/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.20216481]

What makes their literature superior to everyone else?

[Anonymous No.20216488]

>>20216481
Inherent pessimism.

[Anonymous No.20216605]

it's not that good except for 19th century. Probably polish lit is better

[Anonymous No.20216610]

>>20216481
Suffering

[Anonymous No.20216612]

>>20216481

not a single thing, and i really have no favorites regarding countries and lit

[Anonymous No.20216651]

>>20216481
No russian born after the empire has written anything worthwhile.

[Anonymous No.20216659]

Western midwits have a weird fascination with Russia because it's simultaneously European but also exotic and foreign.
Their literature is not better than any of the other bigger European countries and I'd say it's below some of them.

[Anonymous No.20216661]

>>20216659
>Western midwits have a weird fascination with Russia because it's simultaneously European but also exotic and foreign.
This applies only to anglos and other western europeans.

[Anonymous No.20216705]

>>20216661
Great Russian literature, mysterious culture, spirituality, the most beautiful women are the psiop of Russophilia for fools who have never been to Russia and probably never even communicated with Russian irl. Their literature does not exceed the average European level in the 19th century, and even more boring, and the revolution, most of the books of Russian authors are shit.

[Anonymous No.20216711]

>>20216481
It really, really isn't, and the idea that it is stems from a time where everyone interested in literature was a scholar of ancient, anglo, german, french and italian literature already from primary school, and the way to set oneself apart as an elitist was to read russian novels which were rarely translated, necessitating that one learn russian - another display of intellectual force and excessive leisure time, further solidifying the elitism of russian literature.

The meme that russian novels are particularly highbrow stems from this - mistaking the elitism that used to be necessary for appreciating it with an inherent superiority of quality, as you do OP - but the meme has been kept alive throughout the erosion of erudition in proper european literature because today, russian literature is an excellent stepping stone for lower midwits to feel like patricians without them being it. The move from a supermarket crime novel to Crime and Punishment is tiny and insignificant. The move from a supermarket historical novel to War and Peace is tiny and insignificant.

Everything Tolstoy wrote post-1888 is wilfully designed to be as dumb and simple as possible (unironically: read Tolstoy's writings on aesthetics after his religious awakening). Tolstoy came to believe that art was bad and degenerate and should serve a purpose (disgusting), and that purpose was to educate retarded peasants on morality via extremely simple fables.

Dostoevsky on the other hand wrote journalist claptrap, and it is only considered groundbreaking today by people who have never read Stendhal - confer with my point about how russian literature was elevated to the status of superior concurrently with the loss of erudition in european literature.

Gogol is first-rate and world class, as is Pushkin - who remains the only one where knowledge of russian is necessary. But these two do not speak to the inherent superiority of russian literature anymore than, say, Hamsun and Ibsen speak to the inherent superiority of Norwegian literature.

[Anonymous No.20216735]

>>20216711
>Gogol
Ukrainian
>Pushkin
Ethiopian

[Anonymous No.20216790]

>>20216705
>>20216711
I too have read Nabokov's lectures

[Anonymous No.20216800]

lmao /lit/ is fucking insufferable sometimes
So many pseuds in this thread
>>20216711
This being the most embarrassing of them all. Tranny hands typed this.

[Anonymous No.20216809]

>>20216735
*Cameroonian

[Anonymous No.20216852]

>>20216800
>Tranny hands typed this.

[Anonymous No.20216972]

>>20216800
>embarrassing
This implies transgression of a social code, and I am too autistic to even identify such codes, much less care about them.
Try again.

[Anonymous No.20217001]

>>20216481
only beginners think that russian literature is superior. its good but by far not the best.

french literature is better. also irish, scottish, norwegian and italian lit is good but the patrician choice is without a doubt german literature. it filters the plebians perfectly.

american, english and japanese literature is reddit tier.

[Anonymous No.20217045]

Russian art is characterized by a sort of adolescent melodrama more than anything else. Enjoying it is just a sign of being immature.

[Anonymous No.20217051]

>>20216481
*What makes literature superior to everything else?

Fixed that for you.

