I'm new to literature and just finished this and wanted to talk about it. Here are some of my observations

read Notes from the Underground for a better understanding of Raskolnikov's character

Hey OP, I'm glad you read Crime and Punishment. It's certainly a wonderful masterpiece and is rightly regarded as one of Dostoevsky's greatest works. One of your observations, here:

>philosophy and ideas are in dialogue (mostly), not from narrator's observations

is accurate. You'll find that it's not only the philosophy and ideas that are in dialogue, it's the drama, too. Dostoevsky is very Homeric in this regard, and indeed he was inspired by Homer's poems. Both authors let their characters do the talking, which helps create a world of verisimilitude, which in turn lends credibility to the psychology of the characters (extremely important in both authors, as you no doubt noticed Raskolnikov's psychology shape throughout the book), which aids in creating the drama. One of the wonders of these two is that neither necessarily speaks directly at you with a character that expresses their own personal views. In Dostoevsky, for example, you have a wide variety of characters who may express some of the author's views, but never in full, and often times distorted to some degree. There is never the character of Dostoevsky in one of his novels, and he either took this from Homer or at least was influenced by it.

Crime and punishment is a fantastic book, newfriend. Dostoevsky actually wrote it in order to earn income and support his family. Even before completing the novel, he was already an illustrious writer. He understood what people wanted to read, and he simply appeased their interests. Not many other writers could tell a story as well as Dostoevsky could.

The point was that whatever you want to say about the philosophy which Dostoyevsky is getting at, he frames it around a story that is designed almost perfectly. I get the feeling that a lot of literature is so willing to meander that it ends up diluting the point, which doesn't happen here

haha whoa! really makes u think :)

You're right.

>le philosophical novel

You understood nothing. A 500 page novel reduced to a simple parable in your mind.
If you had half a brain you'll find more to consider in a single page than you did in that wasted experience.

>make a post about the form of a work to discuss its merits
>everyone assumes that your observations on the form were the only things you got from the whole book

It's amazing how defensive and childish this board is.

please share the rest of your no doubt enlightening thoughts with us then, user :) We can tell you're a great reader with your use of casual movie review terms like "characterization" and "pacing"

>prose is functional, never really poetic
you read a translation dude
consider that

dude, yeah, a lot of these posts and the people who made them are despicable and pathetic, but instead of just getting mad, how about engaging with the two people who took the time to write thoughtful and nice
posts:
this is why Veeky Forums is bad: people who shitpost get responses and people who put in effort are ignored

>prose is functional, never poetic
I can really tell you read the Garnett translation

Constructive!

Okay, how about this. Read anyone but Garnett. There's a reason Anglophones are bored by Russian lit, and she's it.

P&V are boring too

Revised Garnett is the only option to go with. What are you a P&Vedditor?

Okay, how about Coulson?

Literally who?

I've only read his Crime and Punishment and thought it a little worse than Garnett. It had a few clunky sentences in it but that was all. It was fine.

Garnett is the whole reason Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and others are adored by Anglophones. There's nothing boring about her translations of Dostoevsky.

it's a good book. well regarded for a reason.

the one thing i take issue with is
>every character is given strong traits and characterization is very important

i think this is an amateurish reaction, which is fine given you're new to literature. but i want to pose to you the idea that perhaps you are confusing "good characterization" (or at least defining it as) with "characters that have a strong, consistent, ideological drive," or something along those lines.

dostoevsky's characters are very often exaggerated in certain aspects to espouse/exemplify a particular belief or ideology. a harsher word would be they're almost caricature like - raskolnikov as existentialism-personified, sonia as a hybrid of the innocent virgin (ironically, given her profession) and christ-embodied, porfiry as the cynical rationalist/pragmatist, etc.

a common criticism is that dostoevsky is too heavy-handed with his characters.

if you ever read tolstoy (and you definitely should) i think it would do you good to pay attention to how tolstoy constructs and depicts his characters, versus how dostoevsky does them. tolstoy is generally regarded as the superior stylist and writer of "better," or at least more realistic, characters.

