No, its not that I don't understand, or I get bored, or I'm not cultured enough. Quite the opposite. Dostoevsky is fake-deep slop for midwits. I cannot comprehend how an actually intelligent individual could like his works. It seems to me that its more normies circlejerking to seem cultured.
>>25177776Look, I’m not a huge fan of the guy myself but this post just makes you look like a teenager who got upset that a bunch of girls who don’t shut up about having read white nights on tiktok like him. I highly doubt you’ve read him
Ive read TBK and the idiot, what should I read next?
>>25177776Dostoyevsky talks about people like you in The Idiot, Part 4, Chapter 1.
>>25177786Whatever, they’re all pretty similar other than TBK, why not Crime & Punishment, that’s his most popular book.
>>25177789That's a long one right? I'm trying to read shorter books this year. That being said im gonna start 3 musketeers tonight
>>25177797Yeah, TBK is longer though
>>25177776taking this opportunity to repost some /lit/ humor
>>25177787And his argument essentially boils down to "p-people that disagree with me and think they're soooo intelligent are wrong! they're actually super stupid and delusional!"its all cope, thats what it is. dostoevsky was a scared man seeing the world move on from his conservative values and writing caricatures of people he disagreed with politically to satisfy himself.i'm not trying to say this about myself, this is an unrelated tangent, but i think we often like to deny the fact that people that are actually more intelligent than us are also often arrogant and obnoxious people. actual extraordinary talent and emotional maturity seldom go hand in hand
>>25177797Notes from the underground then>>25177801Kek, it is true though.
>>25177801KEK
>>25177798Alright I'll put it on the list
He’s fiiiiiiine, you’re giving him too much flakNear enough every Russian author worth their salt is better than him though. Give me Gogol over him any day
>>25177787Lol.>>25177804>seethe spergNo one's gonna read all that you seething sperg.
>>25177787I saw myself in that chapter and realized dostoesky is kino
>>25177849Didn't we all.
>>25177776I read notes from the underground and thought it was pretty meh. Didn't really care to read anything else by him.
Why are Leo Tolstoy fans like this so damn insane?
>>25177832i read
>>25177962Because you wrote it
>>25177776You're not wrong. He definitely has some great themes in his works like the Brothers Karamazov. But his writing is long and drawn out, in which characters go through long monologues with little character development. You have to respect what he contributed to Russian literature, but he is by no means the greatest Russian writer. That would be Tolstoy.
>>25177804Just go back to porn and video games dude. Why ruin this site and bore sane individuals with your drivel?
>>25177776Dostoevsky is the man more than any other who has created modern prose, and intensified it to its present-day pitch. It was his explosive power which shattered the Victorian novel with its simpering maidens and ordered commonplaces; books which were without imagination or violence. I know that some people think he was fantastic, mad even, but the motives he employed in his work, violence and desire, are the very breath of literature. Much as we know has been made of his sentence to execution, which was commuted as he was waiting for his turn to be shot, and of his subsequent four years' imprisonment in Siberia. But those events did not form his temperament though they may have intensified it, for he was always enamoured of violence, which makes him so modern. Also it made him distasteful to many of his contemporaries, Turgeniev for instance, who hated violence. Tolstoy admired him but he thought that he had little artistic accomplishment or mind. Yet, as he said, 'he admired his heart', a criticism which contains a great deal of truth, for though his characters do act extravagantly, madly, almost, still their basis is firm enough underneath... The Brothers Karamazov... made a deep impression on me... he created some unforgettable scenes... Madness you may call it, but therein may be the secret of his genius... I prefer the word exaltation, exaltation which can merge into madness, perhaps. In fact all great men have had that vein in them; it was the source of their greatness; the reasonable man achieves nothing.
>>25177776>>25177804I can tell your IQ is below 125 (being very generous) from the way you write.
>>25178363115 desu
>>25177804>actual extraordinary talent and emotional maturity seldom go hand in handlol bro grow the fuck up
>>25177776>Dostoevsky is fake-deep slop for midwitsI wouldn't necessarily go that far, but I don't think it's a coincidence that he's so marketable and "memeable" on social media like TikTok. That said, TBK is a masterpiece. Everything else he wrote? Not close.
maybe the real idiots were the friends we made along the way
why read old book when new book reads better (unironically)?
