Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Dislike him. A cheap sensationalist, clumsy and vulgar. A prophet...

yeah and Tolstoy hated Shakespeare. So what.

no accounting for taste. dostoevsky was what he was. an emotionally fervent author. what's really laughable is the section on anna karenina in nabokov's lectures on russian literature. he goes into it like an autistic swede, going so far as to document the living schedules of the characters and their clothing and so on. the man didn't like emotion and plots, he liked aesthetics and style. it's just down to preference. sure, you can find out what kitty wore while she was taking a shit, or you could feel the frantic raskolnikov kill a couple women for next to no reason. it depends on what you want. I will say I read pnin and thought it was trash.
>muh bowl

this is good, i like this post. good post.

>didn't like emotion and plots
This is a massive misunderstanding. I think most people read Lolita and see some of his comments on other authors and call it a day. It's pretty obvious he is incredibly interested in the story, as is evidence not just for calling Pushkin a genius but also for his own interweaving, moving, and often surprising plots, nor also was he against ideas in literature as is shown when in an interview he explicitly says this.

Also
>aesthetics
>somehow having nothing to do with emotion

I feel like Nabokov couldn't get over Dosto's Christianity. Nabokov seems like a man who would despise Christians.

Do you think Nabokov was prancing around the room doing little twirls in his office when he wrote stuff like this?

He doesnt like dosto using his characters as puppets for moral lessons

What a load of shit. It sounds like he just doesn't Christians or "reactionaries." He barely goes into detail about any of Dostoevsky's work-and when he does he says some autist shit about there not being enough landscape description.

Biased and faggoty. Vladimir will never compare to Fyodor.

Well obviously Navokov has his own aesthetic ideal, but he clearly distinguishes why Dostoevsky does not fit into his ideal.

I think you need to read it again.

he liked puzzleboxes and details more than he liked an entertaining plot. he was more devoted to the structure of events leading to character development than actually making those moments seem genuine. you can build the skeleton, the flesh, fill it with blood and push it around, but when it comes time to give it life, the problem isn't that you need to give your puppet a soul, make it live on its own, and observe it like some rube goldberg machine, you need to fill it with a piece of your own soul, lend it your words and thoughts. Yes, this idea is discredited as a narcissistic method, (as if somehow the attempt at being the lord creator humself wasn't hubris at its extreme) but you will never have such convincing, depressing, frantic, joyful moments as ones that the author conveys himself. we all know when the author tries to invent a soul. he fails because he is intrinsically a creation himself and will never ascend beyond that. but anyway. i guess i just don't like nabokov. i agree with some of his concerns about dosty, but i still feel some of the criticisms are a bit too heartless.

kek, you damn well know he did

also i'll make the point in clarification about aesthetics. he's more interested in the architecture of aesthetics than he is the emotion of aesthetics, the emotions are a byproduct of a successful building for him, not necessarily the purpose of the building itself. like loving a post office for its floor, its doors, its windows and hallways, to the point that he forgets to deliver his letter while he's there.

Dostoevsky is a sensationalist.

Aka he dramatises normal emotions to the point of melodrama for heightened impact

Nabokov thinks this is unrealistic, and no matter how absurd art can be, the reader has to believe the circumstances of the world

Basically nabokov does not like him because he believes he distorts reality and misguides readers with over the top emotion

To add, his characters emotions are the world, he pays little to no attention to physical world building and barely describes his characters appearance, if only upon introducing them

And he doesnt like his hysterical Christian pandering

maybe the problem was that nabokov was judging through the lens of realism. it's a bit tragic he couldn't enjoy them for what they were, just entertaining and slapdash emotional rollercoasters spiked with some religion and suspense. it would be akin to reading dickens and expecting zola. you're looking for the conclusive realism that you feel is the ultimate expression of literature, and you say ugh this is smarmy bullshit. no one to blame but himself for having false expectations!

Nabokov likes Dickens, though. He taught Bleak House at Cornell

But in that article about dosto he wrote he said he can still enjoy parts of what he deems mediocre writers (dosto)

not my point, but all right, he liked dickens. in terms of enjoyment, he may have said that, but you can tell, can't you? you can tell he fucking hates Dosty. especially when you see how much time and attention he spends on anna karenina, for example. he has about one hundred pages going on and on about AK, in this book of his lectures, and his section on dostoevsky's entire works lasts about fifteen pages. he didn't like him. i'm not saying he's wrong to, just trying soften the blow to people who do live him dearly by making nabokov explicitly human, and trying to establish that great author or no, his opinion is just that.

