I think it's time for a nice conversation/debate on this, guys.
I personally like Dostoevsky because he's a psychopath and that appeals to me.
http://www.strawpoll.me/10408645/r
Don't just vote and say nothin!
Tolstoy was a french loving bastard who couldn't write a passionate scene to save his ass!
>>8129040
Its not even a comparison, Dostoevski produced great portrayals of the human psyche brought to its ugly stretched lengths, Tolstoy produced YA tier period dramas
>>8129040
Both.
Why are people so desperate to make art into a competition?
>>8129056
oh snap, shots fired. Yeah, Tolstoy was a dime store romance wannabe patrician. Dostoevsky was a seedy creepy guy who wrote timeless classics that endure into modernity
>>8129061
Because we're not all losers afraid of being beaten
>>8129040
>liking claptrap journalism
>implying that Russian """""literature""""" is anything more than moralistic trash
>implying that people like Russian literature other than to come across as interesting by saying that they like it
>implying that Russian authors aren't only thought of as good because they looked really serious and wise
>>8129061
>i don't have a worthwhile opinion
why are people so desperate to ensure that no one artist can be considered the greatest?
I suppose you feel stephen king writes masterpieces as well.
>>8129074
>insinuating anyone will read your greentext
quit bein a pleb and pick one and argue about it, loser.
bad thread
>>8129095
>i like tolstoy more but i don't have the wherewithal to express why
>>8129040
>it's literally dosto-jew-sky
i bet if this were a "who's better, mcormac or wallace" this thread would have blown up. i guess not enough of you have actually read the russians.
Who the fuck is voting for Dostoevsky? Damn, lots of plebs on /lit/.
>>8129394
Epic post
>>8129394
>Tolstoy
>not a french asshole licking pleb
kek
>>8129411
Tolstoy could at least write a proper sentence.
>>8129417
[ ] argument [X] not an argument
>>8129422
Actually, it is an argument.
hey, someone went with gogle. p. good choice.
I never got to share my opinion on the last Dostoevsky thread because it expired too soon.
People where thrashing him on his behavior and one person in particular kept calling him shit.
This is exactly what dosetevesky is writing about, how society sees the different natured , the minority as a corrupt man. He even goes as far as too write about criminals and their experience living life with 'criminal' tendiences. Society shuns these people like the particular individual in the last thread and calls them worthless shit or scrutinizes how he uses religion to justify his behavior when in reality dosetevesky's attraction to religion and his alienation because of this repulsion by society was nothing more then his nature! It's exactly how his life played out not how it should or should have, and this is exactly the message in most of dosetevesky's books.
It dosent matter what others ever think for you will always be your nature, and if you do care what others thinks then it is your nature so accept that too, regardless of how repulsive you may seem.
>>8129040
>I personally like Dostoevsky because he's a psychopath and that appeals to me.
>>8129438
he was a shit guy, and his message was shit, but his writing was enduring and of a depth that speaks to a lot of people who think themselves alone in their introspection. he is more enduring as a psychological entity, whereas Tolstoy was enduring as a french loving dullard who couldn't write a passionate experience to save his life.
>>8129441
this makes me wonder what Dostojewskii's twitter feed would look like
>Dostoevsky, Fyodor.
Dislike him. A cheap sensationalist, clumsy and vulgar. A prophet, a claptrap journalist and a slapdash comedian. Some of his scenes are extraordinarily amusing. Nobody takes his reactionary journalism seriously.
- The Double. His best work, though an obvious and shameless imitation of Gogol's "Nose."
- The Brothers Karamazov. Dislike it intensely.
- Crime and Punishment. Dislike it intensely. Ghastly rigmarole.
>Tolstoy, Leo.
A favorite between the ages of 10 and 15, and thereafter. Read complete works between 14 and 15. Nobody takes his utilitarian moralism seriously. A genius.
- Anna Karenina. Incomparable prose artistry. The supreme masterpiece of 19th-century literature.
- The Death of Ivan Ilyich. A close second to Anna Karenina.
- Resurrection. Detest it.
- The Kreutzer Sonata. Detest it.