>>25178415Why anon so retarded? (unironically)
>>25177776Please present your argument without meaningless buzzwords you learned on twitter. If you think you know better than "fake-deep [...] midwits" like Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Freud, Joyce, Einstein, Kafka, Mann, and practically any other 20th century author worth reading, it better be a strong one though.
>>25178449This is why you shouldn’t put much thought into someone on /lit/ calling x writer/philosopher a retard.
>>25177786Dead Souls, Petersburg and Life & Fate. Dost is great but he's not even my top 5 Russian writers
>>25177801Other than TBK he is a bit of a one-trick pony it feels. Tolstoy/Nabokov/Gogol/Beli, etc, don't have this issue imo.
>>25177797It's the shortest of his major novels
>>25178358>writer who more than any other created modern prosefor russians that's objectively gogol or pushkin, they are by far the most influential. everyone from beli to bulgakov allude to them constantly, far more than dostoevsky
>>25178546He's not, Demons is very different from C&P. AK felt more similar to W&P than Demons is to C&P.
What he's like the McCarthy of Russian lit
>>25177786I think you're supposed to read TBK last
Spengler has a great section in Decline of the west about Tolstoy v Dostoevsky
For me it’s Bely > Tolstoy > Gogol > Pushkin > Chekhov > DostoevskyThey’re all great though!!!
>>25177786Tolstoy. TBK is by far the best thing Dostoevsky wrote, so it makes no sense to read anything else. Read an actually consistently good author.
>>25178633To call the Faustian Culture a Will Culture is only another way of expressing the eminently historical disposition of its soul.Our first person idiom, our “ego habeo factum” — our dynamic syntax, that is — faithfully renders the “way of doing things”that results from this disposition and, with its positive directional energy, dominates not only our picture of the World-asHistory but our own history to boot. This first person towers up in the Gothic architecture; the spire is an “I,” the flying buttressis an “I.” And therefore the entire Faustian ethic, from Thomas Aquinas to Kant, is an “excelsior” — fulfillment of an “I,” ethicalwork upon an “I,” justification of an “I” by faith and works; respect of the neighbor “Thou” for the sake of one’s “I” and itshappiness; and, lastly and supremely, immortality of the “I.” Now this, precisely this, the genuine Russian regards as contemptible vainglory. The Russian soul, will-less, having thelimitless plane as its prime symbol,seeks to grow up — serving, anonymous, self-oblivious — in the brother world of theplane. To take “I” as the starting point of relations with the neighbor, to elevate “I” morally through “I’s” love of near and dear,to repent for “I’s” own sake, are to him traits of Western vanity as presumptuous as is the upthrusting challenge to heaven ofour cathedrals that he compares with his plane church roof and its sprinkling of cupolas. Tolstoy’s hero Nechludov looks afterhis moral “I” as he does after his fingernails; this is just what betrays Tolstoy as belonging to the pseudomorphosis ofPetrinism. But Raskolnikov is only something in a “we.” His fault is the fault of all,and even to regard his sin as special tohimself is pride and vanity. Something of the kind underlies the Magian soul image also.“Ifany man come to me,” says Jesus(Luke xiv, 26), “and hate not his father and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, yea, and his own life (τὴν ἑαυτοῦ ψυχήν)als o 8 he cannot be my disciple”;andit is the same feeling that makes him call himself by the title that we mistranslate “Sonof Man.” 9 The Consensus of the Orthodox too is impersonal and condemns “I” as a sin. So too with the — truly Russian —conception of truth as the anonymous agreement of the elect.