Not OP, just curious about your post:
Are you implying that Dostoevsky's characters don't have "good characterization" because they're caricatures? Or something else?

well it depends on your aesthetic sensibilities. the reason nabokov shat on dostoevsky so much was largely for this reason - that his characters are not necessarily "human" or "aesthetic objects," but more "mouthpieces" for certain beliefs, and dostoevsky just plays them off each other in almost strawman-esque fashion at times. again, this is underselling what dostoevsky is doing, but i think one can see where this criticism comes from. dostoevsky's emotional impact comes from characters essentially distilling down their moral and ideological positions and "feeding" them to their interlocutors/the reader. tolstoy does this at points too, but it's a -much- smaller part of how he characterizes his characters, and gogol does this almost not at all, barring certain concluding/crucial narrative moments.

I understand this, I think the clarification though is that while Dostoevsky writes characters with a simplistic operating principle when it comes to describing the drives, reflections and passions of the characters he's amazingly profound.

Ah, I think I understand what you're saying now. So what do you think it says about someone's aesthetic sensibilities if they adore Dostoevsky's characters but are a little bored by Tolstoy's? That's my experience, at least. I've read most of Dostoevsky and re-read a good bit of him, and have read Anna Karenina and a little more of Tolstoy, and I just can't get into the latter's characterization. They seem dry and therefore uninteresting, as opposed to Dostoevsky's characters that function as you said, where they're sort of more explosive in their dialogue.

I hope that makes sense.

certainly - but to play devil's advocate, perhaps he's able to reflect his characters so well precisely because their principles are relatively simple?

tolstoy's power is his ability to essentially produce an entire being with very little space, which says to me that tolstoy had incredibly insight into what makes humans human. one could simplify this to simple realism but i think there's more to it than that. while tolstoy is well known for his doorstoppers, i want you to maybe take a half hour or so and read a couple of his short stories. i suggest maybe alyosha the pot, or if you have closer to an hour - 2, try hadji murat or my personal favorite, the forged coupon if you haven't already. tolstoy deftly paints profound portraits of human experience with very brief phrases and actions, and does not sacrifice any complexity or reflective value. if you have some time give it a try and see what you think.

at the risk of overgeneralizing, i think a not insignificant number of people have similar thoughts as you when they first read tolstoy, but usually find deeper appreciation as they age. subtlety, i think, tends to become more valued as a virtue as you read more/age, and i think tolstoy excels in this compared to dostoevsky.

dostoevsky's strengths are, as discussed here, in his ability to convey strong passions and emotions in an explosive and viscerally impactful way, which is to be admired as well.

...

>shit pleb/bait thread rescued by a single good poster

There's hope for this board afterall

Unrealistic feels like reaching a bit too much. I think that the feeling of them being caricatures comes less from them being realistic or not, and more from the highly engineered series of interactions they go through. It's like they are all totally realistic and consistent, but they are thrown into circumstances where they would realistically act in an exaggerated manner and expound on their beliefs in an exaggerated way. In other words, it's not that they act in a forced way to fit the circumstances, it's that the circumstances are engineered to bring out the way they would naturally act.

It's probably too minor of a distinction to focus on, anyway.

Wonderful post, user. Thank you for not being condescending or anything like that.

I agree that I think I will appreciate Tolstoy the older I get. I've heard many people say the exact same thing as you have just now about the Odyssey, when compared to the Iliad; the slower, more elusive and quiet book becomes the preference of the aged.

