Are there any works on the same level as these?
>The Iliad
>The Odyssey
>The Aeneid
>The Bible
>The Divine Comedy
>The Canterbury Tales
>Shakespeare's works
>Don Quixote
>Paradise Lost
>Goethe's Faust
>2015
>Not having read all of these
ISHYGDDT.
Those are indeed some of the most famous literary works ever written.
crap
crap
pretty good
great
meh
great
meh
meh
pretty good
Part 2>>>>>>>>>>>>> Part 1
part 1 is for non-religious plebs
>>7470310
Tolstoy’s works are on the same level: they are certainly superior to everything else on the list, with the exception of Shakespeare. When he said that War and Peace was, “without false modesty, like the Iliad” he was actually being modest: it is superior to the Iliad.
The Bible is quite unequal in quality. There are great works, like Job, some poems in the prophets, the Song of Songs, the Ecclesiastes, but there is also a lot of dry and uninspired prose that is more cultural and historically significant than aesthetically so. Shakespeare’s body of work is more aesthetically important than the Bible, and I think the world would be much poorer in beauty if Shakespeare was lost than if the Bible was lost.
As for Faust and the Aeneid, I cannot see why they are so revered by some: it’s a very opaque and colorless kind of poetry, with hardly any metaphorical exuberance. Virgil can’t compare to Homer (or whoever wrote those poems).
Dom Quixote, to me, is what Nabokov called it: a cruel and crude old book. Tolstoy’s novels are immensely superior. I challenge anyone here to quote an excerpt of Dom Quixote that can stand alone as a great work of art.
Also, OP: all of the writers you quoted did not read all of the works in your thread, and still they could produce significant books. What did you gain with the reading of all this works? Are you a good writer? Do you possess great creative skills? If not, why would anyone care with how much you have read?
>>7470310
The Hebrew Bible.
>>7470339
>Also, OP: all of the writers you quoted did not read all of the works in your thread, and still they could produce significant books
They weren't from this current year of TYooL 2015 so they don't count
Ulysses AND Finnegans Wake are better than any of those
>>7470339
Challenge accepted. Give me one minute.
Also, Nabokov liked Quijote.
>>7470342
Do you assume OP is referring to the New Testament exclusively? Don't be stupid. When someone says "The Bible" they mean the Old and New Testaments.
>>7470339
No
"truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor." - Alonso ´The Don´Quixote
Now you try getting a line as good from War and Peace.
(It's not like I think you're not able to, I'd just like to read a great line from War and Peace).
>>7470339
>Tolstoy’s works are on the same level: they are certainly superior to everything else on the list, with the exception of Shakespeare. When he said that War and Peace was, “without false modesty, like the Iliad” he was actually being modest: it is superior to the Iliad.
Can't comment because I haven't gone into Tolstoy. I think I'm afraid of him or something.
>The Bible is quite unequal in quality. There are great works, like Job, some poems in the prophets, the Song of Songs, the Ecclesiastes, but there is also a lot of dry and uninspired prose that is more cultural and historically significant than aesthetically so. Shakespeare’s body of work is more aesthetically important than the Bible, and I think the world would be much poorer in beauty if Shakespeare was lost than if the Bible was lost.
I wholeheartedly agree. And not because of atheism or anything like that.
>As for Faust and the Aeneid, I cannot see why they are so revered by some: it’s a very opaque and colorless kind of poetry, with hardly any metaphorical exuberance. Virgil can’t compare to Homer (or whoever wrote those poems).
Also agree. In my opinion it's just revered because it's so old, and we know the stories are from older.
>Dom Quixote, to me, is what Nabokov called it: a cruel and crude old book. Tolstoy’s novels are immensely superior. I challenge anyone here to quote an excerpt of Dom Quixote that can stand alone as a great work of art.
Here, I disagree with you and Nabokov. You're both missing the point while nailing the point. "A cruel and crude old book." Yes. Exactly. Read it again.
As for your challenge:
"Thou hast seen nothing yet."
>>7470377
All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
>>7470371
>Don't be stupid.
