ts big dogs 2014 edition #1: dostoyevsky vs austen

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.

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 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.