Reineke's SLA Notebook

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aravinda
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Re: Team Me: Foxing around

Postby aravinda » Fri Dec 15, 2017 5:29 am

Xmmm wrote:This signifies absolutely nothing to me. Experts make odd choices when they hand out the Nobel prize, too. Sometimes for political reasons, sometimes for cluelessness. It's almost comical to go through the list of great novels that didn't win, and compare them to what actually did win in a given year.
I too am wary of literary prizes and lists partly because of the extraneous factors such as marketing and media. Having said that, I don’t think the opinion of Literature professors or authors is any worse than the opinion of other people, especially people with rather strong opinions. Actually, I tend to give more weight to the opinion of professors and authors than other people who might express their personal opinions as facts. And lists can be useful as starting points (especially when you know how they were made).
As reineke implied what is good literature is largely a matter of personal preference. But if one wants to go by the number of readers (excluding people who are forced to read a certain work for exams etc) which I personally think is a better (again far from perfect) criterion, one must “count” the total number of readers from its “date of publication” to the present day. Of course one needs to read contemporary literature but if one wants “lists”, I don’t know a more “reliable” way. If not it's just my word against yours. For example, I too like Le Comte de Monte Cristo but I wouldn’t say it’s better than Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale.
Some more examples. Look at your order of Russian writers. Even if I assume you excluded poets, (hence the absence of Pushkin which may very well appear unforgivable to Russians) I think it’s preposterous. No offence.
Regarding James Joyce, only a few people may be reading Ulysses but my personal impression is many more people do read Dubliners and his earlier work.
The list is actually Anglo- or Western-centric rather than Eurocentric. Shakespeare belongs to other Anglo countries too. It doesn’t matter whether that country existed or not during his time. Anyway, lists are always like that.
Xmmm wrote:Let's play the game a different way. The experts have declared Tolstoy is the best.
1. Have you read Anna Karenina or War and Peace? All the way to the end? :lol:
2. If you have read one or both, would you agree with this mighty consensus of experts that Tolstoy is the greatest author of all time?
3. If you haven't read one or both, why not? Seeing as how he is the best, why procrastinate?
If you choose not to answer, I will have to assume that either:
a) You were afraid to read either of them because you were worried with good cause that they might be terminally boring
b) You did try to read one of them but gave up a third of the way through.
Obviousely, you asked reineke not me. All the same,
1. I have read both couples of times completely (* see below).
2. I don’t have a "greatest author of all time". But if I decide to choose one, Tolstoy might very well make it (along with Pushkin! :) ).
3. I started reading War and Peace for the first time, as soon as I bought a Penguin Classics edition. At that time I was a medical student and I read it during the short break of 2-3 weeks between my third-year written exams and practical exams. It roughly took me 1-2 weeks, I did hardly anything else during that time. The only part that was boring in the whole book was the epilogue where Tolstoy describes his outlook on history etc. Otherwise, it was absolutely unputdownable! People who speak highly of Tolstoy are not necessarily snobbish, they can be genuine too.

Xmmm wrote:We were reading something by some deconstructionist. It was not Foucault or Derrida, it was some German guy ... I forget his name
By the way, was it Paul de Man (but I thought he was Belgian)?
Sorry to hijack your Log, reineke.
Last edited by aravinda on Fri Dec 15, 2017 8:48 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Xmmm
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Re: Team Me: Foxing around

Postby Xmmm » Fri Dec 15, 2017 5:34 am

aravinda wrote:
Xmmm wrote:
Xmmm wrote:We were reading something by some deconstructionist. It was not Foucault or Derrida, it was some German guy ... I forget his name
By the way, was it Paul de Man (but I think he is Belgian)?
Sorry to hijack your Log, reineke.


Yes! Thanks!
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aravinda
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Re: Team Me: Foxing around

Postby aravinda » Fri Dec 15, 2017 5:51 am

reineke wrote:Tolstoy or Dostoevsky?
Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in the Old Criticism by George Steiner
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Re: Team Me: Foxing around

Postby Xmmm » Fri Dec 15, 2017 6:48 am

reineke wrote:Regarding your questions,

1 Both books were required reading in high school and one of the books was a requirement for the high school exit exam. I don't remember if we read an abridged version of War and Peace. Dostoevsky was required reading as well as were Turgenev and Gogol. I grew up listening to the story of my grandfather's traveling to New Zealand to dig for gum. The one book he carried on this journey was Tolstoy's War and Peace.
2 I have no opinion on this question. I also do not read into these lists in the same way as you.
3 I am preparing to listen through several audio book versions of Tolstoy's works (in Russian). Russian literature is my no.1 reason for messing with the language. I am a believer in learning by ear and I am unwilling to start this journey before I am comfortable with everyday speech.


