespeare in great contempt and actually put his work below "Uncle Tom's Cabin," if you could believe that. Tolstoy and Shakespeare are pretty similar in a lot of ways, and I think the same thing is going on with Nabokov and Dostoevsky.

Great posts and what a pleasure to read. I had you confused with OP because I didn't think he would have the gall to be so lazy and use your post as his reasoning here. The clarification of your second point about "harrowing subjective scrutiny" is right on the mark. Simply, Tolstoy concentrates more on the sociological aspects of man while Dostoevsky/Nabakov start and end in the psychological plane (generally). Hence, the differences of this in their works. I had heard this before, but never explained so perfectly, congratulations. The same goes for the first paragraph of your second post. It's not challenging to see how someone could dislike the two simultaneously. Thanks for connecting the dots and your posts are well appreciated.

Thanks user, your appreciation means a lot to me. I mentioned this in an earlier post but I would really recommend reading Thomas Mann’s “Goethe and Tolstoy” (in which he discusses Schiller and Dostoevsky at length as well), a lot of what I discussed above draws heavily upon his analysis. Plus, he’s really a pleasure to read. I think you’d enjoy, especially if you’re a fan of both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, because his commentary provides a tremendously useful vocabulary for discussing what makes each one so extraordinary.

>joaning the guys who mock-executed you and stole a good chunk of your life invalidates your teachings on love/understanding
He wasn't Jesus

>invalidates your teachings on love/understanding
never said that, many authors were hyprocites/assholes/faulty humans and it doesn't invalidate their teachings, i ujsut said that dosto himself wasn't some moral boy
but this user already corrected me on the post that I was replying to

fuck, I'm tipsy I meant that post

Nabokov was a poet who wrote novels, Russias foremost prose stylist. I think he likely thought moral questions were boring and already solved, and there were tomes and libraries full of ethics textbooks for that. I dont think people realize how hard it is to write good poetry, Nabokovs style and word and idea choice, flavors, colors, textures, sounds, relations, flows, imagery, flowering, baroque, romantic, rich, exuberant, heavenly, delightful. He was an abstract, expressionist, impressionist, realist, painter, and complex kaleidoscopic oriental rug weaver

mein diarus, desuin

>I especially dislike Dostoyevsky

how does it feel to have just revealed yourself as a fool for the whole board to see?

Hang yourself, maggot. After all these good posts you add your shit like a cunt bitch.

I too wish death on this person.

I never said he wasnt russian

You like Hamsun but not Dostoevsky? Hamsun is the Norwegian Dostoevsky.

He's more lyrical