The plot is the events that happen that make up a narrative. What you are describing he lacks has nothing to do with plot. You are not talking about plot at all but about something else.

>he was more devoted to the structure of events leading to character development than actually making those moments seem genuine.
So to rewrite this for you
>he was more devoted to the plot than actually making those moments seem genuine.

So yes, Nabokov is very interested in plot.

Of course he didn't like him, he thought he was a mediocre writer. Why spend so long analysing him when he thinks tolstoy is a universe of top tier writing?

That would be like dedicating equally 100 pages of analysis to Shakespeare and Arthur Miller

no, his concerns are far more detail oriented than the simplicity of a plot. but i'm sure you know better than me. the details that make up a plot are not the plot itself. for instance, if you spend a thousand hours mixing pigments for just the right colors, are you more interested in the colors, or are you more interested in the plot? both aren't one and the same, one is a part of the other.

i was just saying that the part of him enjoying any of dostoevsky at all is bullshit.

Why would he lie?

Havent you read a book tjat you thought was overall shit but had an amusing passage or two?

why wouldn't he lie?

You are claiming he is being untruthful, so state your reasoning

er painting, not plot, heh.

i already have by mentioning his treatment of dostoevsky in his lectures. to say that you couldn't spend time analyzing the idiot or bros k to an equivalent level as you would analyze ak is ridiculous, and the implied gap between tolstoy and dostoevsky is obviously a biased statement. why nabokov would lie, on the other hand could be as simple as hubris, throwing someone he sees as lower than himself a bone insincerely, or perhaps pressures to analyze someone he hates due to the prevalence of dostoevsky in culture might make him inclined to appear somewhat fair. to say to a harry potter fan that you enjoyed the parts about the broomsticks doesn't mean you enjoyed them at all.

The plot is merely the events that happen, nothing else. It doesn't matter how those events are presented or executed, because that doesn't change the plot. Nabokov is interested in plot. You are criticising the way he executes the events that make up his plots, not the plots themselves. That's fine. I'm not arguing with you about that. I'm only arguing that using the actual definition of plot, that Nabokov is clearly very interested in it.

Wow guys, look at this user with his revelation!

What a discovery, that Nabokov personally does think Dostoevsky is worthing of analysis as much as Tolstoy!

Does not*

and i'm saying that character development (which i find is more interesting to him) is not by itself plot. but i think it's such a semantical argument at this point that it's a bit irrelevant, don't you? i do like our discussion though. i'm not entirely sure if i'm speaking with two different people. anyhow, i've tried to understand more about nabokov, but have been met with a brick wall in his lectures here. i agree with him on some things, but a great many things i can't even relate to. maybe that's a limitation in my understanding of others, or just my intelligence, but i do marvel at him spending so much time creating what would by anyone else's hand, be considered fan art of kitty's wardrobe. it's just interesting to see what people focus on when they read.

hey thanks for your addition! i'm a huge fan of your work.

>and i'm saying that character development (which i find is more interesting to him) is not by itself plot
I never said anything about character development. Lolita has a lot going on plot wise that has nothing or very little to do with any sort of character development. Quite a lot actually happens in that novel. If you just make bullet points of the events that actually happen in that particular novel it would be a long list, with almost none of it involving character development.

> but i think it's such a semantical argument at this point that it's a bit irrelevant, don't you?
It's a semantic argument in that we are using different definitions of plot, and that I am trying to show you that I am using the standard definition and you are using a personal one. But that does not make it irrelevant to the discussion.
You are making claims about why you don't like Nabokov. I'm not actually engaging with the substance of those claims, only trying to get you to clarify what you actually mean because the way you are using certain words is strange and hindering the ability to discuss what you actually mean.

i can see that you're probably not going to understand then. whether that's malicious on your part or not isn't my concern i suppose. it's okay that you can't (or refuse to) understand the difference between plot and character development and architectual detail of a work.
your condescension is tiresome in a discussion, i have to say. later holmes.

i'll give you one more shot. here you respond to me, changing what i'm talking about, configuring it to a definition that's comfortable to you, when i explicitly say he cares more about character development than the plot itself in the post you respond to. you then assume when i say character development via events, you assume i mean narrative plot when i mean just what i said, the strict development of characters. i then go on to use examples of his obsession with details, showing how one would be capable of talking about how a character wore their clothing or what they were doing, and simultaneously avoiding moving an overarching plot forward. yes, his books have plot. i'm saying that in his criticisms of other works, he considers plot less relevant to the work than the detail given to the characters and even the setting. anyway this has been fun. i'm sorry if this continues to make you think i somehow have the wrong impression of what plot is, but i can't be tasked with leading you by the nose forever.

