I love Dostoevsky too much and am quite happy in my bias and echo chamber of that—he was one of the writers that I read in my early days, and to date, I feel that he changed a lot in me or resonated so much that I can't explain.
I believe Nietzche said this about him "the only psychologist from whom I had something to learn."
And one of my favorite quotes by him:
For, after all, you do grow up, you do outgrow your ideals, which turn to dust and ashes, which are shattered into fragments; and if you have no other life, you just have to build one up out of these fragments. And all the time your soul is craving and longing for something else. And in vain does the dreamer rummage about in his old dreams, raking them over as though they were a heap of cinders, looking in these cinders for some spark, however tiny, to fan it into a flame so as to warm his chilled blood by it and revive in it all that he held so dear before, all that touched his heart, that made his blood course through his veins, that drew tears from his eyes, and that so splendidly deceived him!”
My favorite course I took in college was a Russian Literature elective my first semester. I fell in love with Dostoevsky when we read Crime and Punishment and I ended up writing my 25 page term paper on him and his role in the proto-existentialist vs nihilism movement in Russia in the 1860s. There will always be a part of me that wishes I had taken my career in that direction instead of computers :)
Reminds me of an interview with Fields Medalist Laurent Lafforgue, where he mentioned that at one point, he had only been interested in literature, particularly Dostoevsky, and couldn't understand how anyone could bother with mathematics, but that he later realized that mathematics could also convey profound truths.
If you’re a young man in your twenties looking for structure and morality in a setting of first-world postmodernity, TBK is an incredible opiate. Much better than alcohol or Call of Duty.
That said, I’m skeptical its wisdom will help us carve out a new future that’s better for everyone. I think Cloud Strife’s journey in the original release of Final Fantasy VII is better-suited to that.
I love The Brothers Karamazov so much. I don't think there has ever been a story told that made a better case for being a good person.
I think the most important lesson we have to learn in our modern world is that there aren't good or bad sides.
Most stories told follow the path of the hero's journey, in which the hero obtains some great power and learns to use it for good, generally by destroying some great villain.
In reality, there are no villains and there are no heros. There are only good and bad actions. And every person does bad actions everyday, out of ignorance, out of convenience, out of ego, out if ideological allegiance. There is also very little in the way of greatness in every day life.
And there is no other cure than to do what Alyosha does. Try to do good. Alyosha does not judge anyone, he has genuine compassion even for the worst of men. Alyosha has no great skill, is not endowed with any great intelligence and is sometimes socially awkward. He sometimes gets his affairs out of order and makes mistakes. He is not an island: he relies on the moral support of his mentor (the famous monk) for a good part of the book, and is devastated when he dies. And he never does anything which could not have been done by anyone else.
But he, at every point, chooses to do the good, as well as he can. At one point, during a time when one of his brothers was wanted for murder and his whole family drama is in full force, while going around town trying to do things to help, he sees a kid which is being bullied by other kids which are throwing stones at him. Alyosha shoos away the other kids, and inquires into this lone kid's drama. He then spends the rest of the day helping the kid, with his problems, instead of rushing to fix his own. It never even occurs to him not to act in this way.
And it not only helps the community for him to act in this way. But it also, as it were, helps his own "soul". While other characters go insane, or have manic episodes, Alyosha can bear the tragedies because of his own conduct.
I dont know, I came away basically agreeing with Ivan's ideology. Was a pretty depressing experience personally just to further confirm my ideas of society fracturing without religion without really offering a realistic replacement.
It appals me how much praise dostoyevsky and such still get, without any attention to a lot of the context around it.
The prime reason his (and of most other russian writers) legacy and importance to world culture is the fact that they were backed by an empire. Try and think, for once, why you tend to know about Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, but (usually) don't know about literally everyone else from east europe?
The answer is simple. While russian culture was supported, promoted, encouraged. The culture of their colonies was suppressed, imprisoned, executed.