>>Tolstoi is the former Russia, Dostoyevski the coming Russia. The inner Tolstoi is tied to the West. He is the great spokesman of Petrinism even when he is denying it. The West is never without a negative — the guillotine, too, was a true daughter of Versailles — and rage as he might against Europe, Tolstoi could never shake it off. Hating it, he hates himself and so becomes the Father of Bolshevism. The utter powerlessness of this spirit, and "its" 1917 revolution, stands confessed in his posthumously published A Light Shines in the Darkness. This hatred Dostoyevski does not know. His passionate power of living is comprehensive enough to embrace all things Western as well — "I have two fatherlands, Russia and Europe." He has passed beyond both Petrinism and revolution, and from his future he looks back over them as from afar. His soul is apocalyptic, yearning, desperate, but of this future certain. "I willo to Europe," says Ivan Karamazov to his mother, Alyosha; "I know well enough that I shall be going only to a churchyard, but I know too that that churchyard is dear, very dear to me. Beloved dead lie buried there, every stone over them tells of a life so ardently lived, so passionate a belief in its own achievements, its own truth, its own battle, its own knowledge, that I know — even now I know — I shall fall down and kiss these stones and weep over them." Tolstoi, on the contrary, is essentially a great understanding, "enlightened" and "socially minded." All that he sees about him takes the Late-period, megalopolitan, and Western form of a problem, whereas Dostoyevski does not even know what a problem is. Tolstoi is an event within and of Western Civilization. He stands midway between Peter and Bolshevism, and neither he nor these managed to gtt within sight of Russian earth. The thing they are fighting against reappears, recognizable, in the very form in which they fight. Their kind of opposition is not apocalyptic but intellectual. Tolstoi's hatred of property is an economist's, his hatred of society a social reformer's, his hatred of the State a political theorist's. Hence his immense effect upon the West — he belongs, in one respect as in another, to the band of Marx, Ibsen, and Zola.
I still have zero idea what people see in Tolstoy.
>>25178648>Dostoyevski, on the contrary, belongs to no band, unless it be the band of the Apostles of primitive Christianity. His "Demons" were denounced by the Russian Intelligentsia as reactionaries. But he himself was quite unconscious of such conflicts — "conservative" and "revolutionary" were terms of the West that left him indifferent. Such a soul as his can look beyond everything that we call social, for the things of this world seem to it so unimportant as not to be worth improving. No genuine religion aims at improving the world of facts, and Dostoyevski, like every primitive Russian, is fundamentally unaware of that world and lives in a second, metaphysical world beyond. What has the agony of a soul to do with Communism? A religion that has got as far as taking social problems in hand has ceased to be a religion. But the reality in which Dostoyevski lives, even during this life, is a religious creation directly present to him. His Alyosha has defied all literary criticism, even Russian. His life of Christ, had he written it — as he always intended to do — would have been a genuine gospel like the Gospels of primitive Christianity, which stand completely outside Classical and Jewish literary forms. Tolstoi, on the other hand, is a master of the Western novel — Anna Karenina distances every rival — and even in his peasant's garb remains a man of polite society.
>>25178651>Here we have beginning and end clashing together. Dostoyevski is a saint, Tolstoi only a revolutionary. From Tolstoi, the true successor of Peter, and from him only, proceeds Bolshevism, which is not the contrary, but the final issue of Petrinism, the last dishonouring of the metaphysical by the social, and ipso facto a new form of the Pseudomorphosis. If the building of Petersburg was the first act of Antichrist, the self-destruction of the Society formed of that Petersburg is the second, and so the peasant soul must feel it. For the Bolshevists are not the nation, or even a part of it, but the lowest stratum of this Petrinc society, alien and western like the other strata, yet not recognized by these and consequently filled with the hate of the downtrodden. It is all megalopolitan and "Civilized" — the social politics, the Intelligentsia, the literature that first in the romantic and then in the economic jargon Champions freedoms and reforms, before an audience that itself belongs to the society. The real Russian is a disciple of Dostoyevski. Although he may not have read Dostoyevski or anyone else, nay, perhaps because he cannot read, he is himself Dostoyevski in substance; and if the Bolshevists, who see in Christ a mere social revolutionist like themselves, were not intellectually so narrowed, it would be in Dostoyevski that they would recognize their prime enemy. What gave this revolution its momentum was not the intelligentsia's hatred. It was the people itself, which, without hatred urged only by the need of throwing off a disease, destroyed the old Westernism in one effort of upheaval, and will send the new after it in another. For what this townless people yearns for is its own life-form, its own religion, its own history. Tolstoi's Christianity was a misunderstanding. He spoke of Christ and he meant Marx. But to Dostoyevski's Christianity the next thousand years will belong.