- War and Peace. A little too long. A rollicking historical novel written for the general reader, specifically for the young. Artistically unsatisfying. Cumbersome messages, didactic interludes, artificial coincidences. Uncritical of its historical sources.
>>8129438
That's all well and good, but the man couldn't write.
>>8129453
>listening to the opinion of a vapid pedophile
>>8129445
Could you please elaborate on him being a 'shit' guy? What exactly do you mean by this?
>>8129453
>nabokov likes anna karenina, the love letter to french aristocracy and hollowness, completely lacking any humanity except for one candid moment that didn't even seem to fit in the novel
>>8129458
He could write. He has many books, how could he not have written them?
>>8129466
that he was just an unpleasant man, from every account, he wasn't a very pleasant guy. but who cares about the artist? the artist is nothing compared to his work. just a phantom, a disappointment.
also, strange that nabokov wouldn't love dostoevsky, since they were both pedophiles.
ah, maybe nabokov just saw too much of himself as a man in dostoevsky. didn't want people to see his true creepy pleb side. hard not to see what with all his creepy pleb books.
>>8129477
Notes from the underground does open up with "I am a sick man.... I am a spiteful man."
I'm sure he was aware of this quality of his regardless that he encompassed it in one of his charcters.
>>8129492
"No, I am not a pleasant man at all"'
ITT: plebs who vote Tolstoy trying to be patricians
Dostoevsky is the only true answer. Even if Tolstoy is one of the greatest writers of all time, he doesn't reach the deep meaning of Dostoevsky's works.
Tolstoy writes about Russia, Dostoevsky is Russia. He changes his thoughts (socialist/conservative, agnostic atheist/agnostic theist) because he knows that Russia need this. He doesn't want a country devastated by edgy nihilism.
>>8129471
He was a shitty prose stylist. Worse than Dickens, even. The quality of his writing was bad.
>>8129445
What did you find about his message that was shit? His message was literally about loving others and looking out for your fellow man, what's wrong with that?
>>8129498
>caring about prose
Found the fifteen year old with the thesaurus
>>8129505
It's slavenmoral Christ shit
>>8129511
>reads for plot
>>8129498
Can you read him in his original language?
>>8129505
>looking out for your fellow man
what? dude, what? no.
he was selfish and crude and relied on the lord to save him from his hatred, every one of the characters he crafts were severely flawed monsters, each of them a facet of the broad perspective he had of people's darkest sides. he was a brilliant author because he wrote humans, not what humans "should" be.
>>8129498
>reads for prose
>being this much of a pleb
>>8129520
>autism intensifies
>>8129520
>not reading for plot
i bet you really enjoy opening books at the middle and reading each prime numbered page outwards from the center.
>>8129526
Let me guess - you're about 14 years old, right?
>>8129538
>thinks reading for prose makes him patrician
>>8129522
Go back to r/books with your disgusting reading-for-plot plebbery. This is /lit/.
>>8129538
You're undoubtedly a 13 year old, at least in spirit. Go read some sam Harris or jerk off to math problems like Wittgenstein did
>>8129549
Time to go back to plebbit, kiddo.
>>8129522
I mean, specifically in The Brothers Karamazov, the idea of 'being guilty towards all of humanity', was the core of Zossima's message and was pretty much a central theme of the book. I'm not sure how you could argue otherwise.
>>8129547
no, i think plebbit is where you belong, friend:
https://www. reddit.com/r/proseporn
>>8129555
one character of many many many many many many many monsters. sure, zossima was an ideal, but it was a message that drowned beneath a sea of true people.
>>8129544
Reading for prose is what distinguishes LITERATURE from the edgy genre trash you enjoy, son.
Time for you to return to your homeland on plebbit.com.
>>8129570
the level of delusion this anon has. i feel sorry for you. literature doesn't live and die by prose. it lives and dies by many things, prose is just a method of expressing a plot, or characters, or ideas. prose is a secondary aspect and it always will be. your desperate desire to seem superior because of this is what will inhibit you from ever surpassing plebbiness.