Only reddOt likes dosto you bumbling mongoloid

troll thread. Or, if not: read Proust's analysis of him...

I haven't been condescending at all. But because you said that I will.

>Make a post explicitly noting the differences between plot and character development
>Get accused of not distinguishing between them
>What is reading comprehnsion
>He thinks plainly stated arguments are condescending
>He wants oh so sorrys and thank you for attached to every point
>Probably picked up the habit on reddit

I feel like we are talking past each other.

>when i explicitly say he cares more about character development than the plot itself in the post you respond to.
This isn't what your stated position is which I am actually responding to. Saying that character development is more important to him than plot is a completely different position than saying that plot is unimportant which is the actual point I am trying to address

>you then assume when i say character development via events, you assume i mean narrative plot when i mean just what i said, the strict development of characters
As I just said this has nothing to do with your claim you made that I am responding to. I am not assuming that is what you mean. I am only trying to reign the conversation to that point.

>i then go on to use examples of his obsession with details, showing how one would be capable of talking about how a character wore their clothing or what they were doing, and simultaneously avoiding moving an overarching plot forward. yes, his books have plot. i'm saying that in his criticisms of other works, he considers plot less relevant to the work than the detail given to the characters and even the setting.
This is a pretty good point, but again we shouldn't assume that because something is more important that it means the other part is less important. Going back to Lolita (because it's the only work I have read by him in years) the ambiguities of the character are not just presented via description and narration, but also by plot. When Humbert sees Dolorous playing double tennis with the 'stranger', making him and the audience begin to wonder how long this has all been going on is done through plot. Humbert finding out she has been skipping school related things with a 'friend' is a plot point.
Plot is vital to for Lolita to work in a way that, say, the specifics of plot aren't so important for Beckett's works.

>he considers plot less relevant to the work than the detail given to the characters and even the setting.
I think finally we have broken through it. Now that we are using the same definition of plot what you actually mean from your original statement is contained right here. Now I don't disagree with this statement, only that the harder wording of the original, that is it isn't important (not less important) is misguided as I hope I have shown with my use of Lolita.

here you go

What a ghastly rigmarole this thread is.

Oh well if Fatamir Knob-O Cough says it's bad he must be right!

HA!
SIKE!

The Idiot is one of the most frustrating rage inducing books ever written. I hate this book so much, but no other book has ever produced such an emotion from me. I'm conflicted.

You are the most infuriating entity on this board. You have continued to stymie any conclusive conversation by shifting meanings, by accusing others of not understanding what the fuck they are saying, even after many descriptions of what they mean. You have at every turn EVERY TURN been completely obtuse, so far as to go back and try (unsuccessfully) to make my initial comments seem what they never were.

Nowhere anyfuckingplace do I ever fucking state your proposed claim, that "plot is unimportant", or even "plot is unimportant to nabokov". I never fucking said this, nor did i even imply it. I said, "nabokov doesn't like plot" then i went on to say, "nabokov likes something else." which implies, that he finds one thing more important than another. Now, i don't know what the fuck is wrong with you, thinking that when something is more, it doesn't automatically mean, the other thing is less. I mean, if we're talking about misunderstanding terms, you don't even know what the fuck "more" means. You, my friend, are a fucking idiot. Three hours you have been responding to my fairly well made comments, trying to tell me that I don't understand what I'm talking about, down to the very terms, in a condescending way, and then you go so far as to greentext this:

>Make a post explicitly noting the differences between plot and character development
>Get accused of not distinguishing between them
>What is reading comprehnsion

which ironically, is exactly what the fuck you have done this entire time. Then after all this, you fucking sit there, trying to change what the word "more" means, and then you even concede my fucking point, that Nabokov likes something more than another thing. I fucking hate you. I hope you never come back to this board, and I think you need to work on your people skills, you fucking floundering vapid and mentally retarded faggot.