The Hebrew Bible is more than the old testament.
Idk maybe Metamorphoses?
>>7470382
>From War and Peace
>>7470310
moliere's comedies and the nibelungenlied could be on that list
>>7470389
Anything that wasn't included in the Old Testament is 1) shit; 2) heretical; 3) literally about things like the morality and legality of fucking goats (spoiler:fucking goats is cool if you're a Jew, apparently).
>>7470339
>I challenge anyone here to quote an excerpt of Dom Quixote that can stand alone as a great work of art.
"Too much sanity may be madness. And maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be.”
"I would be absolute." - Don ´The Don´ Quijote.
>>7470395
A number of epics could probably make the list, but Homer is there because he's really culturally significant throughout the West. Something French does need to be added, though
>>7470310
The Mahabharata and Ramayana
>>7470404
Just admit that I got you. You know that I did.
>>7470377
>Now you try getting a line as good from War and Peace.
>(It's not like I think you're not able to, I'd just like to read a great line from War and Peace).
Thank you for disagreeing with me in such a polite manner. Really, thank you for that.
I don’t have the novel here with me, but some passages of the Rostov hunt; of the night in the Rostov house when Andrei can hear Natasha on the top balcony, talking all sorts of things that teenage girls talk and her wishes of being able to fly; the costume-party in the country house, in a night of snow and moonlight, and a lot of other passages are great in beauty.
One line I never forgot was this one:
>“The strongest of all warriors are these two — Time and Patience”
>>7470411
tartuffe and don juan by moliere more than do it for france. maybe the charterhouse of parma by Stendhal.
>>7470339
“El que lee mucho y anda mucho, ve mucho y sabe mucho.” Alonso 'El hidalgo' Quijote!
>>7470420
It’s not my fault you don’t know what great writing is
(also, just admit you did not read his works: you have read what? Some few chapters of Anna Karenina?)
>>7470339
>Tolstoy
>Not Dostoevsky
How could anyone suck Tolstoy's dick over Dostoevsky's?
>>7470422
You could also have Gargantua and Pantagruel, Montaigne's essays, Phèdre by Racine, Madame Bovary, Les Fleurs du mal, À la recherche, and probably plenty of others
>>7470419
I remember this one in danish: Ikke i aften far, i aften skal jeg være danserinde.
It's something like: Not tonight father, tonight I am going to be a dancer. It's odd, almost always the english sounds better. This, I think, is one of the few perfect danish phrases.
>>7470445
I support the inclusion of Montaigne. Him and Tolstoy should be counted among the very best.
>>7470445
if anyone from modernity deserves it, proust and baudelaire would be the ones. lost illusions by balzac could possibly replace flaubert but it would be sacrilege. montaigne for sure, maybe the english letters and dictionnaire philosophique by voltaire to boot
haven't started with racine yet tho
>>7470431
Dostoyevsky is Reddit shit; there's a reason most of the literary greats prefer Tolstoy to Dostoyevsky.
>there are actually people.who have the nerve to throw shade on faust
This fucking degenerate board...
Metamorphoses you daft cunt
Ulysses, Gravity's Rainbow and Infinite Jest
Moby-Dick, 2666 and... what's the third of the second meme trilogy?
>>7470506
Moby-Dick isn't even one of them. . .
>>7470506
All wrong.
>>7470506
Moby-Dick and Ulysses actually are on that level though
GR is pretty fucking amazing but it lacks the necessary universality. It's kind of the 20something pseudointellectual stoner's bible, but the further you are from that demographic the less and less value you'll find in it.
>>7470310
The Aeneid isn't that good
Canterbury Tales isn't that good
Much of Shakespeare's stuff isn't that good
Paradise Lost isn't *really* that good
Faust isn't that good
It's stupid to place The Bible among works of literary fiction since they're completely different types of literature
Works on the same level? The Mahabharata, Anna Karenina, In Search of Lost Time and Ulysses.
