Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are my Gods.

>>24542763 (OP)
Italian, German, English, Greek and Spanish literature is better.

That'll change in the first week of the first semester of your second year at varsity dumbcunt

>>24542766
>Spanish literature is better
You're kidding, right? There has been one great novel and that's it.

Borges, Saramago, Coelho, GG Marquez

>>24542763 (OP)
They would despise you for thinking that

>>24542800
They were both devout Christians.

>>24542773
You're forgetting about all the other Spanish Golden Age writers and poets. They more than equal the very greatest products of 19th century Russian literature.

>>24542805
Who are you talking about?

>>24542810
You never heard of Lope de Vega, de Quevedo, Calderon, etc? It's expected for any educated person to have read and be familiar with them.

>>24542816
Schopenhauer pursued philosophical and philological studies on Calderon, Lope de Vega, Cervantes and not least the works of the Jesuit Balthasar Gracián (1601-1658).

>>24542773
At least have the humility to know you wouldn't be qualified to say. Instead you should have said:
>You're kidding, right? Spanish literature isn't fashionable in the anglophone country in which I live.
But it's quite believable that Spain is better, Russian literature is in fact very weak. A Russian aristocrat named Tolstoy just happened to perfect the English novel

>>24542826
>anglophone country
You shouldn't just assume random things.

>>24542830
It's a decent assumption. You type English like a native

>>24542839
I guess, I will take that as a compliment and leave it at that. You're right, I have no clue of Spanish literature and my initial post was just meant as a bit of harmless banter.

>>24542763 (OP)
Find better Gods

>>24542763 (OP)
Then you have failed to comprehend both of them. Especially Tolstoj, considering how much he hated the idea of putting people on the pedestal.

>>24542816
Time of Silence is one of the greatest novels of 20th century, shame Martin-Santos died before he could finish TIme of Destruction.

>>24542874
They both admired other great authors themselves.

>>24542802
Exactly, they'd each turn you into a neurotic side character who only appears in two chapters out of a 3-part 500-page novel of his

>>24543209
Good, I'm a slave and not worthy of their attention.

Me too, but add Lenin to that list. My 3 Russian cutie patooties

>>24543246
Lenin was one of the greatest enemies of God there has ever been.

>>24543250
That's why I love him

>>24542763 (OP)
If you are alluding to Dostoevsky’s worst novels, then, indeed, I dislike intensely The Brothers Karamazov and the ghastly Crime and Punishment rigamarole. No, I do not object to soul-searching and self-revelation, but in those books the soul, and the sins, and the sentimentality, and the journalese, hardly warrant the tedious and muddled search. Dostoyevsky’s lack of taste, his monotonous dealings with persons suffering with pre-Freudian complexes, the way he has of wallowing in the tragic misadventures of human dignity – all this is difficult to admire. I do not like this trick his characters have of ”sinning their way to Jesus” or, as a Russian author, Ivan Bunin, put it more bluntly, ”spilling Jesus all over the place." Crime and Punishment’s plot did not seem as incredibly banal in 1866 when the book was written as it does now when noble prostitutes are apt to be received a little cynically by experienced readers. Dostoyevsky never really got over the influence which the European mystery novel and the sentimental novel made upon him. The sentimental influence implied that kind of conflict he liked—placing virtuous people in pathetic situations and then extracting from these situations the last ounce of pathos. Non-Russian readers do not realize two things: that not all Russians love Dostoevsky as much as Americans do, and that most of those Russians who do, venerate him as a mystic and not as an artist. He was a prophet, a claptrap journalist and a slapdash comedian. I admit that some of his scenes, some of his tremendous farcical rows are extraordinarily amusing. But his sensitive murderers and soulful prostitutes are not to be endured for one moment—by this reader anyway. Dostoyevsky 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.