I've been recommended Hadji Murat many times now, so I'll certainly get to it at some point. I do intend on reading War and Peace in the coming months and am very much looking forward to it. I anticipate liking the setting more than Anna Karenina, where the only things I sincerely enjoyed was Levin, especially Levin on his farm (and I wonder if this is, by your observations, a common theme of the new reader to Tolstoy). What is it about The Forged Coupon that you prefer over Hadji Murat?

very true and i think this is definitely a good way to think about it. as pointed out previously, the dialogue lends credibility to the psychology, but these dialogues are not the same kind of "natural dialogue" that one finds in everyday speech. so highly engineered is a good way to put it - just like homer (or might i suggest: plato?), dostoevsky characters are placed in very explicitly politically/philosophically charged situations, and react accordingly.

i preferred the brothers karamazov to this

the forged coupon is tolstoy's most panoramic book. this is probably strange to hear when considering the epic scope of AK, WP, and even Hadji Murat, spanning geographies and time; for me, as i mentioned, tolstoy's greatest strength is in his subtle and concise characterization, and it is this kind of panorama that's on full display in the forged coupon. it's a very brief work - 50 pages or so - and traces a single fake banknote altered by a schoolboy for a spur of the moment purchase, and it follows this banknote as it passes through the hands of dozens of characters. the coupon changes hands 20+ times in the span of 50 pages, and tolstoy manages to depict an entire range of human lives - from the modest to the greedy, the depths of depravity to the heights of innocence, and everything in between - and he does it by giving 1 - 2 pages to each single character. i think it's tolstoy at his most humanistic.

I am the guy who wrote the long post about Dostoevsky that you mentioned there, and the same one talking to you about Tolstoy right now.

You're right to suggest Plato, who influenced Dostoevsky immensely, but this is along with Homer and the Greeks in general. Dostoevsky took from Homer his characters speaking for themselves for the sake of drama, and from Plato he took many of the philosophical concepts he talked about.

A major example can be found in The Brothers Karamazov, where the three brothers are based upon Plato's tripartite soul: Ivan is logical, Alyosha is spirited, Mitya is appetitive. The major difference between Plato and Dostoevsky, however, is that Dostoevsky's characters often act out, or otherwise respond physically (e.g. Ivan's illness and hallucinations, Raskolnikov's fainting and illness) to their politically/philosophically charged situations.

And this is where Homer comes in, who has his characters talk and talk and talk and then take some manner of action. That's how I see it, anyway.

That sounds wonderful, and you've sold me on it. I'll see about giving it a read tomorrow.

Here's a question that might be difficult: do you have any tips for reading Tolstoy? Anything to look out for in general? Tolstoy is so renowned that ever since I read Anna Karenina and didn't really care for it, I've been a little sad that I've been missing out on the beauty that other people talk about, like you've been doing. It's possible that he's just not for me (at the present), but I'd like to make sure I at least gave him the shot he obviously deserves.

Camelia tu esti?

i think a lot of the difficulty people have when reading tolstoy is exacerbated by the fact that they're almost always reading AK and WP. those books are non-trivial, and require a certain amount of sustained immersion and focus to keep track of all the plot points and characters and kaleidoscopic action. his shorter works tend to follow a single line of narration, or in the case of something like hadji murat, it's like a W&P in miniature, which makes for a much easier read. i don't think you'll find them too difficult to read.

as for things to look out for, i would say maybe pay attention to his sentence constructions and -how- he reveals what he does about the characters (the order, the amount of detail, etc.). it falls under "style" which you stated you weren't too fixated on, but this is less prose style and more narrative technique. i don't think paying close attention to this is crucial to reading tolstoy, but it could be something that might help. no promises.

no disagreement here i think this is a fine summary. dostoevsky has long been considered a highly dramatic - in the traditional stage sense - writer as you alluded to in the earlier post.

it also lends credence to starting with the greeks :^)

Always start with the Greeks.