It's about time Dostoevsky and Gorky and so many other russian writers get the same treatment Kipling did.
Dostoevsky was a horrible person, a staunch chauvinist who denied the basic existence of other nations and cultures on then russian territory, stating they're just an obstacle on russia's imperial path.
And not only were many of them plain bad during their life, their art was (and is) weaponized, to manufacture an image of russia that lifts it from the evil things they did (and are doing) into being something interesting, something positive. To erase cultures of those russia enslaved from the map of the world.
It's "Crime and punishment" scaled up -- fuck the victim, they're not interesting. Just look at the murderer though -- fuck the fact he axed a granny, look how deep his soul is!
Joseph Brodsky, who is so complimented in the article, also wrote one of the most filthy and nauseating poems i ever read (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Independence_of_Ukraine). Before the author continues with their adorement of both Brodsky and Dostoevsky, i highly recommend they read that one. And Dostoevsky's statements regarding Poles, Ukrainians and Serbs.
Such ignorance to the reality of who these people were is disgusting.
Isn't Dostoevsky's idea in Crime and Punishment that there are humans who feel like they are 'special' (and thus can become monsters when they act on that belief) as opposed to the idea that a 'special' class of humans exists?
It's been a long time since I read it, but my takeaway was that he was depicting the true nature of humanity. Specifically, that people are neither fundamentally good or evil, but are fallible beings that react to their circumstances.
> "[...] Reading him simply makes one realize that stream of consciousness springs not from consciousness but from a word which alters or redirects one’s consciousness."
This has a slight ring of Derrida and/but I find it a very interesting point. The "stream of consciousness" really does seem like a stream of the words themselves, each one in reflection of the previous and anticipation of the next. The flowing is not just in the writer's mind but the reader's as well.
As a Russian I can tell you: don't go there. You won't understand Dostoevsky fully without growing up in the Russian culture, full of depression, fatalism and похуизм (I don't give a damn attitude). Reading classic Russian literature is the right way to depression and craziness. Just don't do that.
I've read my fair share of Russian literature, and I never felt depressed from it. If anything works like the Notes from the Underground or the Overcoat reassured me of my sanity in the face of an irrational society and have often confirmed long held yet elusive suspicions I had on how people actually think or behave.
Sounds good but doesn't add up. I think his writing's legacy is due more to the time it was published, it's translations into other languages and boosters like Freud who thought BK what the greatest novel ever written. That opinion gets echoed a lot, but thinking about literature in a ordinal sense is a little absurd. For me, the ruble ammouts in BK were almost meaningless. I just assumed 3,000 or 5,000 rubles was a shit ton of money, but def less than a million dollars today.
I got the privilege to read some of his original Arabic works (being Arabic speaker). Although he used to write directly in English, his works in Arabic are definitely immortal.
I perceive this thread in the same way as the praise of Hanns Johst.
With the perceived potential of separating work from its author being inversely proportional to the amount of attention devoted to both (Raskolnikov attitude towards Poles as something on the surface, though it's infiltrated with Russian chauvinism at a much deeper level).
With overlooking the fact that it is being used as a weapon (together with the unified Russian language created by Pushkin) for erasure of entire cultures. I'd stress this out: this is not a weapon in a museum. We are talking active phase. And the more obscure the relations above are, the higher the penetration rate.
“Non-Russian readers do not realize two things: that not all Russians love Dostoevsky as much as Americans do, and that most of those Russians who do, venerate him as a mystic and not as an artist. He was a prophet, a claptrap journalist and a slapdash comedian. I admit that some of his scenes, some of his tremendous farcical rows are extraordinarily amusing. But his sensitive murderers and soulful prostitutes are not to be endured for one moment—by this reader anyway.” V. Nabokov, [0]
I really recommend Nabokov's full lecture on Dostoyevsky [1], plus obvs all the of the lectures in the series are brilliant.
