Do I read the Idiot or Crime & Punishment first?
start with the greeks
Crime and Punishment is the better starting book. The Idiot had some interesting parts but it's a pretty dry book overall.
>>24161663That jacket looks so comfortable man
>>24161663Neither. Don't bother reading from this disingenuous hack who likes to espouse christian philosophy yet was a gambling fiend and serial adulterer
>>24161663Skip Pseudoevsky entirely.
>>24161686>Crime and Punishment is the better... bookFTFY
>>24161663I haven't read it, but Crime and Punishment is probably of a higher caliber of storytelling and will provide you with more insight into Dostoevsky's style. The Idiot has a great start and a really great ending, but if you're not into Dosto, the middle portion isn't enjoyable.Having said that, I have seen people characterize The Brothers Karamazov as a synthesis of his earlier works, where he incorporated these aspects more skillfully. I have read The Idiot and some of Demons, but if I knew TBK was like that I wouldn't have wasted my time with those two.
>>24161695Back when clothes were thick and weighty. Now everyone dresses like a battery, drives in a battery and speaks to a mossad time bomb battery.
>>24161719>I have read The Idiot and some of Demons, but if I knew TBK was like that I wouldn't have wasted my time with those two.There's some kinship with Idiot but idk if it's similar to Demons at all.
>>24161684I'd prefer to start with familiar religious commentary but what would I start on w/ the greeks>>24161686tanks> The Idiot had some interesting parts but it's a pretty dry book overall.I see, yeah I heard an excerpt in the film "it follows" of "the Idiot" about the inevitablity of death & was mesmerized >>24161701> likes to espouse christian philosophy yet was a gambling fiend and serial adultererInteresting but people sin & I wonder if he has anything worth saying to empower my own faith >>24161702first time seeing fyodor hateusually he's up there w/ neitzche (in the mainstream) only reason I'm not starting w/ the latter is because I imagine his secular material outlook will cause me hiccupswhat do ya'll think of Voltaire?
>>24161663Skip him. He is the ultimate pseud promoted by Tik Tok. The reason he is promoted is because the publishing industry is run by Jews who are very good at Russian, so they prefer to sell new Russian translations of literature as it is easier for them to use it to control you. Notice how its always a new translation BTW and never the Constance Garnett translations (which are actually better and the origin of him being respected in the west, because she improved his prose) being pumped.
>>24161763The Dostoevsky hate is pure contrarianism. Notice how the first reason >>24161773 gives for disliking him is that he’s popular on Tik Tok.
>>24161773>Constance Garnett translationsI'd recommend Garnett to only women. Men should read McDuff or Avsey. Maguire for Demons, Wilke for Notes, Ready for C&P
Nabokov hates him so i have to too
I'm currently reading the Garnett translation of the Idiot after reading the P&V translations of Notes from Underground and Crime and Punishment, and I've noticed the "vibe" of the idiot feels a lot more different to that of the other books and I'm wondering if that's due to the translation or simply the novel itself. Anyone more well versed in Dostoyevsky care to share some insight?
>>24161763
>>24161784What a Jewish post insisting that people need to pay for a modernized updated translation of an over 140 year old book. The Garnett one is public domain and her weird job of doing it is how Dostoyevsky became canonized in literature. It is the translation Joyce and Hemmingway liked, and it has value inherent to that, similar to the literary value of the KJV bible.>>24161781You can't refute my argument, and you praise tik tok? Interesting. The reason he sucks is related to his retarded world view of essentially saying starving 19th century Russians need to just buck up and clean their rooms before they do anything about the absolutely nightmarish political system they lived in. You should learn about 19th century Russia and why he is an absolute monster.
>>24161813Although I had read those books, I always wonder about the Sappho question with the whole start with the Greeks. The question being: should you read the poems of Sappho which were discovered in the late 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries in that process, or should you treat them as contemporary literature and read them later? At the time of the Greeks they would have been commonly read and familiar, but post 5th century they would not have been commonly read and known? So do you include them or exclude them?
>>24161890You don't have to pay nigger. Just pirate it.
>>24161914Was the Garnett translation too difficult for you? Why do you need a 21st century translation of a 19th century novel when there is a perfectly good 19th century translation that was made for it? If accuracy is your concern why wouldn't you use the Norton Critical translation that has footnotes on everything? Sounds like you just get filtered by old books and should go back to booktok.
>>24161904As they are products of that time, it seems pretty logical to me to read and analyze them as part of the archaic Greek world.
>>24161663If 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.
>>24161763>>24161781It is, as in all Dostoyevsky's novels, a rush and tumble of words with endless repetitions, mutterings aside, a verbal overflow which shocks the reader after, say, Lermontov's transparent and beautifully poised prose. Dostoyevsky as we know is a great seeker after truth, a genius of spiritual morbidity, but as we also know he is not a great writer in the sense Tolstoy, Pushkin and Chekhov are. And, I repeat, not because the world he creates is unreal -all the worlds of writers are unreal - but because it is created too hastily without any sense of that harmony and economy which the most irrational masterpiece is bound to comply with (in order to be a masterpiece). Indeed, in a sense Dostoyevsky is much too rational in his crude methods, and though his facts are but spiritual facts and his characters mere ideas in the likeness of people, their interplay and development are actuated by the mechanical methods of the earthbound and conventional novels of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
>>24161786It 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.
>>24161921Why are you defending Garnett so intensely, niggerbro? The problem is that Garnett’s translation has this soft, flowery, gentle tone that defangs the original. It's Dostoevsky for women. McDuff is the most pleasant one, and I'll recommend him. If I cared about footnotes, I would go for Avsey.