>>7470529
this modern son of a bitch is blind to greatness
grow up middlebrow
>>7470534
Grow as a reader and find out for yourself
>>7470537
Passive aggressive as fuck
>>7470534
I am tired, so I am just going to go full copy-pasta.
a)
Tolstoy is the wonder that he is because of the congregation of several different factors. There is a very real quote about the nature of Genius, that partially explains its rarity, which states that: “Genius is the happy result of a combination of many circumstances.”; it was made by Havelock Ellis, in his Study of British Genius. Tolstoy, not only a literary genius but one of the supreme literary genius of all time, was, him too, a combination of several factors.
1) First things first: he was a very intelligent person and a very sensitive man. He was always paying attention not only to himself (he wrote obsessively about his own life, personal doubts, problems, achievements, disappointing’s, fears and desires, in a diary which he kept for almost all his life, from 16 onwards), but also to people around him. He was very proud, a huge egocentric, and he searched fervently for the approval of others. Thus he was always paying attention to others, to their expressions, their words, their thoughts, their simple gestures, their facial movements – he was deeply sensitive to that and could read on other what they were feeling. Many intelligent men have only contempt for the public, and walk in their lives inside some sort of bubble: they despise others and remain faithful only to themselves and their spiritual teachers (composers, writers, mathematicians, philosophers, and other mental heroes):
>>7470543
So does >>7470537
>>7470529
Don't pretend you've read the whole Mahabharata laddy
>>7470543
take back what you said about virgil, goethe, and shakespeare and we can speak as grown-ups
however, no one needs to torture themselves with the original english of the canterbury tales. we simply don't
>>7470546
b)
this is some sort of defense; they fear the public; they fear rejection, or maybe they simply don’t care with other people – they are sufficient to themselves. Even many writers are like that, but those writers will never be supreme genius (like Shakespeare and Tolstoy), because they lost many of the prisms and facets of humanity that socially ambitious man (again, like Shakespeare and Tolstoy: for Tolstoy desired literary fame and recognition fervently – as well as any recognition he could get - , as is stated in his diaries) absorb during their life’s. Make a test: go to a restaurant and observe that many people just sit down, enoy their meal silently and don’t even look to their sides, while other people are always paying attention, looking to the people in other tables, perhaps thinking about their physical appearance, their clothes, their gestures. Tolstoy was one of those people who pay attention – he was always trying to guess what impact he made on others and what others were thinking of him.
2) He was a rich man. Tolstoy could live several experiences and know several people because he could afford the luxury of leading a dissolute and carefree life. Most of us leave school to University already needing to sustain ourselves with jobs and loose many important living hours in boring offices. Tolstoy was a heir to a great fortune, and although he always felt some ambivalence toward it (guilt), he also enjoyed with little care. He lived his live when he was young. He gambled (and lost a lot of money); visit hookers; pay gypsies to play music for him and to fuck their girls; visit the great cities of Europe; visit the great cities of Russia; enjoyed balls with the high society (when he almost always didn’t do nothing, just stay there, shy and with fear, contemplating the other dance – he was thought to be a “boring partner” by most of the girls). Also, like a rich man he could choose even to go to war and get out of the war whenever he wanted. So he also had the experience of the battlefield, but not the traumatic experience (which destroys a man forever) of being forced to fight until the very exhaustion of his physical and mental forces.
>>7470318
underrated
>>7470556
c)
3) Tolstoy was a very, very, very ambitious man - Tolstoy was arrogant and proud, and wanted always to be the best at what he did; when he decided that he would be a writer, his desire was to defeat all the other writers, to be the greatest, and that desire to win, coupled with an enormous courage and boundless ambition were the ferment required for the construction of something as big as War and Peace, for example. Whenever his mind settled at something (sports, gymnastics, music, economy, agriculture, theater) his goal was to completely dominate that field, and even to write definitive treatises about it (even on gymnastics he planned to write the most complete and definitive treatise). To be fair even his religious quests were moved by ambition. Having succeeded financially, aesthetically, historically, Tolstoy also wanted to be, not only a great landlord and supreme artist, but also a spiritual leader and father. There were no limits for his egocentrism.