Nabokov is the proof that being a genius writer doesn't always imply having good taste. For example, see his opinion on Henry James, Faulkner or Camus.
The man wrote what he wanted to read and hated everything else.
I think that in general some artists are this way and that makes what they produce different from anyone else. Jonathan Blow for example is snobby and hates a lot of stuff, but his intense and specific ideas about the way games should be has led to some very interesting and thoughtful work
I read Crime and Punishment as a teenager and I enjoyed it quite a bit. Raskolnikov’s misadventures are not ‘fun’ but as a psychological exploration of guilt (or lack thereof), it was very interesting.
I like Notes from the Underground and his other short stories (like the Double) even more.
Not by a long shot. War and peace is the classic long read, but outside of Russian literature you also get authors like Victor Hugo and Les Miserables.
Also, depending on your tastes, Charlotte Bronte and other similar period writers were equally bland or significant.
A dissing with two of my favourite authors as protagonists, thank you!
A small extract of “Transparent Things" by Nabokov that I love so much: how a Caran d’Ache pencil is built. An incredible travel through space and time!
This criticism is all the more poignant given that it comes from Nabokov. He is one of the few authors for whose works the Russian and English versions are almost equivalent; he was bilingual and did the translation himself.
> But it’s worth recognizing that you like a translation of D
Probably he just lucked out, and all his translators are geniuses. Tho this would be a more remarkable skill, than just being a literary genius..
BTW I usually like derivative works, in every arts.
If a translator makes changes, and she is only right 60% of the time, that's still a net positive. I encourage every translator to make changes, if they think they can make the text better.
Dostoevsky is funny, but his humour is very subtle and can be easily lost in translation. And being funny and dark are not mutually exclusive things, there is a whole genre of tragicomedies, after all
All the “Amazon classics” have audible included which can make it go quickly. The dinner table conversation with a host which had consumption was quite amusing. Agree on darkness.
Something wrong with the way Dostoyevsky wrote them, according to someone who died in 1977.
I had to look up what "soulful" even means because I see it used so infrequently: "expressing or appearing to express deep and often sorrowful feeling" — while I cannot guess what would appeal to someone who would hire a sex worker as that isn't my thing in the first place, nor can I guess to the lived lives of those who so work, what I can say is that "observing someone being openly sad" doesn't pattern match my ideal for a fun time either when reading or when getting off, even though that is an entirely sympathetic and believable personality trait for a character who is a sex worker.
Especially believable in the case of characters that Dostoyevsky, who died in 1881, would have written about — not only because of the stereotype that Russia is even more grim than Country/Blues paints the USA, but also because while things like chloroform for childbirth pain relief had been used by Queen Victoria this was only in 1853 for the first use on the 8th child, but still advised against it for the 9th child in 1857*; or that likewise "it's a good idea to wash your hands between autopsies and assisting midwifes in childbirth" was only even noticed (and not immediately well received) in 1847.
* including by religious figures even though she was the head of the church
I don't think that is at all obvious from OP's comment. Reading "But his sensitive murderers and soulful prostitutes are not to be endured for one moment" the straightforward interpretation is that the writer doesn't like when a prostitute is represented as soulful.
If the problem is not the soulful prostitutes per se, but something more specific that makes it cliche, I think the quoted phrase could have expressed that better.
One cannot write without tropes, and not only because the attempt itself is such a trope.
That doesn't mean one cannot find Flanderization to be annoying, not even a decade (at least) before the character after which that TV Tropes entry was named, was created.
His works will live on regardless of the culture or the time it was written. As long as there is Poverty, Guilt consciousness, Morality his works would be relevent.
I did not bow down to you, I bowed down to all the suffering of humanity.
Well one example would be how the characters are all extremely overdramatic and prone to hysterical outbursts at the slightest provocation, or how they enter a fever if they get into an argument, etc.
