ts big dogs 2014 edition #1: dostoyevsky vs austen

Brothers Karamazov is the highpoint of mankinds cultural history. So fyodor.

"i can't think of a lot of artists who better explore the feeling of being in an ideological grip" doesn't do much for me as a description of fyodor but totally works as one of jane

ha yes. but yknow, in dostoevsky: all these characters consumed by obsessions. hostaged by thoughts. of gambling or guilt or revolution or nietzschian supremacy, or whatever the underground man's deal is--toxic narcissism, i guess. the possessed is a title for the whole career. but yeah austen's characters exist obv in a rly specific and constrained society and their friction against the convictions and expectations of their world is a big part of what is happening. this is a different kinda thing tho cuz all the characters are living in regency england together at the same time, whereas even in the meeting of the revolutionaries in demons the joke is that everyone's consumed by a different thing. (if ever a joke held up...) but there are other things in austen that are more personal i guess: fanny price's dissonance re class is her own fucked-up perception-filter and comes from her particular circumstances. and pride and prejudice, tho they're both reactions to regency society by alienated smart people, become in darcy+liz private demons; they distort and compel the way obsessions do in dusty. still obv the tone is way different, i mean everyone in dostoevsky is a madman.

voted. man I hated both of these when I was a teenager

too hard

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

ultima iv vs 868-hack

too hard

^

I think in the end I prefer the outlandishness of D's personalities. there is a direct savagery to the play of them that I like. they are wild and atomic, and immensely destructive.

Austen is astonishing tho. and I wd happily argue that in the social and personal interrelations, and the relation between internal thought, and authorial or character expression, there is no less a corseted savagery.

it's very possible that ultimately it's a form of exoticism that has me going for D.

Voted for Austen rather easily.

are you trying to kill me

what have I ever done to you thomp

I can't think of any novelists with the guile to position recessive and almost plodding characters as the loci of intelligence, and with the talent to create narrators who can both inhabit these recessive characters but step away at fraught moments so that as readers we can see them unmediated.

Is that what Austen's doing with Fanny Price, do you think? I've never been clear whether that character was intended by Austen as an admirable type, who simply fails to appeal to current sensibilities. All of her other heroines are vastly more likeable.

oh def I had Fanny and Anne Elliot in mind.

lol that Trilling essay alluded to in Metropolitan is actually very good on Mansfield Park; the would-be Fourierist gets the summary wrong.

maaan I thought you were talking about raskolnikov

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

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. :-/

because three quarters of the population express a marginal preference for dostoyevsky over Austen?

i did feel bad about reinforcing patriarchy when i voted for the gloomy fucker

And then the knee-jerk assumption that my objection is based purely on gender rather than aesthetics (I'm not your cartoon, Daphnis) is really the other part.

sorry, poor joke, marginally true as it happens

from my end i mean uggh ignore me

most of the voters in this thread expressed how hard a choice it was tho, the result is hardly a ringing manifesto of one over the other

good result

I abstained but ftr I'm a fan of this read the results ignore the thread approach to polls

I gotta say if the idea of having a conversation w ppl who do not share yr exact aesthetic preferences but are open minded to them is such anathema 2 u u shd probably admit to urself u have some important things to learn about human charity

u shd read the brothers karamazov

I didn't vote. I didn't want to have to pick. These two caught my heart at very different points in my life (D as a teenager, A a lot more recently). I don't even know how Brothers Karamazov would read now. I did read Pevear and Volokhonsky's The Adolescent a few years ago, and had that hard-to-verify suspicion that maybe translation wasn't doing it justice.

should have voted

tbh even though i agree that people posted very thoughtful things to this thread, i had a pretty negative "of course" reaction to the results. so many conversations about austen with dismissive men my whole life, can't help it.

and Dostoevsky was one of my first literary loves, right around the same time as Austen

Feel like Tolstoy would have been a more appropriate comparison? Idk

i like how different they are, though! it's a good comparison, even though it ruined my life

yeah all arguments aside i had a good long think about "what does this choice say about me?" before i clicked on Dostoyevsky and in the end it really came down to how important Notes from Underground is for me

Yeah, I also liked this choice because it made me question my asumption that D was just objectively so much better. But come on! He is! Had Jane Austen had, like, thirty more years to add to her ouvre, perhaps it would have been more equal, but as it is, it's a bit like comparing Wagner with Bizet.

is there going to be more of these or is that "#1" a tease? enjoying the high brow rumination on this thread.

petition to include non-literary big dogs as well (Picasso, Nietzsche, etc.)

