Tolstoy vs Dostojewskii

>i like tolstoy more but i don't have the wherewithal to express why

>it's literally dosto-jew-sky

i bet if this were a "who's better, mcormac or wallace" this thread would have blown up. i guess not enough of you have actually read the russians.

Who the fuck is voting for Dostoevsky? Damn, lots of plebs on Veeky Forums.

Epic post

>Tolstoy
>not a french asshole licking pleb
kek

Tolstoy could at least write a proper sentence.

[ ] argument [X] not an argument

Actually, it is an argument.

hey, someone went with gogle. p. good choice.

I never got to share my opinion on the last Dostoevsky thread because it expired too soon.

People where thrashing him on his behavior and one person in particular kept calling him shit.

This is exactly what dosetevesky is writing about, how society sees the different natured , the minority as a corrupt man. He even goes as far as too write about criminals and their experience living life with 'criminal' tendiences. Society shuns these people like the particular individual in the last thread and calls them worthless shit or scrutinizes how he uses religion to justify his behavior when in reality dosetevesky's attraction to religion and his alienation because of this repulsion by society was nothing more then his nature! It's exactly how his life played out not how it should or should have, and this is exactly the message in most of dosetevesky's books.

It dosent matter what others ever think for you will always be your nature, and if you do care what others thinks then it is your nature so accept that too, regardless of how repulsive you may seem.

>I personally like Dostoevsky because he's a psychopath and that appeals to me.

Link to the old discussion

he was a shit guy, and his message was shit, but his writing was enduring and of a depth that speaks to a lot of people who think themselves alone in their introspection. he is more enduring as a psychological entity, whereas Tolstoy was enduring as a french loving dullard who couldn't write a passionate experience to save his life.

this makes me wonder what Dostojewskii's twitter feed would look like

>Dostoevsky, Fyodor.
Dislike him. A cheap sensationalist, clumsy and vulgar. A prophet, a claptrap journalist and a slapdash comedian. Some of his scenes are extraordinarily amusing. Nobody takes his reactionary journalism seriously.
- The Double. His best work, though an obvious and shameless imitation of Gogol's "Nose."
- The Brothers Karamazov. Dislike it intensely.
- Crime and Punishment. Dislike it intensely. Ghastly rigmarole.

>Tolstoy, Leo.
A favorite between the ages of 10 and 15, and thereafter. Read complete works between 14 and 15. Nobody takes his utilitarian moralism seriously. A genius.
- Anna Karenina. Incomparable prose artistry. The supreme masterpiece of 19th-century literature.
- The Death of Ivan Ilyich. A close second to Anna Karenina.
- Resurrection. Detest it.
- The Kreutzer Sonata. Detest it.
- War and Peace. A little too long. A rollicking historical novel written for the general reader, specifically for the young. Artistically unsatisfying. Cumbersome messages, didactic interludes, artificial coincidences. Uncritical of its historical sources.

That's all well and good, but the man couldn't write.

>listening to the opinion of a vapid pedophile

Could you please elaborate on him being a 'shit' guy? What exactly do you mean by this?

>nabokov likes anna karenina, the love letter to french aristocracy and hollowness, completely lacking any humanity except for one candid moment that didn't even seem to fit in the novel

He could write. He has many books, how could he not have written them?

that he was just an unpleasant man, from every account, he wasn't a very pleasant guy. but who cares about the artist? the artist is nothing compared to his work. just a phantom, a disappointment.

also, strange that nabokov wouldn't love dostoevsky, since they were both pedophiles.

ah, maybe nabokov just saw too much of himself as a man in dostoevsky. didn't want people to see his true creepy pleb side. hard not to see what with all his creepy pleb books.

Notes from the underground does open up with "I am a sick man.... I am a spiteful man."

I'm sure he was aware of this quality of his regardless that he encompassed it in one of his charcters.

"No, I am not a pleasant man at all"'

ITT: plebs who vote Tolstoy trying to be patricians
Dostoevsky is the only true answer. Even if Tolstoy is one of the greatest writers of all time, he doesn't reach the deep meaning of Dostoevsky's works.
Tolstoy writes about Russia, Dostoevsky is Russia. He changes his thoughts (socialist/conservative, agnostic atheist/agnostic theist) because he knows that Russia need this. He doesn't want a country devastated by edgy nihilism.