I'm very curious about what you're saying to look out for here. Here's a quick extract I found after a cursory search through Anna Karenina of something being done with a character. Translated by Constance Garnett because that's what was available. It's the start of Chapter 4:

"Darya Alexandrovna, in a dressing jacket, and with her now scanty, once luxuriant and beautiful hair fastened up with hairpins on the nape of her neck, with a sunken, thin face and large, startled eyes, which looked prominent from the thinness of her face, was standing among a litter of all sorts of things scattered all over the room, before an open bureau, from which she was taking something. Hearing her husband’s steps, she stopped, looking towards the door, and trying assiduously to give her features a severe and contemptuous expression. She felt she was afraid of him, and afraid of the coming interview. She was just attempting to do what she had attempted to do ten times already in these last three days—to sort out the children’s things and her own, so as to take them to her mother’s—and again she could not bring herself to do this; but now again, as each time before, she kept saying to herself, "that things cannot go on like this, that she must take some step" to punish him, put him to shame, avenge on him some little part at least of the suffering he had caused her." etc.

I think I understand what you're talking about here. This introduces her (in this scene) immediately as someone who is looking rather poorly: "scanty" hair, "once luxuriant and beautiful", "sunken, thin face" and "large, startled eyes", which look even larger because of her thin face. She's standing in a messy room and her current action is taking something. Suddenly, she hears her husband and stops what she's doing. I imagine here that she stands up and looks alert, being quiet and just listening to the sounds. She tries to take on an unnatural expression. She's anxious and her thin face is careworn as a result. She's frustrated because she hasn't been able to accomplish what she's tried to do ten times in three days, but she can't. She tells herself over and over that things have to change, and that she has to act in order to effect that. I imagine that this relates right back to her trying to adopt an unnatural (because she has to mechanically adopt it) expression of severity and contempt in her face.

Is this the kind of thing you are talking about? Am I on the right track?

sure, and that's just largely paraphrasing/summarizing the action. i think it's interesting to think about how the reader feels the range of expression/shift in emotion that dolly feels "concurrently" - that is to say, we start with her in the middle of a messy room, without much emotional description (it's all setting), in a "neutral" state, and it is only after the sound of footsteps that descriptions of mood and feeling come in, and then we're taken through her fears in a pseudo free indirect discourse manner where we slip briefly into dolly's consciousness.

That's lovely. I think you're onto something here.

>Dostoevsky
>translation
>complaining about prose

hehehe!

I'm going to head to bed now. Perhaps I'll kickstart my Tolstoy reading with your recommendation tomorrow and then join in on the War and Peace group reading that starts on Saturday. You've given me some truly valuable insight, so thank you. And thank you for the discussion.

passion is not lacking in realism. I worry that the real issue is what people think of realism, and how they perceive their fellow men, whether it be through subtleties or emotional outbursts. It's difficult to see what will make a character seem fake in a novel, and what things a reader will identify with.
When it comes to a depiction of emotion, from what I've seen, Tolstoy gives up the ghost and treats his characters as cardboard. When they need to be frenzied, they hardly show it. However, when his characters are at peace, it seems he has the advantage over the frantic Dostoevsky. Neither is the lesser author by merit of their impact on literature and people alone, but one might go so far to say that they appeal from two sides of the same coin. From what I've seen, it's not so much age that makes a person appreciate Tolstoy more, necessarily, but rather balance in their minds between logic and emotion. whichever of the two has more influence in the person's mind will impact their sense of reality and identity with more weight. instead of direct analysis of the authors themselves, they should be used as mirrors to help us define ourselves, and to help us identify what pleases us, so that we may lead more fulfilling lives.

Nice post user. I read C&P a while ago and even tough I enjoyed it, most of the philosophical aspects (yes, I am aware this is a "philosophical novel") of the book weren't that moving or impactful for me. Maybe it has to do with the fact that I abandoned my religious beliefs. But im curious, what did you think of the point dostoevsky was trying to make?

just read alyosha the pot. gosh, tolstoy was such a stick in the mud. never any life in that poor man. should have filled the pot up with life instead of cardboard.

Not a single complaint was expressed in the Op.

I connected with the novel mostly through the characters than the philosophy. I think that on the first read, it's hard to tell what dostoevsky is trying to say until you are through a decent chunk of the book, so I'll probably enjoy it more through that lens on my second read.