>>8129570
Posts like this should be a bannable offense
+themes
i could see you trying to say literature is distinguished by themes, but not prose.
>>8129583
Sounds like a quote straight off of plebbit. Time for you to go back.
>>8129040
Dost is early Metallica and Tolstoy is Poison
>>8129601
you seem like the type to read through a book in a language you don't understand because the scribbles look pretty.
or
"i hate this font, i can't read this novel."
>>8129613
>thinking we're the same person
>>8129565
I wouldn't say it 'drowned'. Yes, the people in Dostoevsky's books do terrible things sometimes, and some of them are pretty shitty people, but there's always a way out, a path for self-redemption. You can see it in characters like Dmitri in TBK, with Rodya in C&P, even though people do shitty things, the message still remains at its core. Maybe Dostoevsky didn't truly think we'd ever fully live up to that ideal, but he definitely thought that we should always strive for it.
>>8129625
well, i can see the validity of your perspective, but i would say that it's a matter of a pessimistic reading and an optimistic reading, i was always coming back to dostoevsky because of the bleak truth of his characters, not because i needed to hear his ideals.
>>8129606
Point me towards to the Rust In Peace era Megadeth or to the Slayer of Russian literature
>>8129729
Bely for slayer.
It really feels like most of the people hating on Tolstoy haven't read him.
If you'd only had read a summary of Tolstoy it would certainly seem like all he was was a standard boring YA-ish french loving asshole stuff. But Tolstoy is an incredibly unique genius in the history of literature, and easily one of the greatest novelists who ever lived.
When you look at style alone, there's no comparison to Tolstoy in balancing beauty and realism. By making every detail, every in the picture he paints a sign of a detail in complicated human emotions - emotions that Dostoevsky wouldn't touch, because they're not dramatic enough. In Anna Karenina, for example, you have Levin lose a political philosophical argument with his brother. If Dostoevsky wrote it, what would be important would be the politics or the philosophy. But since Tolstoy wrote it, what was important was the fact that Levin felt deep down that he was right in spite of the fact that he knew he lost the argument.
Love is exactly the proof of this also. Is there any love that's not cartoonish in Dostoevsky? In The Brothers Karamazov, you have, all of the sudden, without any explanation or detail, a father and son in love with the same woman. That could be very interesting.
It isn't. He doesn't know how to write love. It's just taken for granted. In Anna Karenina, you track every feeling involved in the affair between Anna and Vronsky. The way Karenin's anger becomes passive-aggressive vengeance, which has brief period a brief christian forgiveness when he's sick which actually makes Vronsky feel like the lesser man briefly - that's life, not an illegitimate son framing his half-brother who was in a love triangle with his dad on the murder of his dad, or a 10 page long speech.
Or Levin's marriage. It's slow, it's very painful, it takes an incredibly long time - Levin takes up intellectual matters to distract himself from his rejection and drops them right when he sees her for a second. If all you get is a summary, it seems so boring, unlike Dostoevsky's ridiculous love triangles.
Tolstoy finds depth in every-day experience, enormous depth. Dostoevsky characters have philosophical outbursts because of the crazy situations in which they almost randomly get placed. It's not like Dostoevsky's bad, or there's no value whatsoever to his work. Notes from the Underground, for instance, is probably one of the best portraits of a societal outcast that was ever written. But Tolstoy was a far more realistic writer, and as a result the depth of his work pleases the reader who is wants to read about life rather than someone who wants existential philosophy and ridiculous situations.
>>8129468
>love letter to french aristocracy and hollowness
You didn't even read the book, did you?
>>8129938
i did. it was shit. the only part that was remotely pleasant and enlightening was Levin mowing grass with the peasants.
>>8129960
But you got the message completely wrong. He was parodying the hollowness of the aristocracy, not writing a love letter to it.
Also, what about the prose? I think Tolstoy is a much better prose writer than Dostoevsky.
>>8129960
how pleb can you get
>>8129908
>thinking subtlety is more realistic
you haven't ever been in love if you think that love in most instances isn't cartoonish.