This is very obvious after reading something like George Eliot's Middlemarch, who has a very realistic depiction of the characters rather than Dostoevsky's overly dramatic approach. The latter, imo, just makes the characters impossible to empathise with, because they act in ways that no common human ever acts.
This is common in 19th century writing, but in the 20th century it seemed to improve. One of the reason George Eliot is so praised is because she eschewed that convention far earlier than authors like Dostoevsky.
> a writer's financial situation does not make art immortal.
That was not the point of the article. The point was that the narrowness of circumstance - living between riches and poverty and what type of person can handle that (not to mention the unique problems that might come up with that) - requires someone that can balance that sort of situation.
Like most literary analysis, GP's remarks ("narrowness of circumstance")
are bullshit. The title "What Made His Work Immortal" was completely
off-topic.
Dostoyevsky was truly great and could see the true and important things about the world, while Nabokov's contribution to literature will not be remembered past this century. One foresaw what the death of absolute good would do to the world—the casual mass murders of millions in places such as Germany, Cambodia, Stalinist Russia. The other is famous for Lolita.
“Don’t be afraid of anything, ever. And do not grieve. As long as your repentance does not weaken, God will forgive everything. There is not—there cannot be—a sin on earth that God will not forgive the truly repentant. Why, a man cannot commit a sin so great as to exhaust the infinite love of God. How could there be a sin that would surpass the love of God?
Think only of repentance, all the time, and drive away all fear. Have faith that God loves you more than you can ever imagine. He loves you, sinful as you are and, indeed, because of your sin. It was said long ago that there is more joy in heaven over one repentant sinner than over ten righteous men. Go now, and fear nothing. Do not be offended if people treat you badly. Do not hold it against them. And forgive your departed husband all the harm he did you. Become truly reconciled with him. For if you repent, you love, and if you love, you are with God. Love redeems and saves everything.
If I, a sinner like yourself, am moved and feel compassion for you, how infinitely much more will God! Love is such an infinite treasure it can buy the whole world and can redeem not only your sins, but the sins of all people. So go and fear no more.”
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov (pp. 64-65). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
There was no shortage of casual mass murder before the 20th century, not infrequently perpetrated by religious orders. The Mongol invasions in the 13th century, An Lushan rebellion in China in 750, Albigensian Crusade in the 12th century... it´s a long list I´m afraid - we are not a tame species.
It's a good quote for orthodox christians, I'm not sure it would make anyone else want to read dostoevsky though. I'm a dostoevsky liker and orthodox christian myself so this isn't an issue for me but in this venue I feel like you could have made a better choice for representing him.
It's interesting what people take from this passage. I was primed by alangau's statement that Dostoevsky predicted the death of absolute good, and the mass slaughter of millions, when I read
> There is not—there cannot be—a sin on earth that God will not forgive the truly repentant.
To me, this sends a horrifying message. A self-righteous individual can kill millions, wake up to the terrible reality of their act, repent, and be bathed in the joy of a loving god's forgiveness. They need suffer only a moment's guilt, before proceeding fearlessly back into the world.
And yet, according to alangau's sibling comment, the passage was deeply moving to him. Perhaps my horrified response is a deep motion of sorts, but that isn't a typical usage of the phrase "deeply moved."
That is an interesting view of it. I mentioned this elsewhere but I happen to share a religion with dostoevsky so this idea is familiar to me and no longer jarring. It does violate a certain idea of fairness or consequence that most people subscribe to, and that contradiction is all over the gospels so it really is one of the original ideas of christianity.
And ultimately this view of repentance is kind of unhelpful in a practical way when dealing with incredibly damaging behavior. We can't really judge the sincerity of someone's repentance, ultimately it is between them and god. We can restrain them from being in a situation where they could commit that act again though, just in case.
Something I think about often is an event that occurred in my home town when I was a young adult. A child, 12 or 13, old enough to know better, was playing with the stove and set the house on fire. One of their siblings died in the fire.