That being said, I don't think that raskolnikov's philosophical ideas are so far from what seems rational to a young man exposed to existentialism. I had upsetting beliefs when I was younger and his beliefs are like an exaggerated version of what I went through. Part of what fixed his ways of thinking was God, so I can see you being turned off, but part of it was a recognition of his nature. He couldn't be a killer, no matter what ideas got in his head to convince him otherwise. That wasn't the sort of person he was, and his fever and his relationships with his family are evidence of this (among other things). So the attack on existentialism is more like a recognition of the inate nature of man than some sort of theistic thing, I think.

Anyway, I'm eager for a second read-through (with a different translation) in a year or so.

Great post. I wonder, though, which author do you think is more related to logic, and which to emotion,and why?

>When Mikolka tortures the horse to death.

IT IS MY PROPERTY!

Who is the sad vicious cunt that sits down and writes this garbage.

Good question

Good thread folks, I've enjoyed the discussion.

>A major example can be found in The Brothers Karamazov, where the three brothers are based upon Plato's tripartite soul: Ivan is logical, Alyosha is spirited, Mitya is appetitive.

That's interesting and makes a lot of sense. I think I also read somewhere, maybe the intro to my edition of kbros, that the brothers and the father reflect parts of Dostoyevsky himself.

I've since thought about who in my life resembles those characters and I can't think of anyone who is as extreme as Dmitri or pure/humble/loving as Alyosha. I can see now the criticism discussed itt that Dostoyevsky's characters are more like caricatures rather than humans.

I read Crime and punishment one year ago and it changed every concept that I had about literature. The Rodion's psychological and melancholic aspects through the book are amazing, it is the big point of Dosto’ book although there are greats characters and dialogs. I think I didn’t absorb all the questions involving that history, when I read I was starting in the literature universe and now I’m intending to read it again with more accurate eyes. Unfortunately I never read Tolstoi, I’d like to try war and peace but I don’t know what is the better translate in my country so I think it’s going to take time to start it.
I’m new here and I have to congrats you, guys. Finally, I found an enjoyable thread and topic. Sorry for eventual mistakes, my English is a crap.

It's not really Homer pers se that he is trying to imitate. Dosotyevsky liked his dramas, Schiller was a really big influence so he oretty much apes his storytelling style from theater. That's why the dialogues take the foreground in his novels, more so than descriptions or interior monologues.

i keep on trying to push oliver ready's translation of crime and punishment for all future Veeky Forums newfriends.

reading PV with its misplaced mechanical sounding translation really just ruins (or at least blunts his magic) dostoyevsky for a first timer.

I don't understand how you could even begin to think OP was saying that.

>that the brothers and the father reflect parts of Dostoyevsky himself.

True. I've read similarly that Fyodor being named Fyodor is a clue to how Dostoevsky views himself.
You're right that most people aren't as extreme as the characters portrayed by Dostoevsky, but I think they're realistic enough where you can believe that someone somewhere was that extreme, or pure/humble/loving, or obsessed with an idea that takes them too far like Raskolnikov.

Oh no, he's not trying to imitate Homer, he was just influenced by him. I know Dostoevsky was immensely influenced by the Germans, but I don't know much about them. If I recall correctly, he mentions Schiller a few times in Notes From the Underground. Maybe it's not fair to say that Dostoevsky is aping his storytelling style from theater, when dialogue in the foreground is exactly what Homer's style is like, though, admittedly, there's a lot more action going on in his poems too.

Your English is good. It's always nice to go back and re-read things after growing more. When I re-read Crime and Punishment I was able to see so much more in the story than my first reading, and that was my experience with everything by Dostoevsky that I've read. Often with his works it can feel sort of suffocating and overwhelming because there's so much drama with the excitable characters, that you have difficulty sorting it all out. When you re-read it you get to see all of that again, but this time you're aware of them and get to focus more. Things aren't blindsiding you like they would be on a first reading.