I wrote out a response to this and thought I submitted it. I hope it doesn't appear twelve hours from now.

You answered my questions in a totally reasonable way. I have no further objections and appreciate your longsuffering.

I'm preparing to listen through several translated gangster novels because the language is simpler. After that (2019?) I will shift over to Russian literature, because that's also my number one reason for learning the language. I'll never read Max Gorky after what Solzhenitsyn said about him in The Gulag Archipelago, but who knows ... someday ... when I run out of everything else, maybe I will listen to Tolstoy. :)

Thanks again.
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aaleks
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Re: Team Me: Foxing around

Postby aaleks » Fri Dec 15, 2017 11:56 am

In Russia books of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Lermontov, Checkhov, and other classics are obligatory reading in schools. So we're kind of well aware of who they are and read at least some of their works, but it's hard to have your own unbiased opinion about these books and authors. For example, I haven't read War and Peace as a whole book, so to speak. We had to read the book in school but, as many girls, I read only the "peace" parts, skipping practically all the battlefield scenes. Nevertheless if someone ask me about Tolstoy and War and Peace I would say the he is one of the greatest authors and so on just because it's what I was taught in school (if not in kindergarten :mrgreen: ). So all those polls they do not always reflect a true picture. Sometimes it seems to me that foreigners read Tolstoy's or Dostoevsky's books more (and with more interest) than we Russian do because they read them as books, not as a part of school curriculum. Fortunately I'd read some of Russian classic, as for example A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov, before I was obliged to read it for school.

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reineke
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Re: Team Me: Foxing around

Postby reineke » Fri Dec 15, 2017 2:48 pm

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Re: Team Me: Foxing around

Postby reineke » Fri Dec 15, 2017 4:17 pm

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aravinda
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Re: Team Me: Foxing around

Postby aravinda » Sat Dec 16, 2017 4:23 am

As we were discussing “great” Russian writers…

On Nikloai Leskov, a great Russian writer who is not often mentioned in the lists. (Hope reineke doesn’t mind).

“Leskov is a writer who yields enormous pleasure, breaking past sectarian literary and ideological premises. But more: we live in a moment of lowered cultural and emotional expectations, after the fall of modernism but with nothing very strong to replace it. To go back to certain earlier writers is to regain a sense of human possibility. To go back to Leskov is to regain a sense of the passion, sometimes the joy, that can be part of the human enterprise."
IRVING HOWE, “JUSTICE FOR LESKOV”
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“Leikin brought along with him my favorite writer, the famous N. S. Leskov,” Anton Chekhov wrote in a letter to his brother.
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“Without him our literature of the nineteenth century would have been incomplete, first and foremost because it would not have captured to an adequate degree the depths of Russia with its “enchanted wanderers,” it would not have revealed with sufficient fullness the souls and fates of the Russian people with their daring, their scope, their passions and misfortunes … Neither Turgenev, nor Tolstoy, nor Dostoevsky could have accomplished this as Leskov did.”
Boris Eikhenbaum

“Twenty years later the formalist critic Boris Eikhenbaum (1886–1959) finally accorded Leskov his rightful place in Russian literature, looking at his writing in itself rather than in its ideological context, and showing that the attempt to set his work beside that of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Turgenev was mistaken, because he equaled them not by resembling them, but by being totally unlike them."
Excerpt From: Nikolai Leskov. “The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories.”
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“The Anglo-Saxon public have made up their mind as to what they want from a Russian writer, and Leskov does not fit in to this idea. But those who really want to know more about Russia must sooner or later recognize that Russia is not all contained in Dostoevsky and Chekhov, and that if you want to know a thing, you must first be free of prejudice and on your guard against hasty generalizations. Then they will perhaps come nearer to Leskov, who is generally recognized by Russians as the most Russian of Russian writers and the one who had the deepest and widest knowledge of the Russian people as it actually is.”
D. S. Mirsky
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reineke
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Re: Team Me: Foxing around

Postby reineke » Sat Dec 16, 2017 6:00 am

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Re: Team Me: Foxing around

Postby reineke » Sat Dec 16, 2017 6:18 am

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