ts big dogs 2014 edition #1: dostoyevsky vs austen

my attitude towards the narrator of NfU veers around like my attitude to myself: should we laugh with him or at him? is he pitiful or pathetic? isn't everything he says about the world he inhabits a kind of truth? i'm convinced that the book is bitterly funny throughout, but the uncertainty of who is laughing at who is, well, like life really.

my computer autocorrects dostoevsky to Dostoevsky but not austen. !!!!!!

xp yeah but for the underground man, all those little things are reasons to despise the world. even if he is right about a lot of his observations his reactions are incredibly maladaptive. and as you see in the end, the false sense of nobility or superiotity that is -- even at its best -- cold comfort for a guy like that who thinks he is living in a world of hypocrites is worse than worthless. he is the one who is cruel to the woman. as bad as he thinks the world is, he makes it a worse place. so like, "reasonable", idk. he is the ultimate fool.

i can see why dostoevsky is important for the kind of people given to grandiose self-pity or whatever and what he says to those people is often good advice; he doesn't flatter them. however, i sort of think austen is like, a more mature intelligence than dostoevsky. existentialist despair is an adolescent trap. dostoevsky understands this obviously but he thinks the way out has to be some sort of extreme revelation, christian humility or something. for austen and other sublime observers of human beings, the central thing to realize is that life goes on with or without you, and that there are plenty of things to feel and see and know without finding capital A answers.

have we had a discussion about the pantheon of russian writers? i sort of think that dostoevsky should be placed in a different, lower tier than chekhov, gogol, pushkin, and tolstoy but clearly i am not in the majority here.

i don't agree that extravagant emotions are solely adolescent nor that Austen's characters don't experience extravagant emotions, which i feel like you're implying there

Austen was kind of inventing the novel as form as she was writing it tbf
Austen was kind of inventing the novel as form as she was writing it tbf
Austen was kind of inventing the novel as form as she was writing it tbf
Austen was kind of inventing the novel as form as she was writing it tbf

^^^so much this!

"existentialist despair" is more specific than "extravagant emotions." it means raskolnikov thinking he is either a great man, beyond good and evil, or nothing; the he needs to redefine the coordinates of reality in order to survive.

also the thing is that dostoevsky has a more narrow range of personality types he is able to make interesting than someone like austen. the non-megalomaniacs in dostoevsky novels are often caricatures, in my view.

that's not what i take "existential despair" to mean, also i think i think Dostoyevsky is funnier and meaner than you seem to. Raskolnikov is a buffoon.

I think we have to distinguish between 'prose' and 'the novel', in a way. Bakhtin's claim was kinda that Dostoevsky is the prosiest prosaist ever, since, yeah, prose is an 'open system' (it's 'centrifugal', so more like 'opening system') The 'elegant constructions' of Austen is thereby kinda anti-ethical to what prose is, which is instead chaotic (and polyphonic and carnevalesque, etc) It would be very true to point out, that Dostoevsky's characters aren't really that strong, but again, it would miss the point, in that they are constructions in relations and in flux, they are constantly dialogical, rather than monological, and can hardly exist on their own. Which - SPOILER WARNING - they seldom manage to do.

I get why people would dismiss Dostoevsky as a person, as well as his characters. He seems to have been a creep, and his characters are creeps. Kinda like with Wagner. But D is still one of the greatest artists of all time. Come on, everybody, re-read The Grand Inquisitor, and tell me that ain't the highpoint of 18th century literature. Anywhere.

Or, you know, 19th century...

If ever I needed a reminder why I don't actually post/read much on ILB, this result is the exact kind of reason why. :-/

If ILB were the equivalent of gazing at myself in a mirror or listening to my own opinions echoed back to me, I would stop reading it or posting to it. Instead, ILB is diverse and therefore interesting.

His characters mostly seemed to just be a certain type. A certain type that just really, really strongly appealed to, or was related to by certain kinds of bookish dudes that congregated in liberal arts universities or bookish dude congregating places... like ILB.

the greatest novelist the English language has ever produced

ime outside of ilx the only straight men who will cop to this view are university professors

― horseshoe, Sunday, July 20, 2014 9:16 AM (59 minutes ago)

aka bookish dudes that congregate in liberal arts universities

I think very few ILB or bookish dudes feel any sort of kinship with Demitri Karamazov or Smerdyakov...

And on the other hand, ask this question on a forum that isn't english language, and you'd get even more lopsided results...

i think it has to do with the fact that dostoevsky's books, even in translation, are really viscerally powerful. you finish them with a sense that you have "endured" something and this often feels like a mark of greatness. and it is, in a way, but it's not the most important one.

A poll like this is set up to create an artificial opposition that does not mean anything in itself and bears only a tenuous relationship to any reality, and the result of such a poll is equally meaningless and unreal. The utility of it is to start conversation, which it has done.

what dostoevsky novel is that from?

The Idiot?

It's Dickens, right?