Anna Karenina wasn't compelling, I read it alone, fully isolated, in about a week. aside from the deeply apparent moral to never cheat or your life will be ruined, there was nothing to take away from his dry and dull writing. nothing so lasting as that moment with Levin and the grass, because it felt REAL. for once in the book it felt fucking real. everything else he wrote felt so tragically monotonous that it never spoke to me, never sucked my emotions in further than a simple surface level. Hey, in the end, some people prefer Tolstoy. there's nothing wrong with that. I just didn't find what I wanted from his work, and It's probably because I expected something different. I don't dislike tolstoy at all, I just don't love him.
>>8129976
i was reading a translation, so any conversation about prose is pointless.
he wasn't parodying the hollowness of the aristocracy, he was clearly in love with it. not just with his treatment of his characters, but how he wrote, it felt so much like the shit frenchies i've read since then. I'll have to read through War and Peace before i can make a total judgement on that theory, so i'll defer to you in this argument. I just get a very different impression from ol' tolstoy.
>>8129908
Dostoyevsky's love stories may not be great but they're generally just set up for tension, not the focus of a novel
>>8129994
did you read a translation?
>>8129908
Great post, anon.
desu W+P and AK are like only half of Tolstoy's writing, and even he developed far above them later in his career
tolstoys short novels+essays/GiB 4 life
Hadji Murat alone...
>>8130036
I'm always open to new things, I love dostoevsky, and i'm definitely biased because of his influence on me as a pre-lit pleb, however, I am not averse to letting Tolstoy take the lead, It might be a matter of maturity, of reading comprehension, many things. I still have a lot to read still. Nothing's set in stone!
>>8130073
Now you're just a post-lit pleb.
You can tell who is retarded by whether or not they describe Tolstoy's novels as "period dramas."
> DOSTOEVSKY WROTE ABOUT UNIVERSAL HUMANITY, TOLSTOY ONLY WRITES ABOUT ARISTOCRATS HUNTING
Time to find a new hobby.
>>8130164
>MOM SOMEONE HAS A DIFFERENT OPINION
>>8130164
I like how retarded people on /lit/ are the ones who misinterpret Tolstoy.
Tolstoy is obviously the superior of the two.
>>8129071
omg the projection
>>8129432
hahahaha I love it when they're wrong!!
Tolstoj is the country
Dostojevskij is the capital
>>8130236
Well done.
>Dostoevsky
>Jewish
>>8129074
>>8130248
>not knowing about the Dostojewskii meme
>>8130236
Deep desu
>>8129960
I like to mow grass.
>>8130301
want some of my sop, anon? 's good.
>>8130305
I only eat grass faggot.
>>8130311
it has a little grass in it.
>>8130311
DUDE
>tfw Dostojewskii has been consistently double Tolstoy in votes
take THAT
>>8130319
I only drink earl grey or oolong faggot.
>>8130344
just shows how pleb /lit/ actually is
>>8130354
that'd be really convenient for you, wouldn't it frenchfag?
ALL OF YOU ARE PLEBS.
Tolstoy is better when read in native Russian, his mastery of the language was second to none.
>>8130350
That looks dangerous and interesting.
>>8129477
No he wasn't.
>>8130769
Tolstoy, on the other hand, was a geniunely awful person. He married a virgin and the first thing he does in his marriage is show her his journal entries for all the serfs (which belonged to him) he had sex with and impregnated in some cases. His wife's journal is full of torment.
>>8130785
cool, constantine, how'd you get so smart? i idolize your brains, desu
>>8130785
i wasn't being insincere, do you have a list of books that are necessary to be a smartypants?
>>8130748
the guy who built it twisted his dick and bled out the urethra
I go to Tolstoy when I am feeling energetic, expediditious, and socially peppy, and want a crystal clear social realist story that studies the minutiae of the social organism in homey, comfortable, if threadbare prose.
I go to dostoeyevsky after staying up till 3 am drinking whiskey thinking about killing my boss and sweating profusely, my heart racing and my eyes bloodshot, but seeking the truth at any cost.
>>8130952
cringe
>>8130952
OP here, at least i'm not as much of a faggot as this anon.