4) Tolstoy had enormous amounts of energy, and, as a rich man, he could sleep and eat well, without any preoccupation with the future. He always enjoyed a good health, and could spend hours and hours every day sited in his office reading, writing, rewriting and then rewriting some more. His energy was so exuberant that even his sex life presents huge surges of luxury. His diaries are replete with sexual adventures, to whom Tolstoy crawled, drooling, like a beast at one night, only to repent himself to the very marrow of his soul the next day. He was a powerhouse of a man, and, like I said, he had the time and comfort to recover he’s being.
>>7470554
Canterbury Tales is fun to read in the original
>>7470563
d)
5) A large organization was needed to deal with the whole mass of leaves and material produced during the process of writing Tolstoy’s major novels, but Tolstoy had in his young wife, Sophia, a great ally: she organized his papers and copied the almost illegible manuscripts of her husband, something that she would make seven times for War and Peace. Had Tolstoy not find such an able, caring and effortful partner, he maybe would not have remained working to War and Peace for the whole time of the project, for example.
>>7470564
i personally like it but i disagree with the notion that everyone should read it the way they should be reading shakespeare
it's obviously a treasure tho
>>7470569
e)
What I also learned with War and Peace was: be forever paying attention to details. Details (especially details of other humans, of other life’s and existences) are one of the supreme glories of Tolstoy’s fiction, and are capable of improving the quality of anyone’s work in writing.
Some people called War and Peace just a soap opera or a big novel. If War and Peace was, however, was only a narrative of daily life of several characters we would have much more great writers as Tolstoy in the world, and this is not the case. There is something very particular in his work, a wealth that does not seem to be found in other authors, and perhaps such greatness lies especially in this: an ability to discern details. Anyone who has tried to write seriously knows that is not remotely easy to see so many particular gestures, actions, language tics, twitches, individual thoughts, microscopic details of individuality, and in general the multiple features that make every human being a single entity. We usually capture some of these details in each other, but nothing close to what Tolstoy could capture. Other authors also have this ability, but not on the same level. Nobody seems to have seen so much, no one has the capacity of keeping so many details – collected everywhere and for long periods of time – safe in mind for so long until the opportunity to use them in fiction arose. The mental eyes of Tolstoy were the most light-absorbing in literary history: no other author paid that much attention, or at least was able to remember all the particulars collected thorough his persona experience until the time of writing finally appeared.
Tolstoy seemed to be, in his mind and in his five sentences, a flayed man, perpetually naked in raw meat, without the tick skin of numbness: every little vibration in the environment around hit him with significant strength. A butterfly for the common man reverberated with the force of a hawk to this man, the sensitive of sensitive’s.
>>7470395
>moliere
lol
>>7470534
To put it simply, Anna Karenina is a novel that breathes life through every pore.
>>7470553
My translation was about 1/3rd of the Mahabharata, which is enough to know it's a great work of art. Reading the Gita alone would tell you that.
>>7470554
>however, no one needs to torture themselves with the original english of the canterbury tales. we simply don't
lol and you called me middlebrow. As Pound said: "Anyone who is too lazy to master the comparatively small glossary necessary to understand Chaucer deserves to be shut out from the reading of good books forever."
>>7470581
if you've seen don giovanni staged you'll know what i'm talking about
>>7470554
Canterbury Tales is excellent in the original
>>7470585
if it's a question of middlebrows, maybe citing pound isn't yr best defense
ezra pound (and nabokov and bloom and the great art monsters of time) not born that way
>>7470564
>>7470591
again, I agree
>>7470592
I have no idea what you're trying to say
>>7470381
>Tolstoy’s novels are immensely superior. I challenge anyone here to quote an excerpt of Dom Quixote that can stand alone as a great work of art.
Don't be. He's actually arguably the easiest canonical author.
>>7470611
economically speaking, it takes much more to digest chaucer than shakespeare, and I believe it should be stated for the benefit of anyone picking stuff to read from this thread.
this is literally a timeless problem with chaucer
>>7470556
>but not the traumatic experience (which destroys a man forever) of being forced to fight until the very exhaustion of his physical and mental forces
Cervantes did and somehow he wrote the only novel on par with Tolstoy's great works.