>>24161993Because the reason he was respected was because of that translation. His prose in Russian is terrible and she made him a good writer.
>>24162006Maybe the prose is more engaging on a sentence basis, but to me it doesn't feel right unless the narration is like some drunk asshole in a bar is telling the story while everybody is quietly listening and he is periodically slamming the table at heavy moments
>>24161763> excerpt in the film "it follows" of "the Idiot" about the inevitablity of death:>“I think that if one is faced by inevitable destruction — if a house is falling upon you, for instance — one must feel a great longing to sit down, close one’s eyes and wait, come what may…”> “When there is torture there is pain and wounds, physical agony, and all this distracts the mind from mental suffering, so that one is tormented only by the wounds until the moment of death. But the most terrible agony may not be in the wounds themselves but in knowing for certain that within an hour, then within ten minutes, then within half a minute, now at this very instant – your soul will leave your body and you will no longer be a person, and that is certain; the worst thing is that it is certain.”>>24161773> Constance Garnett translations (which are actually better and the origin of him being respectedthe above excerpts are what inclined me to reading his works & it does seem to have an outsourced (feminine) beauty to it not from himself despite gaining him infamyIt only makes sense to read the early translation ignore the faggot
>>24161890>The reason he sucks is related to his retarded world view of essentially saying starving 19th century Russians need to just buck up and clean their rooms before they do anything about the absolutely nightmarish political system they lived in. You should learn about 19th century Russia and why he is an absolute monster.GOD DAMN ITI knew he was a pacifist who'd portrayed the ubermensch (Prophet Muhammed) as bad because le violence ebil BUT HE'S POLITICALLY QUIETIST TOO?!undoubtedly wicked, expected from a crosskike though
>>24161663The real hack is to start with the White Night. Very short and it give a glimpse of the writer style. Then CP and the rest. For me, it's WN, CP and then currently waiting for my first physical book, TBK to arrive.
>>24162047Your post is all chopped up so I can't read it. But the Garnett translation is 100 years older than the McDuff one. And she was actually in her 20s when the book came out, so is going to have a better handle on things. This isn't like the bible where Jerome translated in 500 years, or 1500 years, later, this is translated by a contemporary translator who could just ask the Russians about him. She even met Tolstoy and hung out at his house. That's a major part of the why behind her, she actually spent time in Tsarist Russia and was the translator many of the authors (Dosto was dead then) preferred for their works. Its at the same level of how Nabakov has a Nabakov approved translation of Invitation to a Beheading, or how Victor Hugo specifically approved the Wilmur translation of Les Mis. You are buying into publishing industry lies (that they have made for their own financial benefit) if you are using any other translation.
>>24162064The version of White Nights is a Garnett translation btw.
>>24161663I finished The Idiot yesterday and I liked Crime and Punishment way more. Mishkin is too much of a pussy.
>>24161719I disliked the ending. The book should've ended after Aglaya runs away and the prince stays taking care of Nastasya.
>>24162214Is there any substance to the book beyond Raskolnikov's existential crisis? I dislike things with a message of "don't do that, get off your high horse" and anti-rationalism.
>>24162225>I dislike things with a message of "don't do that, get off your high horse"Raskolnikov doesn't necessarily repent in the end, so that's not correct. What I liked the most was his interactions with his friend and his sister.
>>24162233Got it. I will attempt this before my death
>>24161890The whole point is saying why these ideologies are retarded. The reason Nabokov and some Russians have resentment towards him is he was literally liberalizing them 'putting a monkey on a suit'. He's the greatest redpiller manosphere lifestyle coach of all time. The first book he wrote shocked and captivated Russia's literati from the whole 'she's going to leave you for a chad'. He was an alogger upstart 'put on a suit, wear nice clothes, don't be a cuck' making fun of them the whole time. His ego was probably hitting insane levels of derangement and that's why he was sold out and was always most bitter about that aspect specifically instead of what the le Russian goberment did to him. The reason he resented Turgenev and the revolutionary youth is from the perspective of it being enfeebling, cult like, ugly and unable to be respected internationally. It's like everyone joining a cult instead of becoming an interesting developed person, a liberal. The system of brutality is in place for a reason unless the people change and choose liberalism out of love and personal development or dominated by a superior ideology and foreign technology. Russia was being used as an experiment instead of becoming impressive Greek heroes and intimidating independent Volga bandits like Dosto wanted and thought was Russia's special strength and last line of defense
>>24161663Demons, then maybe notes then skip the rest.
the idiot is kind of backwards for a dostoyevsky novel. it's the one in which he says not to carry the ideas he's usually pushing in the other books too far.
>>24161684Plato NECESSAEY and sufficient for greekrepublicphaedrussymposiumionlysismenocharmides
>>24161719>Demons>wasted my time lol. you are on the wrong board, buddy
>>24162759I dropped it as soon as I caught onto how it was going to depict the leaders of the revolution as cold-blooded sociopaths who have benefitted most from the system they were trying to overthrow. Which was quite early, being when Stavragin left the town. Also I knew Stepan was going to be the best character. I'll try Crime and Punishment at some point, maybe I'll like it.
I liked the part of The Idiot where he describes the experience of having a fit of epilepsy as a moment of transcendent clarity followed by a descent into madness and oblivion, as if in payment for the epiphanybut I don't remember what part it's in so I can't post the real quote
>>24162898I'm pretty sure that was after Rogozhin tried to kill him.