>>25178622>think you're supposed to read TBK last>>25178638>TBK is by far the best thing Dostoevsky wrote, so it makes no sense to read anything else.I see this so often and I have to advise you to read more Dostoyevski still.TBK is definitely the best thing he ever wrote. Possibly the best thing anyone but God ever did. I myself didn't listen to the common advice and read TBK first. It definitely had the effect that nothing ever equalled it since, which can be frustrating.However it also had an enhancing effect on his other works, notably Raskonikov and The Idiot. If you read TBK first, you can read the other "elephants" while having the full idea of Dostoyevski' Christianity already in mind. That can also improve on these books imo. You can "fill in the gaps" where the ideas are not fully developed yet. The one book I'd advise to definitely read before TBK is Notes from the Underground though. It doesn't have a "good" (as in hopeful/uplifiting) ending like the others. It presents the problem of being without Christ that Dosto confronted in TBK and his other works, but without the "solution". Also the despair of the Underground Man is different from that of the other Dosto character and in a way more timely for us.
>>25178663>TBK is definitely the best thing he ever wrote. Possibly the best thing anyone but God ever did.Let us not get ahead of ourselves here, friend. There are a good twenty pieces of literature that are better if we’re being generous.
>>25178670There are like two at most
>>25178670>Let us not get ahead of ourselves here, friend.Yeah yeah you're right.However, of everything I've read only Paradise Lost stands next to TBK for me.I also tend to not judge books by technical standards (prose quality etc. doesn't even register much with a plebian autodidact like me), only by the spirit they transport (or fail to).What would your twenty books be, I'm curious?
>>25178637i'd put chekhov a lot higher but i respect the ranking regardless. at least we agree bely is king and dosto is last
>i started reading six months ago and here is why dostoyevsky sucks!!
>>25178702>What would your twenty books be, I'm curious?Now, do bear in mind that I DO love TBK, but in no order, I’d argue for:Madame Bovary Paradise Lost (probably my no 1, or 2)Anna KareninaDead Souls (biased)Petersburg Eugene Onegin Hamlet (if it counts)In Search of Lost TimeGargantua and PantagruelTristram ShandyDon QuixoteLa Divina CommediaFaustUlysses (probably my no 1, or 2)Bouvard and Pécuchet (biased)Clarissa (probably bias for epistolary novels)The Sorrows of Young WertherDemons (not that it IS better, but I can see people making the argument)Moby DickLes Chants de Maldoror (probably bias)Gravity’s Rainb- just kidding lolI judge books by technical standards, myself, but I think I still value the heart when it comes to art, over the mind. But the prose/poetry itself can evoke strong emotions if it is good enough. I’m also an autodidact pleb, don’t worry about it haha.
>>25178723>PL and ulysses in the top 2 spotsnta but you are based
>>25178723>Gravity’s Rainb- just kidding lolIt's easily one of the best novels on this list. Definitely above Bovary, AK, Don Quixote and Demons.
>>25178728>you are basedNah, thanks though, you flatter me.>>25178729I did enjoy it, especially the last 100 or so pages; I suppose you could say I was Pynched or whatever.
>>25177776I can't really speak about him as a wirter. But I tried reading Crime&Punishment as a teenager and it pissed me off. I ressembled Raskolnikov a bit too much (which made me perceive the novel as vaguely prescriptive as a result), the righteous prostitute pissed me off, and the idea a piece of fiction could prove or refute anything annoyed me. It still does.
>>25178736Heheh you said wirter!