>>7470624
Nah, IMO Chaucer is often easier to get a hold of than Shakespeare. The language is older but more straightforward.
why canterbury tales when the decarmeron is obviously better?
>>7470665
that's a good point but Gertrude Stein has a good idea of her own about Shakespeare's plays versus his poetry, which is that in his plays he "writes as he writes" and in his verse he "writes as he is going to write," and when I think about that differentiation of method, Shakespeare's talent really stands out
Chaucer writes much more indirectly IMO, but that's the open nature of the Canterbury tales mostly
>>7470310
don quixote is shit tho
>>7470339
hahahaha is this for real? just mcfucking kill yourself hahahahahahahahaha
>>7470932
Go back to /his/ you big fat gash
>>7470553
>Don't pretend you've read the whole Mahabharata lady
>implying you need to
>>7470506
The second meme trilogy consists of The Recognitions, Women and Men, and 2666, silly.
>>7470975
Explain how it's unreadable first.
>>7470968
Have you reddit??
>>7470604
haha why does he write like that haha lol what an idiote
>>7471031
He writes like that because that's the way people wrote back then.
>>7471004
there is barely plot even, and a lot lot of encyclopedic knowledge about fishing and stuff who cares lmao. Some describtions are pretty cool like this seagull one i do agree
>>7470926
yes
>>7470310
>implying The Bhagavad Gita isn't the greatest literary work of all time
>>7471615
>You've read neither, it seems.
It's classic shit: no Shakespearean fire.
>>7471705
Please rephrase for my brandy-soaked mind.
Faust is really just a slow-burner. It takes a bit of time to absorb after ones first completion: about six months?
Then read it again.
>>7470395
>Nibelungenlied
Exactly what I was thinking, Parzival too possibly
Beowulf
>>7470490
Not even that anon but you're very wrong.
>>7470310
What are the canterbury tales about anyway? As I am not anative english speaker they are not as ingrained into my brain as it may be to others here. Could it be one of those books that some people claim to be great simply because it is well-known in their culture?
>>7470322
>Part 2>>>>>>>>>>>>> Part 1
No shit. You don't have to be religious to see this.
>>7470339
Faust is more a novel than a poem, really. And it's great.
>>7470310
>all white men
>>7470975
Moby Dick is about finding coherent themes in everything and weaving them together into one... well... thing. Yeah, the encyclopedic stuff is kinda dull, but power through it. It will all be worth it in the end.
>>7473219
>Homer
>White
>>7470529
>It's stupid to place The Bible among works of literary fiction since they're completely different types of literature
Nah, stuff like Job or Jonah in the Whale are actual fiction, as in, they were written as fiction back in the day and regarded as such.
"The Bible" just shouldn't be on the list as one.
tolstoy greater than cervantes, homer, virgil, dante, chaucer, cervantes milton and goethe? you're clearly trolling. i'm sorry, but anna karenina is quite simply some of the most dull tripe about a whiny cunt who cuckolds a man and a guy who mows grass. this opinion that tolstoy's dimestore romantic novels transcended any medium is clearly derived from someone you admire. oh, who is that i see? nabokov? ah, there's the rub. you see, you have let a pedophile define your literature taste for you, i'm sorry you cannot marvel in the beauty of things that are beyond mere domestic interests, like mowing and sexual affairs, but there are those of us here that are incapable of leaving our art so banal. I for one forgive you your misguided attempt to appear sensible, however, it's clear that your shitting on the greatest writers of all time is so much dust in the wind.
>>7473237
Get off this board pleb
>>7473239
sorry you like reading about cucks and child rapists, pleb.
>>7473243
>implying that isn't the pinnacle of the Patrician aesthete
>>7473247
you know, you have a grand point, patricians seem to edge towards fucking children and watching their wives being dominated by black bulls. i suppose that's the sad truth of it all.
>>7473249
None of the characters in Anna Karenina are black. . .