[Anonymous No.20217067]

>>20217045
This. I distinctly recall my reading Dostoevsky phase coincided with my listening to Nirvana phase at the ripe age of 15.

[Anonymous No.20217141]

>>20217045
>>20217067
>t. read 1 book (notes from underground)

[Anonymous No.20217147]

>>20216605
Polish lit has produced exactly zero Goethe-tier figures.

[Anonymous No.20217153]

>>20216972
>sour grapes: autism edition

[Anonymous No.20217156]

>>20216790
>>20216711
Can you source these lectures? I am genuinely interested if this point is expanded upon.

[Anonymous No.20217161]

>>20216481
The combination of Napoleon’s invasion, feudalism and it’s reformation, the various religions and cultures, leads to interesting work

[Anonymous No.20217162]

>>20217141
No it is literally the case for the entirety of Dostoevsky's authorship, which is the one I would argue is the most melodramatic. It is the same in Poor Folk, White Nights, Crime and Punishment, the Brothers Karamazov, The Idiot, The Gambler and The Eternal Husband. I've not read anything else by him, but it is in literally all these works. Less so in the last two, but present.

[Anonymous No.20217167]

It reminds me of the Japanese book In Praise of Shadows where the author speculates on how technology would have developed differently without Western intervention in Japan. There would have been Japanese airplanes, telephones etc. Instead of just American appliances forced into the traditional aesthetics. Russia is a view of alternative history, since they branched off from the same roots as we did but in a different atmosphere. It's like meeting a twin you never knew you had. This is probably what Dostoyevsky, Nabokov and Tarkovsky were hinting at with their themes of the double (in The Double, Despair and Solaris respectively)

[Anonymous No.20217194]

>>20216488
melancholy isnt neccessary pessimism.

[Anonymous No.20217219]

>>20217156
You will not find those points in Nabokov's lectures because they are not there. I stole the phrase "journalist claptrap" from an interview with Playboy (yes, unironically) - reprinted in Strong Opinions - not his lectures, and I agree with his assessment of Gogol and Pushkin. The other anon took that as an opportunity to paint me as a plagiarizing pseud despite the fact that the similarities are superficial, and that taking such superficial similarity as a proof of regurgitation is, ironically, the most pseud thing possible.

>>20217153
I have no idea what this is even supposed to mean. What are the grapes?

[Anonymous No.20217239]

>>20216481
Has anyone read Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics?

[Anonymous No.20217346]

>>20217161
>feudalism and it’s reformation
Unfortunately never existed in Russia.
>Napoleon’s invasion
Literally any European country.

[Anonymous No.20217412]

>>20216735
>Dumas
Haitian

[Anonymous No.20217418]

>>20217239
Yes, it's pure materialist bullshit cope as anything made by marxists and estructuralists.

[Anonymous No.20217745]

>>20217418
>materialist
Try to explain this term as best as you can, and how it applies to Bakhtin.

[Noname Femanon !1oKmZSIAF. No.20218714]

Most "russian" authors are actually ukrainian.

for example gogol was fully ukrainian but people think he's russian just bcuz he lived there

[Anonymous No.20218754]

>>20216852
ywnbaw

[Anonymous No.20218763]

>>20216481
Z

[Anonymous No.20218808]

What's up the FSB shill's collective ass today? Didn't get to check /k/ yet, did something happen?

[Anonymous No.20218812]

>>20216659
>My opinion is objectively correct

[Anonymous No.20218818]

>>20216481

[Anonymous No.20218843]

>>20216661
>anglos and other western europeans.
who else are you describing as western that are excluded?

[Anonymous No.20218856]

>>20218843
Everything that's not Western Europe or Russia is still part of the Western civilization.

[Anonymous No.20218868]

>>20216711
>The move from a supermarket crime novel to Crime and Punishment is tiny and insignificant.

just EBIN

[Anonymous No.20218883]

>>20218714
>Tripfag
>Tranny
>Believes Ukraine existed when Gogol was alive

[Anonymous No.20218888]

>>20216481

SOVL

[Anonymous No.20218902]

>>20218808
These evil white imperialists and colonists. Just look how good the nigger states are doing without them.