>>25178723Interesting list, of those I've only read the following:>Madame Bovary>Paradise Lost>Anna Karenina>Dead Souls (first half)>Demons (about a third)Demons was the only Dosto book I ever ended up dropping (temporarily, though the break has been on for over a year now), because I've found certain passages to really be a drag, something I never really noticed with the other works, even though critics will say they all have this issue.Dead Souls is on me for not finishing it, the first half was pretty entertaining and by rights I should've finished it. But though I liked it, I didn't feel like it was headed to TBK-territory in terms of how much I liked it.Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina are kind of similar books in my mind, I have them side by side on my shelf. They taught me not to take my gf for granted and to not be a bourgie bore, or else.I'd grant that reading them was magical and they definitely served me well, but they didn't change me like TBK did.
>>25178748Demons gets a bit better once Pyotr joins the characters, and only really gets going in the last 200 pages or so. I can see an argument being made for it due to how well it predicted the Bolsheviks, but as a work of art it's much worse than C&P and TBK.
>>25178736Do you hold the taste of your teenage-you in that high a regard?I can honestly say that I had a phase of revisiting stuff (not just books but other art and ideas too) which I disliked strongly as a teenager, and I very reliably found that I was completely wrong about them.Maybe that is the fate of the "defeated rebel" though.
embarrassing posts
>>25178764Revisiting stuff is definitely worthwhile. It produces all kinds of unexpected responses in you:>revisited Conrad, went from hating him to loving him>revisited Camus, went from loving him (Plague) to hating him (Stranger)>revisited Sienkiewicz, hate him just as much
>>25178723Which are your favorite Russian novelsI'm a Dead Souls and Petersburg boy
>>25178778these memes are awesome kek, i love the one that goes "I WILL NOT START WITH THE GREEKS"
>>25178779
>>25178773are you polish?
>>25178897Yes. Mickiewicza też nienawidzę, ale jeszcze nie zamierzam do niego wracać.
>>25178617Two greats who because they are loved by all are hated by the midwits deluding themselves into snobbishness
>>25178928Pretty much. The biggest uptick in McCarthy hate was when that e-celeb video dropped.That said, I really didn't like The Road. It's to Blood Meridian what Vineland is to Gravity's Rainbow.
>>25178729Lol
>>25178748Did you manage to find any Dosto adjacent themes in Dead Souls? I did find Chichikov to be a very Dostoevsky-esque character but Gogol’s book is more humorous. I implore you finish it one day, even if it doesn’t quite meet the standard of TBK for you. And that’s fair on Flaubert and Tolstoy’s books, technically I enjoy them more, but thematically and for how it conveys those themes, you can argue TBK is richer. I recommend Eugene Onegin though. Pushkin pretty much began the tradition of Russian literary heroes you see on Gogol and later Dostoevsky>>25178774Same here for me. Petersburg definitely edges out Dead Souls for me.
>>25177776this but Kafka
>>25178932>that e-celeb videolink? qrd?
>>25179009He’s called wendigoon I think. If you like McCarthy, don’t go hating him after you watch it. It seems many have because they’re weak willed individuals.
>fake-deep slop for midwitsthe fuck does that mean? dostoevsky is the opposite of deep. his whole gig is that pseudos poison their minds with half-baked political agendas and philosophical ideas. you problem might have been seeing your own projection.
>>25178963>I implore you finish it one dayalright I will.On another note I always felt an aversion to the "city novels", like they couldn't possibly be that interesting, being set in one city. But I've just read the synopsis of Petersburg again and it sounds like a fun ride. With Ulysses though I still don't get the appeal. Does it even make sense for an ESL?
>>25179101>city novelsBerlin Alexanderplatz is wonderful.With Ulysses the appeal is the constantly changing style and the wild ride it undergoes.>The delegation, present in full force, consisted of Commendatore Bacibaci Beninobenone (the semiparalysed doyen of the party who had to be assisted to his seat by the aid of a powerful steam crane), Monsieur Pierrepaul Petitépatant, the Grandjoker Vladinmire Pokethankertscheff, the Archjoker Leopold Rudolph von Schwanzenbad-Hodenthaler, Countess Marha Virága Kisászony Putrápesthi, Hiram Y. Bomboost, Count Athanatos Karamelopulos, Ali Baba Backsheesh Rahat Lokum Effendi, Señor Hidalgo Caballero Don Pecadillo y Palabras y Paternoster de la Malora de la Malaria, Hokopoko Harakiri, Hi Hung Chang, Olaf Kobberkeddelsen, Mynheer Trik van Trumps, Pan Poleaxe Paddyrisky, Goosepond Prhklstr Kratchinabritchisitch, Borus Hupinkoff, Herr Hurhausdirektorpresident Hans Chuechli-Steuerli, Nationalgymnasiummuseumsanatoriumandsuspensoriumsordinaryprivatdocentgeneralhistoryspecialprofessordoctor Kriegfried Ueberallgemein. All the delegates without exception expressed themselves in the strongest possible heterogeneous terms concerning the nameless barbarity which they had been called upon to witness.