He was a shitty prose stylist. Worse than Dickens, even. The quality of his writing was bad.

What did you find about his message that was shit? His message was literally about loving others and looking out for your fellow man, what's wrong with that?

>caring about prose
Found the fifteen year old with the thesaurus

It's slavenmoral Christ shit

>reads for plot

Can you read him in his original language?

>looking out for your fellow man
what? dude, what? no.
he was selfish and crude and relied on the lord to save him from his hatred, every one of the characters he crafts were severely flawed monsters, each of them a facet of the broad perspective he had of people's darkest sides. he was a brilliant author because he wrote humans, not what humans "should" be.
>reads for prose
>being this much of a pleb

>autism intensifies

>not reading for plot

i bet you really enjoy opening books at the middle and reading each prime numbered page outwards from the center.

Let me guess - you're about 14 years old, right?

>thinks reading for prose makes him patrician

Go back to r/books with your disgusting reading-for-plot plebbery. This is Veeky Forums.

You're undoubtedly a 13 year old, at least in spirit. Go read some sam Harris or jerk off to math problems like Wittgenstein did

Time to go back to plebbit, kiddo.

I mean, specifically in The Brothers Karamazov, the idea of 'being guilty towards all of humanity', was the core of Zossima's message and was pretty much a central theme of the book. I'm not sure how you could argue otherwise.

no, i think plebbit is where you belong, friend:
reddit.com/r/proseporn

one character of many many many many many many many monsters. sure, zossima was an ideal, but it was a message that drowned beneath a sea of true people.

Reading for prose is what distinguishes LITERATURE from the edgy genre trash you enjoy, son.

Time for you to return to your homeland on plebbit.com.

the level of delusion this user has. i feel sorry for you. literature doesn't live and die by prose. it lives and dies by many things, prose is just a method of expressing a plot, or characters, or ideas. prose is a secondary aspect and it always will be. your desperate desire to seem superior because of this is what will inhibit you from ever surpassing plebbiness.

Posts like this should be a bannable offense

+themes
i could see you trying to say literature is distinguished by themes, but not prose.

Sounds like a quote straight off of plebbit. Time for you to go back.

Dost is early Metallica and Tolstoy is Poison

Getting upset, I see. Unfortunately, you can't downvote posts that upset you here. You gonna cry now, bitch boy?

you seem like the type to read through a book in a language you don't understand because the scribbles look pretty.
or
"i hate this font, i can't read this novel."

>thinking we're the same person

I wouldn't say it 'drowned'. Yes, the people in Dostoevsky's books do terrible things sometimes, and some of them are pretty shitty people, but there's always a way out, a path for self-redemption. You can see it in characters like Dmitri in TBK, with Rodya in C&P, even though people do shitty things, the message still remains at its core. Maybe Dostoevsky didn't truly think we'd ever fully live up to that ideal, but he definitely thought that we should always strive for it.

well, i can see the validity of your perspective, but i would say that it's a matter of a pessimistic reading and an optimistic reading, i was always coming back to dostoevsky because of the bleak truth of his characters, not because i needed to hear his ideals.

Point me towards to the Rust In Peace era Megadeth or to the Slayer of Russian literature

Bely for slayer.

It really feels like most of the people hating on Tolstoy haven't read him.

If you'd only had read a summary of Tolstoy it would certainly seem like all he was was a standard boring YA-ish french loving asshole stuff. But Tolstoy is an incredibly unique genius in the history of literature, and easily one of the greatest novelists who ever lived.