>>24543765
I don’t care for what pedos have to say about those titans

>>24542763 (OP)
Please read through the Russian gov's recommended list. It's genuinely good for Russian /lit/ and I loathe the Russian government

The 2 greatest

>>24543781
how about you post it so people can see it jackass

>>24543250
Lenin actually loved Tolstoy ironically enough

>>24543791
Different anon, but I think it may be Putin's "100 books for School children" list, which infamously includes both picture books and a lot of depressing /lit/ and medieval poetry most very young kids won't get
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_books_for_schoolchildren

>>24543813
lol

>>24543765
you have already posted this faggotry. no one cares you fondle the balls of another dude with a hate boner for dosto. sneed.

>>24543828
Putin's slightly strange expectations of non-gifted kids aside, it is a good intro to good vatnik /lit/ outside the big names
Bulgakov is there and so a lot of relatives of Tolstoy and Dostoevsk

>>24543770
It is questionable whether one can really discuss the aspects of ''realism'' or of ''human experience'' when considering an author whose gallery of characters consists almost exclusively of neurotics and lunatics. Besides all this, Dostoyevsky's characters have yet another remarkable feature: Throughout the book they do not develop as personalities. We get them all complete at the beginning of the tale, and so they remain without any considerable changes, although their surroundings may alter and the most extraordinary things may happen to them. In the case of Raskolnikov in ''Crime and Punishment,'' for instance, we see a man go from premeditated murder to the promise of an achievement of some kind of harmony with the outer world, but all this happens somehow from without: Innerly even Raskolnikov does not go through any true development of personality, and the other heroes of Dostoyevsky do even less so. The only thing that develops, vacillates, takes unexpected sharp turns, deviates completely to include new people and circumstances, is the plot. 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. The misadventures of human dignity which form Dostoyevsky's favorite theme are as much allied to the farce as to the drama. In indulging his farcical side and being at the same time deprived of any real sense of humor, Dostoyevsky is sometimes dangerously near to sinking into garrulous and vulgar nonsense. (The relationship between a strong-willed hysterical old woman and a weak hysterical old man, the story of which occupies the first hundred pages of ''The Possessed,'' is tedious, being unreal.) The farcical intrigue which is mixed with tragedy is obviously a foreign importation; there is something second-rate French in the structure of his plots.

>>24543830
Those four years of penal servitude Dostoyevsky spent in Siberia he spent in the company of murderers and thieves, no segregation having been yet introduced between ordinary and political criminals. He described them in his ''Memoirs from the House of Death'' (1862). They do not make a pleasant reading. All the humiliations and hardships he endured are described in detail, as also the criminals among whom he lived. Not to go completely mad in those surroundings, Dostoyevsky had to find some sort of escape. This he found in a neurotic Christianism which he developed during these years. His emotional life up to that time had been unhappy. In Siberia he had married, but this first marriage proved unsatisfactory. In 1862-63 he had an affair with a woman writer and in her company visited England, France and Germany. This woman, whom he later characterized as ''infernal,'' seems to have been an evil character. Later she married Rozanov, an extraordinary writer combining moments of exceptional genius with manifestations of astounding naivete. (I knew Rozanov, but he had married another woman by that time.) This woman seems to have had a rather unfortunate influence on Dostoyevsky, further upsetting his unstable spirit. It was during this first trip abroad to Germany that the first manifestation of his passion for gambling appeared which during the rest of his life was the plague of his family and an insurmountable obstacle to any kind of material ease or peace to himself. Just as I have no ear for music, I have to my regret no ear for Dostoyevsky the Prophet. The very best thing he ever wrote seems to me to be ''The Double.'' It is the story - told very elaborately, in great, almost Joycean detail (as the critic Mirsky notes), and in a style intensely saturated with phonetic and rhythmical expressiveness - of a government clerk who goes mad, obsessed by the idea that a fellow clerk has usurped his identity. It is a perfect work of art, that story, but it hardly exists for the followers of Dostoyevsky the Prophet, because it was written in the 1840's, long before his so-called great novels; and moreover its imitation of Gogol is so striking as to seem at times almost a parody. 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.