>>25179105(Bloom explains to those near him his schemes for social regeneration. All agree with him. The keeper of the Kildare street museum appears, dragging a lorry on which are the shaking statues of several naked goddesses, Venus Callipyge, Venus Pandemos, Venus Metempsychosis, and plaster figures, also naked, representing the new nine muses, Commerce, Operatic Music, Amor, Publicity, Manufacture, Liberty of Speech, Plural Voting, Gastronomy, Private Hygiene, Seaside Concert Entertainments, Painless Obstetrics and Astronomy for the People.) FATHER FARLEY: He is an episcopalian, an agnostic, an anythingarian seeking to overthrow our holy faith.MRS RIORDAN: (Tears up her will.) I’m disappointed in you! You bad man!MOTHER GROGAN: (Removes her boot to throw it at Bloom.) You beast! You abominable person!NOSEY FLYNN: Give us a tune, Bloom. One of the old sweet songs.BLOOM: (With rollicking humour.)I vowed that I never would leave her,She turned out a cruel deceiver.With my tooraloom tooraloom tooraloom tooraloom.HOPPY HOLOHAN: Good old Bloom! There’s nobody like him after all.PADDY LEONARD: Stage Irishman!BLOOM: What railway opera is like a tramline in Gibraltar? The Rows of Casteele.(Laughter.)LENEHAN: Plagiarist! Down with Bloom!THE VEILED SIBYL: (Enthusiastically.) I’m a Bloomite and I glory in it. I believe in him in spite of all. I’d give my life for him, the funniest man on earth.BLOOM: (Winks at the bystanders.) I bet she’s a bonny lassie.THEODORE PUREFOY: (In fishingcap and oilskin jacket.) He employs a mechanical device to frustrate the sacred ends of nature.THE VEILED SIBYL: (Stabs herself.) My hero god! (She dies.)(Many most attractive and enthusiastic women also commit suicide by stabbing, drowning, drinking prussic acid, aconite, arsenic, opening their veins, refusing food, casting themselves under steamrollers, from the top of Nelson’s Pillar, into the great vat of Guinness’s brewery, asphyxiating themselves by placing their heads in gasovens, hanging themselves in stylish garters, leaping from windows of different storeys.)ALEXANDER J DOWIE: (Violently.) Fellowchristians and antiBloomites, the man called Bloom is from the roots of hell, a disgrace to christian men. A fiendish libertine from his earliest years this stinking goat of Mendes gave precocious signs of infantile debauchery, recalling the cities of the plain, with a dissolute granddam. This vile hypocrite, bronzed with infamy, is the white bull mentioned in the Apocalypse. A worshipper of the Scarlet Woman, intrigue is the very breath of his nostrils. The stake faggots and the caldron of boiling oil are for him. Caliban!THE MOB: Lynch him! Roast him! He’s as bad as Parnell was. Mr Fox!(Mother Grogan throws her boot at Bloom. Several shopkeepers from upper and lower Dorset street throw objects of little or no commercial value, hambones, condensed milk tins, unsaleable cabbage, stale bread, sheep’s tails, odd pieces of fat.)
>>25179107 What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to the range, admire?Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator’s projection: its unplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including millions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and islands, its persistent formation of homothetic islands, peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents, gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, Artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the well by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: [...] etc.