When you look at style alone, there's no comparison to Tolstoy in balancing beauty and realism. By making every detail, every in the picture he paints a sign of a detail in complicated human emotions - emotions that Dostoevsky wouldn't touch, because they're not dramatic enough. In Anna Karenina, for example, you have Levin lose a political philosophical argument with his brother. If Dostoevsky wrote it, what would be important would be the politics or the philosophy. But since Tolstoy wrote it, what was important was the fact that Levin felt deep down that he was right in spite of the fact that he knew he lost the argument.
Love is exactly the proof of this also. Is there any love that's not cartoonish in Dostoevsky? In The Brothers Karamazov, you have, all of the sudden, without any explanation or detail, a father and son in love with the same woman. That could be very interesting.
It isn't. He doesn't know how to write love. It's just taken for granted. In Anna Karenina, you track every feeling involved in the affair between Anna and Vronsky. The way Karenin's anger becomes passive-aggressive vengeance, which has brief period a brief christian forgiveness when he's sick which actually makes Vronsky feel like the lesser man briefly - that's life, not an illegitimate son framing his half-brother who was in a love triangle with his dad on the murder of his dad, or a 10 page long speech.
Or Levin's marriage. It's slow, it's very painful, it takes an incredibly long time - Levin takes up intellectual matters to distract himself from his rejection and drops them right when he sees her for a second. If all you get is a summary, it seems so boring, unlike Dostoevsky's ridiculous love triangles.
Tolstoy finds depth in every-day experience, enormous depth. Dostoevsky characters have philosophical outbursts because of the crazy situations in which they almost randomly get placed. It's not like Dostoevsky's bad, or there's no value whatsoever to his work. Notes from the Underground, for instance, is probably one of the best portraits of a societal outcast that was ever written. But Tolstoy was a far more realistic writer, and as a result the depth of his work pleases the reader who is wants to read about life rather than someone who wants existential philosophy and ridiculous situations.

>love letter to french aristocracy and hollowness
You didn't even read the book, did you?

i did. it was shit. the only part that was remotely pleasant and enlightening was Levin mowing grass with the peasants.

But you got the message completely wrong. He was parodying the hollowness of the aristocracy, not writing a love letter to it.

Also, what about the prose? I think Tolstoy is a much better prose writer than Dostoevsky.

how pleb can you get

>thinking subtlety is more realistic
you haven't ever been in love if you think that love in most instances isn't cartoonish.
Anna Karenina wasn't compelling, I read it alone, fully isolated, in about a week. aside from the deeply apparent moral to never cheat or your life will be ruined, there was nothing to take away from his dry and dull writing. nothing so lasting as that moment with Levin and the grass, because it felt REAL. for once in the book it felt fucking real. everything else he wrote felt so tragically monotonous that it never spoke to me, never sucked my emotions in further than a simple surface level. Hey, in the end, some people prefer Tolstoy. there's nothing wrong with that. I just didn't find what I wanted from his work, and It's probably because I expected something different. I don't dislike tolstoy at all, I just don't love him.

i was reading a translation, so any conversation about prose is pointless.
he wasn't parodying the hollowness of the aristocracy, he was clearly in love with it. not just with his treatment of his characters, but how he wrote, it felt so much like the shit frenchies i've read since then. I'll have to read through War and Peace before i can make a total judgement on that theory, so i'll defer to you in this argument. I just get a very different impression from ol' tolstoy.

Dostoyevsky's love stories may not be great but they're generally just set up for tension, not the focus of a novel

did you read a translation?

Great post, user.

desu W+P and AK are like only half of Tolstoy's writing, and even he developed far above them later in his career

tolstoys short novels+essays/GiB 4 life

Hadji Murat alone...

I'm always open to new things, I love dostoevsky, and i'm definitely biased because of his influence on me as a pre-lit pleb, however, I am not averse to letting Tolstoy take the lead, It might be a matter of maturity, of reading comprehension, many things. I still have a lot to read still. Nothing's set in stone!

Now you're just a post-lit pleb.

You can tell who is retarded by whether or not they describe Tolstoy's novels as "period dramas."

> DOSTOEVSKY WROTE ABOUT UNIVERSAL HUMANITY, TOLSTOY ONLY WRITES ABOUT ARISTOCRATS HUNTING

Time to find a new hobby.

>MOM SOMEONE HAS A DIFFERENT OPINION

I like how retarded people on Veeky Forums are the ones who misinterpret Tolstoy.

Tolstoy is obviously the superior of the two.

omg the projection

hahahaha I love it when they're wrong!!

Tolstoj is the country
Dostojevskij is the capital

>samefagging this hard

just read the whole thread, pleb.

Well done.

>Dostoevsky
>Jewish

...

>not knowing about the Dostojewskii meme

Deep desu

I like to mow grass.

want some of my sop, user? 's good.

I only eat grass faggot.

it has a little grass in it.

DUDE

>tfw Dostojewskii has been consistently double Tolstoy in votes

take THAT

I only drink earl grey or oolong faggot.

just shows how pleb Veeky Forums actually is