[Anonymous No.20218927]

Does anyone like Soviet era authors? I liked Yuri Olesha’s “Envy”

[Anonymous No.20218930]

>>20217162
at what point did you arbitrarily decide melodrama was an insult? its a descriptor.

[Anonymous No.20218957]

>>20218856
interesting

[Anonymous No.20218966]

>>20218927
I do. They are overlooked just like collaborators from Europe are over looked (Pierre drieu la Rochelle for example)

[Noname Femanon !1oKmZSIAF. No.20218975]

>>20218883
lmao what are u talking about
learn fucking history retard
i did not say he was born in ukraine, i said he was ethnically ukrainian

you stupid cunt im half ukrainian, do you think you know more than me? get rekt.

[Anonymous No.20219118]

>>20216488
>>20216610
>>20217194
In view of these I recommend this challenge: Someone post an example of "comedy" in Russian literature where the irony isn't bitter, or doesn't shade into sly trolling. Or for that matter anything rhapsodic, irrespective of the experience or living condition that prompted it. I'm genuinely curious.

[Anonymous No.20219134]

>>20218975
Do you mean he was a Cossack? There is no such thing as ethnically Ukrainian. Just because you live in a puppet state doesn't mean you know shit. To the contrary, surely.

[Noname Femanon !1oKmZSIAF. No.20219155]

>>20219134
here is the proof you fat american. obviously you are too lazy to google one small thing.

gogol is just one example. there are many cossack authors who are known as russian

[Anonymous No.20219185]

>>20219118
Derzhavin would qualify I think. Historical period matters more than nationality in these questions of fundamental attitudes. Pushkin's more juvenile work is quite silly, Tolstoy is basically optimistic and his satire is often gentle rather than bitter. But living too far north and under tyrannical regimes certainly doesn't help with being all happy-go-lucky, although I think it's probably hard to find much of that in any country's serious literature.

[Anonymous No.20219194]

I wish all pidorashkas leave /lit/ (and Earth) forever.

[Anonymous No.20219204]

>>20219155
Then say Cossack you disingenuous fuck. You're probably a Khazar transplant anyway. Ukraine was started after the Bolshevik revolution.

[Anonymous No.20219205]

>>20216481
Harsh winters, alcoholism, and jesus. Cabin fever + religious delusion + intoxication leads to explosive chimp out displays

[Anonymous No.20219209]

>>20218812
well do you expect him to be a faggot and say
>well this is just my opinion but.. um I think maybe perhaps
retard everyone thinks their opinion is correct

[Anonymous No.20219278]

>>20216481
Experience

[Anonymous No.20219293]

>>20218930
I don't believe I did.

[Anonymous No.20219296]

>>20218888
quads of truth

[Anonymous No.20219301]

>>20216605
lmao nice bait

[Anonymous No.20219311]

>>20216711
But Ibsen does speak of the superiority of Norwegian literature.

[Anonymous No.20219312]

>>20216481
Unironically alcohol.

[Anonymous No.20219319]

>>20216711
Pushkin is overrated.

[Anonymous No.20219324]

>>20219155
>name is literally Hohol
lmao you cannot make this shit up, Hohol confirmed Ukranian, russia BTFO.

Tbqh it's all moot, he spent most of his productive years in France, Germany, Switzerland and especially Italy, with almost a decade in Rome - this is when Dead Souls was written. He is properly a European and not a Russian. His main connection to Russia is violently satirizing it while ensuring that he did not live there. While Europe inspired him to write masterpiece of world literature, all his return to Russia did in 1848 was ensure that he went mad with religion, burned his work and killed himself with asceticism.

[Anonymous No.20219332]

>>20218714
It matters in what language he writes. Gogol wrote in Russian, he is a Russian writer of Ukrainian origin.
(well, if someone wants to consider him a Ukrainian writer, I don’t mind, it’s important that he is a great writer and not “nationality”).
Babel is an Odessa Jew, wrote in Russian - a Russian writer. Sholem Aleichem, born in Ukraine, wrote in Yiddish - Jewish writer. Bulgakov, born in Kyiv, wrote in Russian - a Russian writer. Nabokov, born in Russia, wrote in Russian and English, Russian and American writer.