>shitty meme writer famous for one edgy book derides respected, highly-talented writer of great historical importance
Ok

i wonder how many people say nabokov when they're asked about their greatest influences as an author.

>highly-talented writer of great historical importance
Is that generic crap all you can muster about your literary idol, the world's greatest trapper of claps?

*what i have done this entire time

> Céline, Louis-Ferdinand. Second-rate. A tense-looking but really very loose type of writing.

>Camus, Albert. Dislike him. Second-rate, ephemeral, puffed-up. A nonentity, means absolutely nothing to me. Awful.

triggered desu

Nabokov is hugely influential as well

>>They may be contrarian, but they are right.
That would be "Because they are contrarian, they are right."

man fuck nabokov

>the differences between plot and character development
It is impossible for anything to not be the plot tho...

Plot: That which occurs in the book

Every word of every novel is unavoidably (part of) the plot

Now using this most extreme, potentially false, declaration. That yall likely think is incorrect: What technically is not the plot?

IIT

triggered babies that cant take criticism of a writer they like

even if you disagree, at least understand his criticism before going "fuck this guy"

this board is filled with amateurs and children

This tbqh.
>tfw dislike Shakespeare yourself because the jokes aren't funny to your autistic contrarian sense of humor
Life sucks.

The plot is what happens in the narrative of the book, not everything in the book. Do you really think style is part of the plot?

>>In the light of the historical development of artistic vision, Dostoyevsky is a very fascinating phenomenon. If you examine closely any of his works, say ''The Brothers Karamazov,'' you will note that the natural background and all things relevant to the perception of the senses hardly exist. What landscape there is is a landscape of ideas, a moral landscape. The weather does not exist in his world, so it does not much matter how people dress. Dostoyevsky characterizes his people through situation, through ethical matters, their psychological reactions, their inside ripples. After describing the looks of a character, he uses the old-fashioned device of not referring to his specific physical appearance anymore in the scenes with him. This is not the way of an artist - say Tolstoy - who sees his character in his mind all the time and knows exactly the specific gesture he will employ at this or that moment. But there is something more striking still about Dostoyevsky. He seems to have been chosen by the destiny of Russian letters to become Russia's greatest playwright, but he took the wrong turning and wrote novels. The novel ''The Brothers Karamazov'' has always seemed to me a straggling play, with just that amount of furniture and other implements needed for the various actors: a round table with the wet, round trace of a glass, a window painted yellow to make it look as if there were sunlight outside, or a shrub hastily brought in and plumped down by a stagehand.

now see, this i can get behind. nothing about this is wrong except the idea that dosty wasn't an artist because his ideal wasn't conveying the fucking weather. dosty would definitely be served well as a playwrite.

No. Those two psychos above (did you read any of their convo? dont) were arguing about this stuff. And Nabokovs feelings, or values on the different potential elements of Novel.

One, or maybe even both, were arguing, that Nabokov did not value plot as much as style, I guess, aesthetics, details.

Would it be appropriate to say:
Plot is what the characters do? Every single thing the character does, thinks, or says, is plot?

Is character development plot, or it can be, or often is? Unless the narrator is like just "halting the time of the story" to list things about the character? "he had blue eyes and wore a green hat" thats not plot right? Unless that then drectly ties into what happens with characters?

Then style, yeah not plot, as the same exact plot can be written many styles..

I guess those anons convo was pointless. Because all these elements are required. You cant say Nabokov didnt care about plot, or even not that much, because well, is the fact lolita is about a man and a young girl, is that the plot? lolita wouldnt be what it was unless that exactly was the subject matter.

And if nothing happened in the book, no events, could the book have been just as good, if lolita and humbert just sat on a couch the entire novel, and it was just dialogue between them, and monologue of their thoughts?

Nabokov had to have valued plot, because he didnt just do that^^^.

He had to choose every event and scenario he did, now to him they could have been semi empty, or nothing special, he could have most of all valued the playing with lush language, and the plot is just a necessary skelton, for him to drape his flowery organs and skin over: and maybe there could have been 100 different events and plots he could have chosen instead, that would have been 'equal' value, and this might have been one of those anons points... but maybe out of 100s of possible events and plot points, he specicially chose what he did because they were meaningful/valuable to him/his story

>because his ideal wasn't conveying the fucking weather
It sems Nabokov thought, at least one or close to the most valuable aspect of literature was, sensual immersion in a world. Dosts motivations for writing as put maybe, seem to be morals, lessons, combating evil.
Maybe nabokov would have liked dostovoesky if his stories were exactly the same, but just fluffed up style and wordy, like if Nabokov wrote his stories in his own prose?