>>25179112Universally that person’s acumen is esteemed very little perceptive concerning whatsoever matters are being held as most profitably by mortals with sapience endowed to be studied who is ignorant of that which the most in doctrine erudite and certainly by reason of that in them high mind’s ornament deserving of veneration constantly maintain when by general consent they affirm that other circumstances being equal by no exterior splendour is the prosperity of a nation more efficaciously asserted than by the measure of how far forward may have progressed the tribute of its solicitude for that proliferent continuance which of evils the original if it be absent when fortunately present constitutes the certain sign of omnipollent nature’s incorrupted benefaction. For who is there who anything of some significance has apprehended but is conscious that that exterior splendour may be the surface of a downwardtending lutulent reality or on the contrary anyone so is there unilluminated as not to perceive that as no nature’s boon can contend against the bounty of increase so it behoves every most just citizen to become the exhortator and admonisher of his semblables and to tremble lest what had in the past been by the nation excellently commenced might be in the future not with similar excellence accomplished if an inverecund habit shall have gradually traduced the honourable by ancestors transmitted customs to that thither of profundity that that one was audacious excessively who would have the hardihood to rise affirming that no more odious offence can for anyone be than to oblivious neglect to consign that evangel simultaneously command and promise which on all mortals with prophecy of abundance or with diminution’s menace that exalted of reiteratedly procreating function ever irrevocably enjoined?
>>25179117For they were right witty scholars. And he heard their aresouns each gen other as touching birth and righteousness, young Madden maintaining that put such case it were hard the wife to die (for so it had fallen out a matter of some year agone with a woman of Eblana in Horne’s house that now was trespassed out of this world and the self night next before her death all leeches and pothecaries had taken counsel of her case). And they said farther she should live because in the beginning, they said, the woman should bring forth in pain and wherefore they that were of this imagination affirmed how young Madden had said truth for he had conscience to let her die. And not few and of these was young Lynch were in doubt that the world was now right evil governed as it was never other howbeit the mean people believed it otherwise but the law nor his judges did provide no remedy. A redress God grant. This was scant said but all cried with one acclaim nay, by our Virgin Mother, the wife should live and the babe to die. In colour whereof they waxed hot upon that head what with argument and what for their drinking but the franklin Lenehan was prompt each when to pour them ale so that at the least way mirth might not lack. Then young Madden showed all the whole affair and said how that she was dead and how for holy religion sake by rede of palmer and bedesman and for a vow he had made to Saint Ultan of Arbraccan her goodman husband would not let her death whereby they were all wondrous grieved. To whom young Stephen had these words following: Murmur, sirs, is eke oft among lay folk. Both babe and parent now glorify their Maker, the one in limbo gloom, the other in purgefire. But, gramercy, what of those Godpossibled souls that we nightly impossibilise, which is the sin against the Holy Ghost, Very God, Lord and Giver of Life? For, sirs, he said, our lust is brief. We are means to those small creatures within us and nature has other ends than we. Then said Dixon junior to Punch Costello wist he what ends. But he had overmuch drunken and the best word he could have of him was that he would ever dishonest a woman whoso she were or wife or maid or leman if it so fortuned him to be delivered of his spleen of lustihead. Whereat Crotthers of Alba Longa sang young Malachi’s praise of that beast the unicorn how once in the millennium he cometh by his horn, the other all this while, pricked forward with their jibes wherewith they did malice him, witnessing all and several by saint Foutinus his engines that he was able to do any manner of thing that lay in man to do. Thereat laughed they all right jocundly only young Stephen and sir Leopold which never durst laugh too open by reason of a strange humour which he would not bewray and also for that he rued for her that bare whoso she might be or wheresoever.