I've since read The Forged Coupon after your recommendation. I liked it a lot, and I understand your saying it's his "most panoramic book"; it really zooms out and takes a look at an enormous area. It was interesting to see how the bank note itself wasn't even mentioned for half the book, maybe more. The boy's action sent a ripple through the world and affected the lives of so many in a profound way, and ultimately drawing them to [Tolstoy's brand of] religion and making them better people.

You were definitely right about Tolstoy's greatest strength being "in his subtle and concise characterization", and I think having so many characters related to each other, which can all be traced back to a forged note, brought that out, just because you get to see how the murderer is the one who goes on to rehabilitate Mitya more than a decade later, all because of that note. There were tons of little instances like this, like the investigating magistrate being Makhin, who begins ruminating on spirituality and so on after a run-in with someone else that is where they are because of the coupon. Great recommendation.

yay glad you liked it

i shill forged coupon here all the time but only a few people have ever taken me up on it desu

Nice anime review mate.

It's the first time I've ever seen it mentioned on this board, so I think you need to up your shilling.

fuck off
Genuine attempt op, but 10/10 would focus more on what Dosto is trying to do with the book and let yourself naturally notice how his prose and storytelling flows.
Also, fuck off, the story paces like he wrote a dozen short stories and strung them together, the moment when a random dude in the bar outta nowhere grabbed him and told him his life story for no reason physically fucking pained me.

Saying he is inspired by Homer is stupid, becuase there is literally no writer that was inspired by Homer. He set the rules, so anyone writing anything is inevitably going to write in some way like him.
Dostoevsky's novels are like plays, not only dialogue but also how he describes things, the mannerisms of the "actors", the "sets", how he sets the scenes how he divides his novels in parts, very much like acts in a play. Crime and Punishment is almost as if it's narrated by someone watching a play.

>Saying he is inspired by Homer is stupid, becuase there is literally no writer that was inspired by Homer. He set the rules, so anyone writing anything is inevitably going to write in some way like him.

This itself is stupid, there is a difference between saying someone was influenced by Homer and someone having read Homer wrote based on the specific style and content he read.

Joyce's Ulysses being inspired by the Odyssey is the obvious example

Like the other poster pointed out, I'm saying that Dostoevsky was influenced by his readings of the Iliad and Odyssey. This is from Joseph Frank's Seeds of Revolt:

"So far as Homer and Victor Hugo are concerned, it seems that you purposely misunderstand me. Here's what I said: Homer (a legendary figure perhaps like Christ, incarnated by God and sent to us) can be paralleled only with Christ, not with Goethe. . . . You see, in the Iliad Homer gave the entire ancient world the organization of its spiritual and earthly life, exactly in the same sense as Christ to the new. Now do you understand me? [...] Only Homer, with the same unshakable confidence in his mission, with his child-like faith in the god of poetry whom he serves is similar in the tendency of the source of his poetry to Victor Hugo."

I think you're just being a little pedantic here.

>Dostoevsky's novels are like plays, not only dialogue but also how he describes things, the mannerisms of the "actors", the "sets", how he sets the scenes how he divides his novels in parts, very much like acts in a play. Crime and Punishment is almost as if it's narrated by someone watching a play.

I don't know what to tell you. I've already given my reasons why I think Homer has influenced Dostoevsky, and there's definitely a lot more than just what I've talked about here, such as thematic similarities, sets, and probably even the division of his novels that you're talking about. As I've said, Dostoevsky drew a lot from the Greeks in general, but obviously these weren't his only inspirations.

>there is a difference between saying someone was influenced by Homer and someone having read Homer wrote based on the specific style and content he read.
I never stated anything different.
>Joyce's Ulysses being inspired by the Odyssey is the obvious example
Yes, and Dostoevsky does not fall in that category. The influence you claim he has from Homer is so generalized that it could be applied to any writer.

You think every writer has their characters do all the talking without a narrator directly judging them?

No.

Okay