No, that is not the case. Nabokov loves Flaubert, who was basically pioneered taking out flowery writing.

Nabokov views Dostoevsky as a sentimentalist, someone who subverts the reality of things for heightened emotional impact.

Why do people assume anyone who doesn't like Dosto doesn't like him because of his christianity? I love Tolstoy and christianity is way more explicitly present in his works than in Dosto's

It's not Chiristianity per se that Nabokov loathed, it was Dostoevsky's hysterical religious mysticism and the fact that he couldn't resist to have the Christ inserted in his every book and preferably on every page.

Nabokov criticized Tolstoy's religious teachings as well: in his Lections on the Russian Literature he said something like there were always an artist and a prophet fighting for Tolstoy's soul, and in Tolstoy's earlier books, the artist is prevalent, and in the later ones, with rare exceptions, the prophet totally dominates.

Salinger, J. D.: By far one of the finest artists in recent years.

>tfw your favourite author gets some respeck

Suck it highschoolers, Salinger was brilliant

Too many threads about Dostoevsky and not enough about Shakespeare.

I'd rather listen to what Harold Bloom has to say. He said C&P is the best murder novel written in the past 140 years.

PSEUDS BTFO!!!!

Going to try The Double even though The Nose was a stupid little absurdist fantasy story with no artistic worth.

But 'reactionary' is a derogatory term. If you don't mean to be derogatory you wouldn't say reactionary, you'd say conservative.

Not necessarily. "Reactionary" is a legitimate label for a politic which advocates a return to an earlier form of society in some way. It's the antonym of "progressive" as a political label. Idiot.

I'll accept your gratuitous insult to my intelligence as warranted if you can find me an example from a respecable publication where 'reactionary' is used in a non-derogatory sense.

just replying to say your post made me laugh the most i've laughed today. thank you.

>someone who subverts the reality of things for heightened emotional impact.

But thats quite absurd, at least on my first thought.

Nabokov subverted reality (he has some experimentally books), but it would be said he did so for aesthetics, style, not to affect emotions? (though, is not partly the interaction with aesthetics, emotional?)

And is humbert not a rare 'entity' in terms of language, prodigious, flowery, semi unrealistic, and does not such impress upon the emotions; is not the story of the older man and young woman, emotional, have heigtened emotional impact, than if the story was of two 33 year olds? Is lolita not a sensational story?
is the experience of reading pretty prose not in some sense emotional?

and then there is the long history, well as he says, he feels he is more fit for plays, the history of tragedy and such, drama, it has been known, that in literature and theatre, humanities characteristics may be caricatured, or exaggerated.

This is a silly contention in my opinion. maybe. Hes saying, dosts characters are unrealistically dumb, unrealistically emotional, in short too unrealistic?

There are major differences between many people in the world, there are crazy people, mentally diseased, deranged, 1000s shades of weird. Its almost as if its impossible for any character to ever be unrealistic.

I think even if they meant it as a (out of hundred) level 16 insult (or if really, it would be more like a 5-10, just a passing ruffling of the hair... but maybe it also has the connotation of being a bit more active and vocal, it always reminded me a bit (maybe just because some similarities in the word) of revolutionary, there is action in the word, and passione; conservative is steady, stable, conserving, reactionary is active, reacting), it doesnt matter, because the person being called reactionary will, or should, not be offended by such; "yeah, I react to what I see as bad ideas, with the desire to generally continue doing things the same traditional way that has worked for countless generations"

One interesting thought; can progressives ever be wrong? Can a progressive idea ever be 'incorrect', can a reactionary ever be 'right'? Would (what percent) of progressives ever admit this?

>Nabokov views Dostoevsky as a sentimentalist, someone who subverts the reality of things for heightened emotional impact.

I wonder if this is on some level an artist's expression of jealousy...

Ivan Bunin said basically the same thing about Dosto - that he wrote "cheap dime novels" in which he "shoved Jesus in on every page" - but Bunin's own "Life of Arseniev" has drippy, saccharine effusions about God every 5 or 10 pages by the protagonist, in a far more nauseating and self-indulgent way than anything in Dostoevsky.