Is this novel as psychologically rich as Moby Dick or TBK?
>>25279668All three are too different. Tolstoy's writing is very transparent and he doesn't foreground profundity rhetorically. There's fewer philosphical monologues, at least until the end, and fewer cosmic symbolic structures, but the psychological detail accumulates with enormous force. In that sense, I'd argue it's richer than MD as far as psychology is concerned, but not TBK, which is likely the apex of psychological fiction. Either way the three works are fundamentally too different to compare like that.
>>25279680>TBK, which is likely the apex of psychological fictionYou have to be 18 to use this website.
>>25279668I don't consider Moby-Dick psychologically rich, it's more about philosophy and theology, with the characters acting as rhetorical mouthpieces for various stances. If you want to see a psychological novel by Melville read Pierre, though even that reads more like a philosophical treatise about the impossibility of putting the human mind on paper than a well-defined character drama.In that sense AK is psychologically richer that MD. Tolstoy dives into the mind of each character, giving you insight into their thought process. Each character moves in a predictable way inherent to their station, environment and psychological profile. I think this ultimately makes the characters shallow; there is no room for the subconscious to show itself, no spontaneity. It's all clear, gradual buildup that I find untrue to life, but maybe that's because I'm neurotic. Dostoevsky's characters feel like they stepped right out of the madhouse; they're grotesque, unstable, even comic, but I find them much more believable than Tolstoy's well-crafted puppets. Still definitely worth a read, Anna's final breakdown is sublime.
>>25279691I'm sure you have a better example. Go on.
>>25279691>[..] But Updike for example admires Nabokov. And I do not at all. I cannot excuse Nabokov for doing Dostoyevsky down. Of course, Nabokov is clever too, very much so, and sometimes he only wants to show that he’s much more clever than you and I, that he’s the most clever of us all.>[..] And Dostoyevsky, you’re absolutely right. I’ve been reading him all my life. That man could do everything. Complicated characters, madness …He’s also very funny, Very very funny, yes. And passionate! The epitome of passion that someone like Nabokov could never understand; he knows nothing about passion.
>>25279696It's very psychologically rich, the loomings chapter, the masthead, the doubloon and it's perspectivism etc. It's very psychological, it's entirely comparable to MD.Both works also feature a very good sermon, oddly enough.
>>25279709To TBK*
what are some solid psychological novels similar to TBK
>>25279724I think the core feature of TBK and Dostoevsky in general is that he's both carnivalesque and tragic. The characters are exaggerated, larger than life and concerned with life and death. In that sense, I think Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann and Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin are a great fit. Where Tolstoy uses subtlety, Dostoevsky uses grotesque to move the reader.
>>25279668It's a completely different psychology. If Dostoevsky's psychology is the psychology of the spirit, Tolstoy's psychology is the psychology of the body. I haven't read Moby Dick, so I can't speak about it.
>>25279817So you have to infer their thoughts based on their described actions?
>>25279668More actually way more. AK is virtually nothing but the most pure unpretentious real human psychology ever put in text. But when you say something is "psychological" perhaps you mean it must be about some sensationalized exaggerated characters unraveling in dramatic fashion and Tolstoy is not that.In Tolstoy what I see is a writer of "true" psychology. That is to say he is not so concerned with and consumed by philosophical matters or the need to always move towards some greater transcendent goal. That he only uses psychology as the jumping off point and crafts characters like tools towards an end goal. No rather when some greater matter arises in his writing it almost seems to do so by pure accident merely through his natural and complex examinations of people. Nothing Tolstoy arrives at ever feels forced the way it does in other "psychological" writers. Tolstoy is very simply concerned with human beings.
>>25279702>b-b-but this Americlap literal who one-trick pony said--Your concession is accepted.
>>25279668Yes, maybe even more so
>>25279691t. 18 year oldDon't worry, anon. You will get Dostoyevsky when you grow up.
>>25280603The whole "Dostoevsky fans are immature" movement on /lit/ is bizarre, given how many Great Artists in their prime admired him. Nabby's reviews are funny, sure, but some people on /lit/seem to have taken them as Gospel. If anything, many fags here are too immature to look past the Surface and engage with Dostoevsky's Method. Have they not read Bakhtin?
>>25280648it's because Dostoevsky has been getting attention more on social media so of course contrarians on 4cuck will call you immature