[Anonymous No.20219352]

>>20219155
yeah but he wrote in russian dumbass hahahahaha ukrainian was always a pleb dog language for the servile peasants who lived in malorossiya

[Anonymous No.20219422]

>>20216651
Pelevin

[Anonymous No.20219426]

>>20216481
take it easy on the copium bro

[Anonymous No.20219429]

>>20219332
Nabokov said in Speak, Memory he could read English before he could read Russian

[Anonymous No.20219612]

>>20216972
It implies that you are a retard and have terrible opinions about literature

[Anonymous No.20219682]

>>20217239
Yes, it's excellent. (Bakhtin was deeply religious, btw.) Not to be taken literally, in fact most Bakhtin reception from what I've seen had to rework him and work in part contrary to his ideas, but the ideas are some of the most "propulsive" in the past century's literary theory.

[Anonymous No.20219809]

>>20216481
By having such shitty literature (Dosto) it elevates the truly sublime literature (Tolstoy)

[Anonymous No.20219831]

>>20216481
Opinion

[Anonymous No.20219876]

>>20217346
>Never existed
Semantics. You know what is meant, though it is feudalism
>literally any European country
Where did Napoleon turn back? No other country can say they stopped Napoleon whether you believe Napoleon’s invasion was a Pyrrhic victory or not

[Anonymous No.20219908]

>>20218808
>What's up the FSB shill's collective ass today? Didn't get to check /k/ yet, did something happen?
>t.

[Anonymous No.20220101]

>>20219185
One thing that seems to be lacking in Russian literature is a certain gorgeous playfulness, the ornate excesses of Berowne, the insane way Lucio detects and relentlessly calls out the bullshit of the Duke Of Dark Corners, as he calls him, Goethe's fabulous episode of the genesis and apotheosis of Homunculus, his not-so-satanic and generally pathetic Mephistopheles, the lovable Don and Pancho, the serene gods of Lucretius floating above all care in some celestial aether, Ovid's metamorphic sense of metaphor, the scenic Lucretius and Longinus and Wordsworth, the ridiculous monsters of Ibsen, the hallucinatory ghosts of James and Wharton.

[Anonymous No.20220132]

>>20220101
Have you read Andrei Bely's Petersburg? I'm not sure I completely understand what you're referring to but I think it might fit the bill very well. Possibly Bulgakov too though I haven't read him so I'm just basing that on reputation.

[Anonymous No.20220133]

>>20219908
Found it.
Kek you cunts are so eternally buttblasted.

[Anonymous No.20220188]

>>20219118
The Petty Demon by Sologub. It might seem satyrical from the outside, but it's outrageously silly and fun.
Most of Yuri Olesha's stuff to.

[Anonymous No.20220195]

>>20220132
Will look into it. Generally I'm more impressed by the fantastical when its overriding tone is detached and/or elevated, or at least comical, though I appreciate the nightmarish now and then, cinematically detached or not---for instance Zelda Fitzgerald, or Hart Crane, in one of his catastrophically bad times.

[Anonymous No.20221222]

>>20216711
God this is the most pseud post I’ve ever read.

[Anonymous No.20221278]

a hero of our time is tight

[Anonymous No.20221383]

>>20218868
I mean it was in Oprah's book club. Crime and Punishment is a perfect example of a book that a midwit thinks is only for smart people.

>>20219612
According to posturing early-twenties fags who feel very strongly about the 10 books they've read from the /lit/ top 100 chart and have very poorly developed tastes. Who cares? None have been able to articulate a criticism beyond idle insults.

>>20221222
no u.

[Anonymous No.20221388]

European culture is a rootless thing in the Russians. With us, it is our very blood and bones, the very nerve and root of our psyche. We think in a certain fashion, we feel in a certain fashion, because our whole substance is of this fashion. Our speech and feeling are organically inevitable to us.