>>8130952
pls be taking the piss
>>8129729
There's a soviet-era show called "Winnie the Pooh" which might be what you're looking for desu.
Has anyone here read Pasternak?
>>8130975
You're close, though.
>>8129040
Dostoevsky is for edgy, early teen, grimdark types.
>>8129994
That's genuinely sad to me that you didn't take anything away. The part where Kitty learns from Varenka, or when Karenin forgave Anna, that shit flipped me upside down for those pages. They're almost convincing arguments to give away everything I owned.
Also, having grown attached to both rationalizing for Oblonsky and hating Vronsky's guts during Karenin chapters, it pulled away the idea of the obviously right moral system or the obviously right way to live from me in a way that nothing else could.
>>8130362
Lol no.
WE as french tend to préfère dosto but tolsto had à better prose.
>>8129040
1/3
On Tolstoy
>Tl;dr: possibly the greatest novelist and short-story writer of all time; great diary (that presents a man of great vanity, a huge egocentric, but also a restless soul who experienced lots of things in his long life; his philosophy is mostly naïve and a reflex of his egocentrism; he was very sensitive to other people and nature, and was always paying attention to everything with eyes that seems to absorb every little fragment of reality.
I think he is probably the greatest novelist and short-story writer of all time. His prose is clear, pure, precise and limpid, and yet his punctuation is a lot of times quite flawed and he repeteas same words and expressions over and over again. He took great pains with his writing, sketching and rewriting his material several times. And yet this was an exercise into capturing more details, more subtle nuances and microscopic emanations from the characters minds and expressions or actions or from the world around them. He wasn’t at all like some poster on /lit/ who obsess with every single comma or speak that “such and such paragraph doesn’t have rhythm; you must be like Joyce, who valued the rhythm and sound of every single line, etc.”, but who can’t complete a single novel. He was pure and at the same time full of impurities, like spring water, who contains dust and earth and yellow leaves, but who actually has taste, contrary to boiled water.
His life was extremely interesting and movement and his diaries are a great human document (from the early days of a teenage boy with gonorrhea contracted from a prostitute to the last bitter fighting family wars about religion and copyrights), and present to us a man who lived life to the fullest, who had several women (most of them prostitutes, of course, but also lots of peasant girls), owned and worked on a huge farm state, fought in the war, traveled to all the major European countries, had lots of children, wrote masterpieces, became world famous, walked among great urbane centers and inside the mossy-bowels of the woods, and several other things. Yet they also show, all the time, unstoppably, a conceited, egocentric, self-obsessive narcissist, and the great miracle is to see how could such a person, who would by all means be something of a jerk, a man obsessed with beating others and be better than others in every single aspect of his life: the miracle is to see how such perpetual-teenager could achieve so great realizations.
>>8133038
2/3
No other writer ever saw as many things and in such detail as him (only Shakespeare, who is no wonder that he hated, an egocentric like he was noticing that there he had one of his few rivals). He was capable of perceiving every little expression on the face, every thought; he captured every gesture and action of other living things and stored in his brain for when the time to write would come.
Furthermore, the work of many realistic writers look like blurry mirrors compared to the creations of Tolstoy. He seems to be the most sensitive, perceptive and true of all realistic writers. He seemed to be perpetually devoid of skin, always in raw-flesh (at least his mind was like that: both his five senses as his conscience – his brain was as sensible as the tender eyes and soft antennae of the snail) so that even a breath, a look, a frown, an intonation of speech, a facial wrinkle and so many other little things reach him with a disproportionately strong force.
He submerge himself in human life: in the cities and the country, the offices and the fields, the war-zone and the mossy woods with scent of rotten leaves; he visited the slums of the poor and the rich resorts of high-society, and all the time his unparalleled sensibility was capturing every small movement that happened around him. Every molecule of existence was absorbed by the palate of his conscience.