Yeah, I also liked this choice because it made me question my asumption that D was just objectively so much better. But come on! He is!

you hate spinsters too

objective, such a joke word

dostoevsky wouldn't have been capable of the subtlety of mansfield park, which is almost as devastating in its own way as notes from underground.

Hadn't read enough of either to vote I fear, but Mansfield Park is probably the single book I've unsuccessfully started most times - five at least - it seems to be about so much of what I'm interested in, and so many people I admire esteem it so highly? But I can never get past page ten or so, I don't know know why?

When I read Underground it was a bit like Larkin to me in that it just seemed a reasonable person discussing the reasonable concerns of real life, things I had thought in basically the same words, and it made me wonder why no-one else had tried this before and so rarely since.

I have never been able to finish a Dostoyevsky book! Not even Notes From Underground, which, IIRC, was only 100 pages long and not one of the endless OMG will this man never shut up this is as endless as a Russian winter ones. It's just mystifying to me, how so many people could choose this turgid pile of poo over the greatest novelist the English language has ever produced.

(I can understand horseshoe's reaction to the results, but to be honest, I genuinely was expecting it to be more evenly split.)

((I also suspect my reaction to D is coloured by negative experiences with the ~types of people~ who repped for him.))

When I read Underground it was a bit like Larkin to me in that it just seemed a reasonable person discussing the reasonable concerns of real life

this is not how i would describe that book

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

i love both dostoevsky and austen. i think austen is more invested in the integrity of the novel as a form and her books are elegant total constructions. dostoevsky was interested in the novel as a vehicle for ideas. i think bakhtin said that dostoevsky recognized the novel was an "open system" that allowed writers to do basically whatever they wanted, and what dostoevsky wanted to do was present a vision of the human psyche under extreme duress in order to, ultimately, reveal its fragility and convince readers of the necessity of religion. austen has points to make too but they never overwhelm the works, or never really seem to be the sole guiding purpose of her novels.

Austen was kind of inventing the novel as form as she was writing it tbf. i don't know much about the history of the Russian novel, don't know if Dostoevsky had as formative a role?

this is not how i would describe that book

Haha so obviously that was phrased deliberately challopsily but what sticks most for me from NftU is the bit about who gives way to whom on the promenade, and like every thought and action and decision mentioned was like an actual thing I'd thought or done re: the question of who gives way to whom on a promenade?

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.

Then you get this kind of thing as a "literary challenge". It's ok as it goes but this time the writer's brother gets it.

https://www.ft.com/content/99936410-fdf8-11e8-aebf-99e208d3e521

An old favourite of yours for stirring shit iirc

― gyac, Wednesday, 18 May 2022 bookmarkflaglink

http://2h3mh837ken53kitqv1co5fh83o.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/image1-1-1024x538.jpg

Ffs! Hate when the internet spoils my joke

I did do a year of reading only female authors myself, after noticing how few I've read. I can understand the frustration at this sort of self-improvement/micromanagement of cultural tastes taking up so much space in the discourse at the expense of looking at things from a more structural pov but I do think it's a worthwhile thing to do, on an individual level.

the writer's brother is sadly behind a paywall

If you Google the headline you should be able to read it

gendering of fiction always struck me as weird and the specific gendering in that piece is both lazy and misses the mark

that being said, in very general terms women read more than men and afaik it's been like that since the early 19th century, and those men who do not read are missing out obv

I did do a year of reading only female authors myself, after noticing how few I've read. I can understand the frustration at this sort of self-improvement/micromanagement of cultural tastes taking up so much space in the discourse at the expense of looking at things from a more structural pov but I do think it's a worthwhile thing to do, on an individual level.

Agree, I think last year was the first year I read more than 50/50 books by female authors, which is ridiculous.

I remember chatting to guy in Oxfam Books, a big novel reader, who said he didn't want to read Ferrante because he thought it would be "too much of a woman's book" and it's always a shock to meet people like that in the wild

I know a guy who's a very sweet person and a talented writer, but who doesn't read any books by women except for The Shipping News, which he loves. Very strange.

haha, so weird

reminds me of something Sigrid Nunez said:

For pretty much my whole writing life, I always felt—as did every woman writer I know—we lived in a world where if you heard “women’s fiction,” you heard “lesser fiction.” Not just male readers and male editors. Women also felt that a thing made by a man was superior to that made by women. Look at publishing—it was dominated by women. Most of the editors and agents were women, and the books that were admired most and given the most attention were by men. That’s changed. But to be honest, with books written by a woman, an older woman in particular, I’m still surprised when a man says he loves the book. I would feel like it was a hard sell.

and Nunez is obv brilliant

Ursula K. Le Guin bf, GQ essay gf

— Alexander Wells (@ajbwells) May 18, 2022

I did do a year of reading only female authors myself, after noticing how few I've read. I can understand the frustration at this sort of self-improvement/micromanagement of cultural tastes taking up so much space in the discourse at the expense of looking at things from a more structural pov but I do think it's a worthwhile thing to do, on an individual level.