>>25179101Petersburg IS very fun, it’s dense but not as much as Ulysses. Which will definitely be difficult for an ESL. Think of it as like a summation of English literature up to the point in which it was written. Each chapter employs a different style or theme which is relevant to Homer’s Odyssey, (for example, the chapter named “Cyclops” has a one eyed nationalist who engages in a heated debate with Bloom, and Joyce uses very epic, enormous sounding language and portmanteau while describing it. It’s very funny) placed in a more mundane, everyday setting, showing you can make a Homeric hero out of your modern Everyman. Our protagonist is very intricately written and we get to know him better than we know even our closest relatives by the end because of Joyce’s stream of consciousness which definitely takes getting used to. As for plot it doesn’t really have one, it’s a pure linguistic experience that has universal themes of love, fatherless sons and sonless fathers, religion, guilt, consciousness, the psychosexual and to a lesser extent, time, in the sense that it takes place over an entire day, sometimes it moves faster, other times much slower as you’ll see, not in your first read but perhaps the next. Oh and the city as a living entity itself. And the anon above me has posted excerpts from different chapters, showing the stylistic shift between them. Circe is my favourite… it’s quite schizo.
>>25178729>Definitely above Bovary, AK, Don QuixoteWe have a redditor midwit in our midst!
>>25179101just shut up and read them already
>>25178663>I see this so often and I have to advise you to read more Dostoyevski still.I've read all his major works chronologically, including The Double and The Adolescent.
>>25178650reddit is leaking again
>>25179211Reddit loves AK
>>25177776>I hate DostoI love him but I am sure OP must have a good reason for his views>Spouts a bunch of meme speak K maybe just stick to tiktok
>>25179212Other than Marquez, McCarthy and Bolano, this is a solid list. Their placement in the top 10 is crazy.
>>25178773I'd like to revisit Lolita at some point. I read it years ago and the impression it gave me was one of "style over substance", so I didn't really feel it's a masterpiece, unlike most people.
>>25179225You're a midwit and a normie
>>25179225Meanwhile here's /lit/'s top 10
>>25179241If you like those Oprah tier authors he wanted to omit from that list you’re a midwit
>>25179241You should die mad faggot.>>25179242Not so different after all.
>>25179242it's arguably worse than Reddit kek
>>25179280>>>/r/eddit
>>25177776Do us all a favour OP, turn 18 or something. You haven’t read dusty jet ski in your life if you think he’s trying to be “deep” and I don’t even like him.
>>25179212>blood meridian over hamlet
>>25177776>No, its not that I don't understand, or I get bored, or I'm not cultured enough.These are the most common answers here whenever one doesn't like a famous book. Imagine how cretinous the average anon is
>>25179242>>25179212It's almost like the same types people people frequent here and there.
/lit/ is one of the most reddit boards on this site. You shouldn’t get upset when you find their taste is similar to ours.
>>25177804and there it is lol dost haters are always leftist trannies or billions must die /pol/tards
>>25179481Agreed. However, I feel as though a new generation of leftist trannies love him and are already trying to claim him because they like his status as le introspective depressive mentally ill hero author. Despite having only read White Nights or something.
>>25177776You've never read Dosto. Nothing in your post indicates you're even capable of reading Dosto because everything you said is just internet babble. There is no comments on his prose, what themes you think are fake deep, the pacing of his novels, or his characters. You speak in memes because youre incapable of actually thinking.>>25177801This is a post and critique from someone who actually read his work. I love Dosto and this is a very good satire of his work.
He's a preachy hack. All of his characters, settings, and plots are poorly constructed vehicles for his ideology. If you aren't a stupid prole, I'd look elsewhere.>One must be a Russian to understand Russian simplicity, a terrible corroding simplicity in which mystic phrases clothe a naive and hopeless cynicism.
>>25179582No preachy hack could construct Ivan. All of the characters on the page are external manifestations of Dostoevsky's inner conflict.
>>25179255You're a retard and a normie>>25179242This is from centuries ago
>>25180124I’m getting real tired of seeing replies like this, that add nothing to the discussion. Fair, the OP was retarded. But you can do better than that. If you’re going to bump this thread then post something worthwhile. Not that the standards here were ever particularly high, but they have definitely slipped.
>>25180137Because complaining about books you have never read is very worthwhile, right?
>>25177804haven't read it
>>25180403Uh… uhhhhhFuck you fag, YOU’RE worthwhile
>>25179582Books really don't seem like your thing. Stick to video games and anime.
>>25180530Dosto is the anime of literature.
>>25180545And yet he's still literature.
