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So on the Tolstoy vs. Dostoevsky question - both are fine, but I am *strongly* on the side of Tolstoy. Which is strongly contrary to what most of you predicted!
Some reasons https://twitter.com/Scholars_Stage/status/1334753575076057092
Some reasons https://twitter.com/Scholars_Stage/status/1334753575076057092
I really like this roundtable where they asked 8 profs of Russian literature to explain the difference between the two and why that particular prof preferred one or the other. I'll post some excerpts below: https://themillions.com/2012/04/tolstoy-or-dostoevsky-8-experts-on-whos-greater.html
Their comments on D's attraction to the extremes of nature"
Tolstoy's attraction to humanity in all of its manifestations:
1. The writers I admire most are those who are able to encompass the whole of the human experience in their vision. D's "taste for the manic edges of experience" lets him explore important themes of human existence by pushing man to the edges and seeing where he goes. That is
necessary! But it is not everything, not by a long shot. And it is my frustration with him as an author--if you are going to write something that long, that big, it needs to be in more than one emotional key.
2. Tolstoy's characters live in the world. D's characters live in their heads. And I just think that is a bad way to think about life, and an even worse way to live it. The problem with many modern writers, and with almost everyone addicted to twitter,
is that they (we?) spend too much time in our heads, not enough time in the world. Tolstoy glories in the world: in the sky, the grass, the animals, the air, the buildings, the outfits, all of it. And like me, he likes people!
Plop Tolstoy down in a Minnesota bar, or on a Beijing street, or in a Cambodian trip, and he will have an honest, full-hearted love for the things he sees--he will grasp the foibles, the vanities, the cruelties, and the weaknessess of the people around him, yes,
and he will not feel bad skewering it all. But he will feel a common humanity with all of them, and an intense interest in all that he would meet.
D, I think, would feel a much more instinctive disgust at these encounters with conniving humankind,
D, I think, would feel a much more instinctive disgust at these encounters with conniving humankind,
and his books are in many ways about how to overcome (and the consequences of not overcoming) that disgust. But that is really just an alien experience for me! I have no patience for the misanthrope
The only human interactions that summon this sort of loathing in me are... here on twitter. But even here I think is more a problem of medium than the people themselves, and perhaps naively maintain faith that
if I could but see these people in their normal life sans this terrible website I could find the sympathetic in them too.
But that is the bigger issue, I think: T thinks the bigger things of life are "out there," in the world of physical, concrete things, in the social web, in personal relationships. D thinks they are "in here," in thoughts, in the soul.
I am 100% with T on this point--some of my favorite works of world literature, like the Icelandic sagas, do not have any overt depiction of the "in here" at all--and think D points lesser minds (and writers) than himself in a bad direction:
Towards a selfish obsession with subjective experience, an unhealthy fascination with evil and the extreme, and discounting the beauty and glory of existence, both at its crescendo and in the nor smaller struggles and mercies of daily life.
To this you might add a certain bias towards anthropological and historical accounts of human existence, which is obviously my style, and Tolstoy's as well.
Also this thread is on the $ https://twitter.com/_mengde_/status/1335063767663714310
Finally, if you want an author that is able to navigate both D's psychological insight and awareness of human pathologist at their worst... & marry it to the grand Tolstoian sweep of human life w/true sympathy.... then you should be reading Cao Xueqin's Dream of the Red Chamber!