"I remember chatting to guy in Oxfam Books, a big novel reader, who said he didn't want to read Ferrante because he thought it would be "too much of a woman's book""

Give him the latest copy of GQ. It's for men.

This is a good piece on the resistance young men have for reading, changes in the market, etc.

https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/theres-no-hype-machine-for-selling-literature-to-dudes

I think there’s a difference between not reading women (which is dumb) and reading things that only suit your “quiet, tasteful sensibilities” (Nathalie Olah, in the link above). I think that’s ok! Being middlebrow or boring in your reading is literally no one else’s business

And the weird snobbishness (which obvs people here don’t have) about video games. I’d feel desperately sorry for someone who spent more time reading Tom McCarthy than playing Zelda. (Although having bad taste is also ok!)

Trying to get people to voluntarily read anything that doesn't appeal to them is a losing battle. Lots of readers have very narrowly defined ideas of what they want from books and they never break out of whatever narrow niche they fell into.

The best you can hope for from niche readers is that the very habit of picking up books and reading them to the end will permit them some day to accidentally read a book outside their chosen niche, enjoy it, and discover a new niche to add to their old one. If this happens more than once, they may eventually start looking for such 'accidents' and become an adventurous reader.

I've been part of a book club for about ten years now. The host for each month chooses the book. I've read stuff I never would have heard of, let alone thought to pick up, otherwise. It's been a great experience (witness its longevity).

"Trying to get people to voluntarily read anything that doesn't appeal to them is a losing battle. Lots of readers have very narrowly defined ideas of what they want from books and they never break out of whatever narrow niche they fell into."

Lots, not all. Just in this thread three posters talked about their efforts to read more women, and what that might have done for their reading. I certainly see quite a bit of that on book Twitter. Reading women, engaging with more translated literature.

"And the weird snobbishness (which obvs people here don’t have) about video games."

Yes, did overlook that as I haven't touched a game for 20 years.

Ah well.

A champion emerges. pic.twitter.com/PjzAit2mFY

— Elvis Buñuelo (@Mr_Considerate) May 19, 2022

And the weird snobbishness (which obvs people here don’t have) about video games. I’d feel desperately sorry for someone who spent more time reading Tom McCarthy than playing Zelda. (Although having bad taste is also ok!)

C was a pretty bad book, but I reckon it'd make a semi-decent point'n'click tbf

What about bad books vs good video games?

_And the weird snobbishness (which obvs people here don’t have) about video games. I’d feel desperately sorry for someone who spent more time reading Tom McCarthy than playing Zelda. (Although having bad taste is also ok!)_


realisation this post prompted in me: im far more interested in - and enjoy - bad books than i do bad video games.

now imagining a YouTube account called The Angry Literary Nerd doing shticky screaming at a book videos

This is not good.

The latest episode of The Backstory with Andrew Neil is out now.

This week, @afneil talks to @AyoCaesar about why she’s “literally a communist”, her support for Jeremy Corbyn and how she deals with the abuse she gets on Twitter.

Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

— Tortoise (@tortoise) May 26, 2022

thread drift taken to delirious new heights

I have not read this thread, but this strikes me as a not very helpful use of the poll feature. Why compare in this way?

I started to skim the content and realized people here say interesting things whatever prompt they are given.
(I stick by the oddness of the comparison. I think you are challenging something outside literature.)

(outside the form of the novel assuming it transcends time and place and more or less writers had/have a common idea of what they want to achieve)

I have not read this thread, but this strikes me as a not very helpful use of the poll feature. Why compare in this way?

― youn, Saturday, 28 May 2022 bookmarkflaglink

Most polls don't lead to much interesting discussion. This was a bit different, maybe you could read it?

Or just read this:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/may/28/books-by-women-that-every-man-should-read-chosen-by-ian-mcewan-salman-rushdie-richard-curtis-and-more

"Howard Jacobson: Middlemarch by George Eliot
Not every page of Middlemarch is a masterpiece of impassioned intelligence, where action is imbued with thought, and thought is shaped by feeling; but every other page is. No man or woman can be considered educated who hasn’t read it at least twice."

Or just read this:

I started to skim the content and realized people here say interesting things whatever prompt they are given.

― youn, Saturday, May 28, 2022 7:35 AM (five hours ago)

No man or woman can be considered educated who hasn’t read it at least twice.

Okay, Casaubon

Real car crash of a piece. Just schizophrenic in the way it's put together lol.