What is it about Russia that inspires such incredible writers? Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Bulgakov, Solzhenitsyn, Nabokov...

Harsh places make people experience a lot of things other people won't ever get to. Gives them a different perspective on things and it shows in their writing.

if that were true, africa would hold ten thousand shakespeares.
>inb4 they're just not literate

They're just not literate. Hunter-gatherer culture also dissuaded them from settling down, which then allow the creation of civilization and literate culture etc

He said people.

bah, then go and teach your africans, invest in your shakespeare like so many have done before you. i'm off to latin america where the women are hot, and so too the knife in my back.

goat trainers would get better results in masses of pebbles. better than training blacks.

I assure you the latinas will be all over you for a green card.

i'll be looking for literary inspiration and stuff. will be leading a very ascetic life, full of moonlit guitar and frustrated masturbation. you wouldn't understand the literary lifestyle.

Tolstoy was pretty naive.
Bethink Yourself! was pretty sad to read.

Are you implying Solzhenitsyn was a marxist?

i've sort of always believed that pain and suffering creates beauty sort of like how karma works. like how in the ghetto they produce really passionate music, also like early black blues singers started rock etc etc there was a lot of "debauchery" (he snickered and finally resulted in stamping his foot twice indignantly) in Russia ( glug glug ) so there was also great beauty spawned from those dark corners that they romanticized to us and made to come alive in our hearts.

>communism fractured the soul of russia
I think you're right. Modern Russian identity seems to be slightly insecure LARPing that had to be memed into existence

"slightly"

Ivan easy on the vodka

lmao never seen this pasta

Always thought it was funny how they have this paradoxical hatred of themselves yet a fierce love of their country

they suffered

Regardless of your baiting, there really are too few good soviet/postsoviet writers. Maybe also Yerofeev.

>80 years of Soviet Communism
Reminder that communism is jewish and that when jews took over Russia in 1917 they killed tens of millions of Russians.

A lot of Russia's best men were murdered by jews, so there has of course been a major drop off.

pretty much this

Their greatest writers, at least from my admittedly limited reading, seem to have a preoccupation with things like depression, existential crises, etc. which are often necessary to producing a type of genuine emotional response from literature.

daily reminer
Russian Veeky Forums before communism > Russian Veeky Forums after communism
stay salty leftist

You have to realize how Autocratic Imperial Russia was. Most opinions that the Government did not like were silenced, so the only way to really discuss important issues was indirectly via literature. The conflict between Slavophiles and those that wanted westernization in Russia, along with the conflict between the radicals of the 19th century and the moderates/liberals/conservatives that culminated with the revolution gave a lot to discuss. This is what authors like Turgenev and Dostoevsky were writing about, not "russia is so sad". What inspired the likes of Pushkin and Lermontov, which were before all of this ideological stuff I believe, was probably a unique situation where all of the nobility were highly educated and torn between traditional Russian culture and trying to emulate France/Britain/Germany, along with their military experience or career in public service which gave them a lot to write about.

But then again I'm not a historian so I might be wrong in everything I said.

Africa is not a harsh place to live. It's always warm, there is tons of plant-based food and animal-based food as far as the eye can see.

Compare that to Europe where it's frequently cold or snowy, and the animals are smaller and spend a lot of time in hiding. Clearly Africa is the easier of the two environments to live in.

Your proof is the ingenuity of Westerners vs the simplicity and stagnation seen in most African cultures. Life is easy for them, so they never were pressed to evolve.

You're forgetting about the constant aids and ebola outbreaks, user.

>the UK
why do the British think all the Irish writers wanted to be British?

>fucking lions and tigers and tsetse flies, rampaging elephonts, warring tribes, overwhelming heat, little medical infrastructure, little infrastructure in general, etc

>nabokov

subtle

Hihi fascism

This.

But I'll also add that the semi-Westernisation happened at quite a late point in Western history (romanticism, realism etc). So Russians were fulfilling their potential at quite a late, urban stage of the game. Poetry quickly became the prose they are more known for outside Russia.

The tsar/aristostocrat environ. helped with refinement, too.

Aristocrat, even.

Bulgakov is not that good, Dostoevsky and Solzenitsyn are puffed up, bombastic abusers of melodrama. Westerners like them because they think that's that DEEP SLAVIC SOUL MAAAAHN. You could have at least mentioned Bely and Khodasevich instead.

Indeed. When people hear of English language they immediately think of England. England is such a fraud country actually, but I'm not in a mood of talking shit about it now.

Did the Russians really suffer that much? The skeleton kids in Africa who don't know how to write don't suffer at all then? Before pitying someone else maybe you should check how much you suffer yourself.

I think this is what's wrong with the world today. People think that it's all about money, but most importantly, they think it's all about information and education and knowledge, and the talent of putting words together in an appealing manner with which they express their so called suffering, makes them look as if they "suffer"

Can't believe "art is the refuge of the lonely" actually becomes cliche.

"Fear no more the heat o' the sun
nor the furious winter's rages"

>Fear no more the heat o' the sun
>Africa is the easier of the two environments to live in
>it's always warm
>too warm is not bad

Damn, thanks for making me realize Shakespeare is an autist - he writes unnecessary verses.