>>7473257
That happens immediately as someone uses the word "cuck"
>>7473256
>mistaking pinnacle of patrician aesthetics with what tolstoy "achieved"
>not realizing that tolstoy did not reach this height simply because he wasnt as patrician as nabokov
>>7470310
Ancient greek stuff is the epitome of boring and worthless.
it really is sad to see people who faun over tolstoy's endless dusty farts as though they were anything more than religious moralizing.
back to simplicissimus.
>>7473263
>he hasn't even read the Enneads
>>7473269
No shame in not having read the greeks, m8.
I'm sure you'll loce it when you get to it.
>>7473213
It's a story telling contest among a diverse group of pilgrims, each giving little views into medieval life. It's nice.
HAVE YOU READ INFINITE JEST!?!?!?!??!!!??!??!?!
>>7471049
>there is barely plot even
>about fishing and stuff who cares lmao
>>7473290
Sounds comfy.
>>7473305
It is:
Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour,
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halve cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye
(so priketh hem Nature in hir corages),
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially from every shires ende
Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke,
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.
The Lusiads is pretty great.
>>7473308
Man, english barely changed since then. Isn't this medieval? German literature from back then is barely readable for a non-educated german today, but I can almost read this perfectly and english is not even my native tongue.
>>7473316
This is Middle English from the very late medieval period. It's extremely readable compared to the earlier Anglo-Saxon or Old English, which is essentially a different language
>>7473316
It's 14th century from what I recall.
It's middle English, which is very different to old English. Beowulf is in old English:
Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum,
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.
Oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum,
monegum mægþum, meodosetla ofteah,
egsode eorlas. Syððan ærest wearð
feasceaft funden, he þæs frofre gebad,
weox under wolcnum, weorðmyndum þah,
oðþæt him æghwylc þara ymbsittendra
ofer hronrade hyran scolde,
gomban gyldan. þæt wæs god cyning!
Ðæm eafera wæs æfter cenned,
geong in geardum, þone god sende
folce to frofre; fyrenðearfe ongeat
þe hie ær drugon aldorlease
lange hwile. Him þæs liffrea,
wuldres wealdend, woroldare forgeaf;
Beowulf wæs breme (blæd wide sprang),
Scyldes eafera Scedelandum in.
Swa sceal geong guma gode gewyrcean,
fromum feohgiftum on fæder bearme,
þæt hine on ylde eft gewunigen
wilgesiþas, þonne wig cume,
leode gelæsten; lofdædum sceal
in mægþa gehwære man geþeon.
Him ða Scyld gewat to gescæphwile
felahror feran on frean wære.
Hi hyne þa ætbæron to brimes faroðe,
swæse gesiþas, swa he selfa bæd,
þenden wordum weold wine Scyldinga;
leof landfruma lange ahte.
þær æt hyðe stod hringedstefna,
isig ond utfus, æþelinges fær.
Aledon þa leofne þeoden,
beaga bryttan, on bearm scipes,
mærne be mæste. þær wæs madma fela
of feorwegum, frætwa, gelæded;
ne hyrde ic cymlicor ceol gegyrwan
hildewæpnum ond heaðowædum,
billum ond byrnum; him on bearme læg
madma mænigo, þa him mid scoldon
on flodes æht feor gewitan.
Nalæs hi hine læssan lacum teodan,
þeodgestreonum, þon þa dydon
þe hine æt frumsceafte forð onsendon
ænne ofer yðe umborwesende.
þa gyt hie him asetton segen geldenne
heah ofer heafod, leton holm beran,
geafon on garsecg; him wæs geomor sefa,
murnende mod. Men ne cunnon
secgan to soðe, selerædende,
hæleð under heofenum, hwa þæm hlæste onfeng
>>7473320
Well, for german that is one step less: the current german is called "late new high german", which started in about 1650.
1350 to 1650 was the "early new high german". 1050 to 1350 was "middle high german" (which I can read decently enough because I speak a dialect that is similar to this. It is also similar to english, actually. You can clearly see the common roots.)
750 to 1050 was "old high german"
And everything before that is basically "germanic", which has similarites with latin.