How do you react to that as a parent? You love the child, have to go on raising them. No punishment even makes sense, the idea of taking away the nintendo or whatever is simply grotesque, and what could be accomplished by anything proportional to the consequence? The only thing left is forgiveness. I think this is how it is with god and your hypothetical monster.
While I do understand your point, there's a difference between being irresponsible and being willfully murderous. Personally, having grown up among orthodox christians, I've seen too many cases of self-righteous people lapsing and committing bad things and then finding comfort in their religiousness. "Be afraid of believers, they have gods that forgive their sins" - that kind of thing.
> They need suffer only a moment's guilt, before proceeding fearlessly back into the world.
Well, maybe not. Dostoevsky was Orthodox, so I don't know how he would think about this...
From a Catholic perspective sin has both temporal and eternal consequences. God can forgive a truly repentant person any sin, ordinarily through the ministry of the Church by the power and authority of Christ, establishing or returning a person to the life of divine grace in their soul, but the temporal consequences of their sin/s may remain to be repaired.
By analogy, suppose my neighbor became unreasonably angry with me, becoming so incensed that he threw a rock at one of my windows causing it to shatter. Then, after a day of cooling off, he apologized and asked forgiveness. Now suppose I granted him forgiveness, moved by his sincerity and a mutual desire to repair the relationship. The shattered window remains — the glass needs to be cleaned up, and a new window must be purchased and installed. Maybe my neighbor has the resources and skill to do the repair himself; or maybe he can pay directly or reimburse me for contract labor; or maybe he can't afford the repair but promises to pay me back; or maybe one of his family members pays me instead. One way or another, the window will be repaired and my neighbor bears responsibility for it.
So sin, generally, is like this, from the Catholic POV. If the forgiven sinner is not able to make repair before their life ends, then they will suffer in purgatory after death before enjoying the beatific vision. The purification will be more severe depending on the number and gravity of sins. Some mystics claim to have been informed about souls that will suffer in purgatory flames hotter than those of damnation until the last moment before the general judgment, so terrible were their sins and unrepaired consequences of the same.
I think it's important you choose what affects you most. I was deeply moved reading this when I was atheist, so who am I to say what will and will not move others?
I'm not sure, I think the strength of his writing isn't well captured in quotes. But it seems like this one resonates with more people than I expected so I concede I was wrong about this.
The quote is truly the quintessence of Dostoevsky's works. A classic orthodox christian hodgepodge base, served with heaviest spicing of obligatory suffering of all kinds - both physical and mental, all perversely portrayed as a virtue.
It's kinda like alcohol, and if we go with this comparison - Dostoevsky promotes drowning in it as a salvation. Put bluntly, that shit ruins lives, not mends them. But Dostoevsky does not just write about it, he carefully designs the whole narrative to make it look like the only logical choice and wholeheartedly promotes it. And that's why I just can't stand his works, despite all their psychological, artistic and linguistic/literary merits. This insane cultural gap is simply too big to cross for me.
It all makes sense in historical and cultural context, of course, but that's exactly what puts an expiration date on Dostoevsky's works. They're a product or a very specific culture, and thus will no longer be relevant when their parent culture will finally wither away (and, personally, I sincerely hope it naturally does, for I see it as way more harmful than positive).
There are literature works that would remain relevant for a long while, but Dostoevsky is not one of those.
I read the quote in Alyosha's voice, I don't remember if it's really him. I'm by no means a Dostoyevsky expert and I read the book, halfheartedly, a long time ago. So please do your own thinking when I say that Ivan, not Alyosha, is closest to the author's heart.. he wrote about the three brothers because he was trying to resolve the conflicts between (at least) 3 archetypes of the Russian soul! Too humble he was, to try to generalize that to the world, but the downside is, later readers can't help but put in their own interpretations, or selectively quote stuff that aligns with their lonely hearts..
I believe those words are said by the elder Zosima in one of the early chapters when he has several visitors. Not Alyosha - although it's been several years since I've reread the book.