>>8133048
3/3
About his personal philosophy and Christian thought: it was a very naïve manifestation of his ego. He wanted to be hailed not only as a supreme writer and patriarch, not only as a courageous soldier (he confessed in his diaries that what he really wanted with war was to get medals to show off in the balls of the nobility), but also as some sort of saint and sage. His views of art and society were distorted by his own desire to be supreme; he hardly could acknowledge greatness in others, and if death was a trouble to his mind (how could he, the great, the supreme Leo Tolstoy, die? How could Death dare to act this way against him?), he would choose religion as relief and God as a savior only if he himself was the one who would dictate the rules of how the things would work. He also is hailed for his efforst to help the poor and the sick, but it must be noted that he was only interested on doing that if his efforts were being acknowledged by others, if the public eye was upon him: this was also a manifestation of his desire for approbation and hunger for be better than the rest of humanity. The funny thing is that he managed to actually be one of the giants of the world.
if and of you got into a discussion with anyone who was anywhere near knowledgeable on the topics you discuss you guys would be totally humiliated
>>8133095
ah suck a dick, if you don't have anything to actually add to the discussion, then you can fuck right off. obviously you're not one of those people who knows enough to humiliate anyone, and learning isn't about humiliation.
>>8133038
>>8133048
>>8133054
thanks for your input, OP here, this is what i've been trying to draw out, the guys who are really passionate about either one of the authors. did you write this yourself, or is this copypasta?
>>8133210
>OP here, this is what i've been trying to draw out,
Thank you, I am glad you like it.
>>8133210
>did you write this yourself, or is this copypasta?
I wrote it, but it is a really old post. I have already posted it in other Tolstoy threads. I like him a lot, so when I can I like to make contributions.
>all the votes for Dostoevsky
I expected better /lit/
How the mighty have fallen
>>8133235
>thinking there's an objectively correct answer to this question, and putting others down for choosing what anon personally feels is the correct one
Pleb.
>>8133229
no, thank you. anyhow, now we need someone like you who loves dostoevsky enough to mill out a few paragraphs, heh. I find it very interesting that he wanted to go to war to have medals to show off to nobility, I think I was at least somewhat right to believe that he had a streak of adoration for aristocracy, or being accepted and admired within it. Not that any attribute of the man truly diminishes or enhances the writing itself, (though it might for some). What is your favorite work of his if I may ask?
*not choosing
Dostoevsky was almost as bad as Balzac.
JOYCE IS LE BESTEST RUSSKY AUTIST AUTHOR
Aren't they both Christfags that have some bullshit excuses for suffering?
>>8134487
Probably.
I don't think anyone on this thread has even read any of their work anyway.
>>8134487
Пpoвидeниa, that's the "excuse".
>>8134487
Tolstoy was non-theistic Christian who toyed with reincarnation.
Dostoevsky examines suffering quite a bit, but doesn't address theodicy much, yet where he does (The Brothers Karamazov, especially The Grand Inquisitor), he does it better than anyone else, because rather than just answering "freewill", he explores in depth just how much freewill is worth compared to the price of blood and suffering of children sacrificed on its alter.
>>8129630
>i was always coming back to dostoevsky because of the bleak truth of his characters, not because i needed to hear his ideals.
Then why not just read Hannibal retard.
T makes me feel warm. D makes me know cold
>>8135313
who?
>>8130952
i agree
>>8133235
Tolstoy wrote books that were scandalous for their time, mostly because he liked to show off for his clique. The only reason we look back at him with such interest is because he's a writer that made it big in the past. No doubt people will ask in the future "Who's better Meyer or McCarthy?"
Dostoevsky on the other hand wrote actual philosophical works that he had put legitimate thought into over the course of his life. His books were either his own ideas put into story, or elaborate and elegant responses to pre-existing ideas, like the nature of Christ.
>>8136818
0/10.
>>8133229
If you don't mind, what do you think of Dostoevsky compared to Tolstoy?
>>8133253
>not understanding literature is the study of the objective
>art in anyway subjective
>opinions mattering, ever
>>8137864
>thinking the subject/object divide exists
better shed them spooks, son.
>>8137890
>thinks he knows stirner
>>8133038
>>8133048
>>8133054
Holy shit, I see Tolstoy the man the exact same way you do
>>8129451
I have a tooth ache