With the Russians it is different. They have only been inoculated with the virus of European culture and ethic. The virus works in them like a disease. And the inflammation and irritation comes forth as literature. The bubbling and fizzing is almost chemical, not organic, it is an organism seething as it accepts and masters the strange virus. What the Russian is struggling with, crying out against, is not life itself: it is only European culture which has been introduced into his psyche, and which hurts him. The tragedy is not so much a real soul tragedy, as a surgical one. Russian art, Russian literature after all does not stand on the same footing as European or Greek or Egyptian art. It is not spontaneous utterance. It is not the flowering of a race. It is a surgical outcry, horrifying, or marvellous, lacerating at first; but when we get used to it, not really so profound, not really ultimate, a little extraneous.

[Anonymous No.20221484]

>>20221388
>pseud jewish hands typed this
you should consider kys or doing a gender change surgery, the chirugical outcome of which will be the removal of your small balls since your penis was already rabbinically removed and offered to moloch, when you was a baby

[Anonymous No.20221495]

>>20221484
What's gotten into you today? Where does all this anger come from? Be more of an Alyosha and less of a Smerdyakov

[Anonymous No.20222183]

>>20219876
>whether you believe Napoleon’s invasion was a Pyrrhic victory or not

[Anonymous No.20222193]

Suffering and time to think. The West is a curse on mankind, a machine to extract optimum and arbitrary wealth for the wealthy.

[Anonymous No.20222240]

I don't know about superiority but Dostoevsky is the Michelangelo of literature, certain scenes in his novels make you feel like you're reading something that's elevated far and beyond anything previously and subsequently done in the medium.

Anna Karenina is a similar kind of masterpiece and I have to read War and Peace to form a coherent opinion on Tolstoy.

[Anonymous No.20222246]

>>20221388
I hate psychobabble like this, it ruined humanism. I blame the French.

[Anonymous No.20222248]

>>20216605
>polish lit
no such thing exists

[Anonymous No.20222329]

>>20222248
Poles have 3 national epics, what are you talking about?

[Anonymous No.20222677]

>>20216481
In the days of the Empire, Jews were confined to the Pale of Settlement, so the damage they could do to Russian culture was more or less limited to infecting the Russian people with the Jewish mind virus that is Christinsanity.

Of course that all changed when a bunch of Jewish bankers from Western Europe and the US financed the overthrow of the Czar, after which the quality of Russian literature quickly deteriorated. And Bolshevism of course turned out exactly as Hitler amazingly predicted in the 1920's, with the state at first stealing all property from the Russian people under the pretext of "sharing the wealth;" and then, after the whole shitshow inevitably collapsed under the weight of its own internal contradictions, selling the USSR's state-owned wealth to rich Jews for pennies on the dollar while ethnic Russians live in misery and poverty.

(inb4 dumb comments by mentally retarded Commies who don't even know that the Russian revolution was financed by Jews like Olof Aschberg, Israel Gelfand, Jacob Schiff and so on).

[Anonymous No.20222693]

>>20216488
Fpbp as usual

[Anonymous No.20222701]

>>20216711
>claptrap

nabokov

[Anonymous No.20222995]

>powerful and mighty russia
3 nobel prizes in literature

>poor poland
4 nobel prizes in literature

facts don't lie

[Anonymous No.20223017]

>>20222995
But yet every year the Nobel is awarded, all I hear is that it’s a joke. Can’t have it both ways

[Anonymous No.20223517]

>>20220195
Yeah it's really not quite what you're looking for, it certainly has a constant sense of criticism and irony, but at least it's done for the most part with an emphatically detached playfulness.

[Anonymous No.20223989]

the otherness

[Anonymous No.20224026]

>>20216605
Polish lit is so bad your best lit is a plagiarized snore fest

[Anonymous No.20224042]

>>20216711
Do you really believe that those books are similar to "supermarket novels"? If so, could you expand on why?

I think it's true that the Russian literature thing is somewhat of a meme though, people see titles full of weighty abstractions, coming from an exotic foreign land, and they build up an artificial image of what lies behind those externals.