Solzhenitsyn is a puffed up bombastic abuser of melodrama

Pleb tier idiot

What is weirder is that China has an incalculably larger history and tradition of literacy than Russia but has very little in terms of literary treasure. Their "Four Great Novels" are nothing special, their philosophers are like stultified sub-Aristotles and their "poetry" is simplistic and lame (99% is basically "Moon is high, Emperor's peach garden is in bloom, I think of my friend Xiao who left on journey"). YAWN. There is no Chinese equivalent to Tolstoy after 5000 years lmao.

>"Moon is high, Emperor's peach garden is in bloom, I think of my friend Xiao who left on journey

keked

>What is it about Russia that inspires such incredible writers?
Misery

nigga whut

Things like Shakespeare aren't made without hundreds of years of literate culture for one to build on and tropes to manipulate, classics to reference, general erudition to have, etc.

I mean, look at Homer, even while we admit its poetic beauty, we gloss over the fact that it's primitive and violence-filled with not very deep characters, a remnant of early civilization based mostly on oral tales of wars and violence and great heroes; there's no nuance, everything is larger than life, and mythology/fantasy is mixed crudely with attempts at psychological realism; not only that, but it's admitted that it wasn't even likely entirely written by one person and there's no official version of it, what we have may have been a product of the collective consciousness and different scribes marking it down using the memories of different bards. Homer after all was blind and was reputed to have been the first bard to have SUNG the tales, not the person to have afterwards written down the Iliad or Odyssey.

And Africa DOES have a rich oral tradition, which, if they had settled down to agricultural civilization, may very well have led to the writing down of the works of someone like Homer, who could very well have birthed an entirely different and great literary culture.

lol. both are these guys were anti-communist. did you just comment on writers you haven't read?

>What is weirder is that China has an incalculably larger history and tradition of literacy than Russia but has very little in terms of literary treasure.

You cant read even half of it accurately you stupid fuck.

the russian writers were not starved nor did they live in a frozen tundra

one explanation is that for russian orthodox: art = theology

they have no systematic/philosophic theology

thus inherently skeptical of not only stodgy british memers but also the german memers

weird obsession with land

Nabokov is an American writer.

Yes, and if Africans had dug out harbors from their cliffs, they could have had a grand sea-faring tradition.
Except they dindu that either.

Nabokov was ULTIMATELY an American writer.

Good critique of Iliad/Odyssey man. I liked it a lot as a teenager.

t. Chang
And by the way, I don't need to read "half of" Chinese literature. I've read their masterpieces, as decided by critics and time itself - which indeed can be judged even in translation. They suck.

Same lmao. It could easily pass for a Tu Fu translation.

That's exactly what i mean. it's kind of ridiculous and unfair to blame the Africans for what they didn't do/not meeting Western standards when the climate of Africa was against settling down to agricultural civilization leading to subsequent focus on literacy and then literate art.

You might know with the modicum of historical knowledge we have that the Ancient Greeks were great seafarers because they lived on islands and shipbuilding was thus important. You may as well call other civilizations inferior for not having developed shipbuilding to the same extent because they didn't have the same need to.

Finally, criticizing Africans for not having a literate culture is ultimately proof of an excessive and artificial glorification of literature culture and the intellect. Really, in a lot of books, you don't get anything that edifying. A guy can read Dante and Homer and Dostoevsky and still not know what to do with his life and ultimately end up killing himself; a person can be very literate but also weak-willed, petty, mean, incompetent, bitter, nasty, bored, vain, easily depressed etc. Whereas at least hunter-gatherer tribes don't suffer from such histrionics and mental illnesses to the same extent people in civilizations do, and are content to sit for hours looking around at nature. Something many of a high level of civilization would be hard-pressed to be able to do.

Not to mention that the western way of life is hilariously unsustainable and destructive.

There are certainly good aspects of western culture that even the Africans can and do benefit from, but this whole cultural superiorty thing is just pitiful.

the forced contrarian opinion

Napoleon. At least for Dostoevsky and Tolstoy.

I agree. But could you elaborate on why you think they suck?

>the only country that can compare (...) is the United Kingdom

Happened with Communist Russia too. Shalamov, Platonov, etc.

>Did the Russians really suffer that much?
Yes.

Wow, so you know how much someone else had suffered. You know what he has been through, you know what passes through his mind. I'll be honest and tell you that you should never delude yourself, of knowing. The Russians could've suffered less than you think, could've suffered more than you think.

>What is it about Russia that inspires such incredible writers

Something that didn't exist prior to the mid 1800s and when it was there lasted about 50 years

Shakespeare is worth every russian combined, most russians concur

Your mind has been colonized, anglo. Realize that the orient will forever be beyond you

Can you think of any post-WW2 identity that isn't LARPing?

UK is England, Wales, Scotland and N.I. The Republic is a seperate country. FFS just google it you tard

The country with the richest and underappraciated literary canon is Iran. persian poetry is peerless and good in translation.

>communism fractured the soul of russia
spooky

You are dumb.

Redpill me on Persian poetry.

Spain had its Golden Age with great writers, poets and dramaturgs, but Spain is always out of the scope of everyone for historic reasons. If you want to be a true patrician, have a look at that period of time.

>muh wine
>muh beloved one
>muh hidden Sufic meanings
It's actually pretty good and more meaningful in its mysticism than most Western poetry, just read it

fuck off Dominic

90% of good irish writers are anglo blood you idiot