His characters mostly seemed to just be a certain type. A certain type that just really, really strongly appealed to, or was related to by certain kinds of bookish dudes that congregated in liberal arts universities or bookish dude congregating places

The only Dostoevsky I've read is The Idiot but I'm struggling to relate this to Prince Mishkin or Lizaveta Prokofyevna fwiw.

Hippolyte maybe, admittedly.

i think a lot of people read notes from underground and see themselves in the protagonist. usually, i hope, the reaction is "oh shit! my misanthropic superiority complex is ridiculous and promises to bring nothing but misery to myself and those around me."

in this sense, the book is an enormous boon to the world.

Except it's not a conversation. It's a bunch of college-educated witedudes FOR WHOM THE WHOLE LITERARY WORLD IS A MIRROR, congratulating themselves all "ooh, I wouldn't want a conversation that was just like a mirror!" in a room full of college-educated witedudes.

Yes, because a 19th century Russian Christian fundamentalist is obviously just like all of us...

tell us again how yr objections aren't about gender

is it a conversation yet

silly to deny that more boys are crazy about dusty and more girls about jane i guess (i guess?) and that these results do in part reflect ILB demographics but acting like this poll was "ts: hot wheels vs polly pocket" and consisted of nothing but smugly unchallenged paeans to hot wheels is idk it's just not v accurate

returning from a wedding last Memorial Day weekend I read P&P for the first time on the plane, laughing every few pages. At one point the dude in the aisle sea one row and left of me turned around, saw what I was reading, and looked at me as if I were Karl Marx in business class.

lol. i remember a conversation i had about austen with a dude in college. he was a friend; i got the impression he had always admired my taste *up to this point.* when he found out i liked austen he was so crestfallen like he had really thought i was the one smart girl and i had let him down. i remember him wrinkling his nose and mentioning that a girl he had known had really liked austen and that she was Mormon. he said Mormon like it was a species of insect. i remember thinking it would have been nice if he had considered why austen might appeal to a girl with a Mormon upbringing instead of just reacting with disgust.

i realize everything i've posted in this thread has been about the politics of taste but i love both of these writers a lot and don't know what to say about their work really.

The guys who condescend to women who only read Austen don't understand the women are making fun of them for sticking with Kerouac and sci-fi.

big dogs number three will be Kerouac vs sci fi

horseshoe i am enjoying and appreciating yr posts, i also wd find it pretty hard to say anything about the work of these two and the politics of taste stuff is part of why I picked them

i used to be v contemptuous of dostoevsky before being brought round by a devotee girlfriend, whom i never did succeed in getting into austen :(

Except it's not a conversation. It's a bunch of college-educated witedudes FOR WHOM THE WHOLE LITERARY WORLD IS A MIRROR, congratulating themselves all "ooh, I wouldn't want a conversation that was just like a mirror!" in a room full of college-educated witedudes.

If this truly reflects your opinion of ILB, then you might prefer a nice slice of pie instead.

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-OoWMMZAM6ds/Tw7wAPaTTbI/AAAAAAAAB-k/WVGNeMdiA8s/s1600/Eating+Crow+2.jpeg

returning from a wedding last Memorial Day weekend I read P&P for the first time on the plane, laughing every few pages. At one point the dude in the aisle sea one row and left of me turned around, saw what I was reading, and looked at me as if I were Karl Marx in business class.

Yeah, anybody holding up a copy of P&P on a plane and loudly LOLing every few minutes probably deserves a "look", let's be real.

...

lol policing

plane journeys with ppl laughing at their reading material is yr idea of heaven no doubt

this thread makes me feel bad for not really liking austen, tho i understand why ppl do. i've given her a try several times, and i always come away feeling the way i do after a long, tedious meeting at work. there are bits i remember fondly (the dad in 'pride and prejudice' is pretty funny) but i've never really found any of her characters that engaging or memorable. prob my fault, not hers.

frederik b is otm that dostoevsky comes from a world that's completely alien to ours in most ways, so much so that i don't think he can be blamed if pretentious college kids or whoever pretend to see themselves in his characters. anyway, the truly insufferable kids are the ones insisting they will never read dostoevsky because st. nabokov disapproved of him.

demons is my second favorite novel ever at this point but still feeling v good about my austen vote (beyond the natural pleasure of minority selfrighteousness) (i think)

halfway thru my first read of emma cuz of this thread, not embarassed to admit i keep track of characters like "oh right breckin meyer". maybe i'll try the gambler again next. found it too upsetting the first time tbh lol.

voted autism

hah clueless is the best. heckerling gets austen.

what's the best austen to start with? i actually remember liking 'emma' more than the others i tried, but ended up misplacing my copy during a move.

P&P is as good a place. Also Persuasion because it's short and so unlike the others.

persuasion is long as fuck

idk Emma or nothing sorta. Mansfield park is sort of brilliant qua minor work and has one of the most fuckable male leads in lit but you should probably read fanny burney &/or ms Radcliffe first really /:

My Penguin copy of Persuasion is just over 250 pages!

S&S is more minor than MP, I think. It lacks the tensions that make the latter so frustrating in places.

'long' has this british vernacular sense im sort of addicted to