It's probably Dostoevsky alone who's responsible for the idea of Russian literature as so violently tragic and intense, since the other authors don't necessarily prevent that label on the basis of the way they appear to a casual observer. Pushkin and Lermontov don't really display anything more melodramatic than was the norm for Romantic poets, as far as I know based on my limited knowledge of them.

[Anonymous No.20224138]

>>20216488
Fpbp

[Anonymous No.20224215]

>>20222329
That no one has read

[Anonymous No.20224223]

>>20221383
You haven't made any arguments you just called Dostoyevsky a "supermarket novel" like anyone cares about your pseud opinion. How do I critique that argument?

[Anonymous No.20224663]

>>20216481
translations

[Anonymous No.20224700]

I think the common "Russian literature is best" opinion can be explained by two things:

1. Competing nationalisms: Most countries in Europe from the middle of the 19th century and into the 20th had strong nationalistic pride in their own literature, to the extent that they often disparaged other competing literatures. For example, it's incredibly common in this period to see English writers claim that French poetry simply was trash, or not even poetry at all, and that French novels were immoral (too sexy) -- bad for the character of the nation. English novels were regarded by Frenchman as childish, and English poetry was often seen as barbaric. However, Russia offered a kind of literary "no-man's land", by not being England, France, Germany etc. -- the point being that everyone for the most part could agree that Russian authors were good because they didn't have nationalistic rivalries with Russia.

2. When a nation reaches "literary self-awareness" they typically have a golden period of quality writing. England and France reached that period hundreds of years before Russia. But Russia's golden period (Pushkin onwards) aligns with the period that most mildly "serious" readers actually read from regularly -- the 19th century. People read 19th century literature far, far more than they actually read, say, 17th century literature, and since that lines up with Russia's golden age, they come away worshipping Russian literature. The amount of people who have actually read Rabelais or Thomas Browne might be 1/100th of the amount of people who have read Tolstoy.

[Anonymous No.20224749]

>>20224700
Quite good points, though the other thing to say is that most of the people you'd give as examples for those other countries' golden ages are poets or dramatists, not novelists; the 19th century focus has a lot to do with that being the period where serious novels became common - that and the Enlightenment/Romanticism.

Side question that I was reminded of by your first point, something I've been thinking about for a while: why is French literature/philosophy/culture so vicious and evil? There are exceptions of course but it's really striking how fucked up they are. You could say because of de Sade, but what made him that way? Why did they have a sexually sadistic serial killer (Gilles de Rais) in medieval times, when such individuals have almost exclusively only existed in the post-Enlightenment period? What the hell is wrong with them?

[Anonymous No.20224763]

>>20224749
Giles de Rais was setup. The french nobles did him dirtier than they did the Templars.

[Anonymous No.20224772]

>>20224749
>Quite good points, though the other thing to say is that most of the people you'd give as examples for those other countries' golden ages are poets or dramatists, not novelists; the 19th century focus has a lot to do with that being the period where serious novels became common - that and the Enlightenment/Romanticism.
Yes, I suppose the taste for the 19th century really is in a lot of ways just a taste for the modern novel -- pretty much all canonical modern novelists are read more than pretty much all canonical modern poets.

> why is French literature/philosophy/culture so vicious and evil?
I'm not sure it always was the way you're describing -- I think some of what you are noting is a kind of retrospective view inspired by canons of the mid to late 20th century. But the French 19th century does seem more dark compared to the English 19th century... for what have to be political reasons, right? If you were English in the 19th century you'd basically just been watching your country massively expand its productivity and influence over and over and over again -- it was just up and up and up. But if you were Baudelaire, Verlaine, etc. you'd lived through multiple bloody revolutionary periods, seen massive hopes for humanity completely destroyed, and possibly experienced real material destitution. And all that gets into the writing in one way or the other, obviously.

[Anonymous No.20224820]

>>20224772
Very good points, although I think there was something crueler and less humane in French culture even in the old regime. But perhaps that just traces back to being more advanced culturally and thus more decadent and removed from simplicity and tradition.

Also true about modern poets, it's not as if the time has been sterile by any means in terms of new ideas in poetry, but they take up a lot less space in the cultural world than the novel does.