In my experience, people often conflate forgiveness, reconciliation, and redemption. They are distinct things. People also often do not understand the role repentance plays (evangelical Christians are _especially_ prone to miss it entirely).
We can forgive someone for horrific things they've done, even when they are utterly unrepentant. Forgiving them is changing our attitude about the harms the offender did from anger and hatred to acceptance and peace. This does not mean saying "what they did was okay," but rather accepting that they chose to do something horrible, learning to make peace with their hurtful choices, and focusing on healing the damage to ourselves and others rather than seeking to injure the injurer.
Reconciliation is mending a damaged relationship between two (or more) people, as much as it can be. Unlike forgiveness, true reconciliation requires that all parties make an effort - the injured party must put in the work of forgiving the offender, and the offender must do the work of repenting.
"Repent" now means "make a show of acting sorry" in evangelical Christian circles, but genuine repentance is very different. It is recognizing the harmful choices you have made and truly regretting them, and as a natural outgrowth of that regret, choosing to do what you can to heal the damage you have done. It means accepting the consequences of your choices; a repentant offender expects to be distrusted and treated differently for their crimes, and does not resent it, realizing the shattered relationships (emotional, familial, civil, and otherwise) are part of what they chose. Without repentance, others may forgive an offender, but reconciliation is not possible - if the injured continue a relationship with the aggressor, it is necessarily a stilted, broken, fragmented one.
Redemption is rarer and harder to achieve than either forgiveness or reconciliation. It is when reconciliation succeeds and goes beyond success, giving birth to something fuller and more beautiful than what was first broken. Adapting the words of my lost-yet-beloved faith, "He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and there will be no more death or sorrow or crying or pain. Behold, He is making all things new."
This is not, in my experience, how conservative Protestant evangelicals use these words. However, in the decades I practiced Christianity, I slowly found these ideas in the Bible, despite the ludicrously-wrong exegesis practiced in US churches, by reading the texts many, many times. I find a great deal of truth and wisdom in them, considered this way. I hope perhaps my explanation can help you understand why so many people resonate with the message recorded in the Gospels, and the one that Dostoevsky so loved.
If you're going to write a book, for other people to read, you ultimately want people to understand and recognize your ideas/the point of your work. It has nothing to do with morality.
I'm talking of the poster, judging the Lolita author for being famous for Lolita. Thinking that judgement is through fame is a morally depraved, evil outlook
Oh I see. I don't disagree with you point then, but the context here is 'immortal works' and that's definitely strongly correlated with the popularity of the work. 'Immortal work' ~= 'still popular long in the future'
If I write a cautionary tale about the seductive evils of fascism,
with an unreliable narrator who's a cog in the evil machine, and obviously deluded about it,
and deeply unpleasant detailed descriptions of the awful cruelty perpetuated by the nazi regime,
and some fascists really like my book, because detailed descriptions of awful nazi cruelty are their jam, and they really identify with my evil, unreliable, deluded narrator
and a lot of people haven't read my book, but they know the kind of person who like my book - fascists
should I be judged by the popular reception of my work?
With this chain of events, at minimum you should be judged as someone who failed and accidentally created a fascist book.
But also, it is a bit suspect chain of events. Because it is quite unlikely that your books describe Jews in much sympathetic human way. Fascists would not like that. You wrote a book about suffering fascist and per your book ideology, fascism is bad when the fascists themselves suffer. That is just critique of concrete fascist regime from the point of view of the fascist.
@kristjankaim is correct - this sure isn't Nabokov. Example: "Immortality of Dostoevsky’s art is unquestionable; his art will likely continue to live on."
I fail to see the connection between Dostoevsky and air defence. Following the same logic, I should stop listening to Beethoven (because of nazis), or drive a Honda because of unit 731. Say whatever you want, but people will listen to Tchaikovsky and read Tolstoy hundreds of years from now.
You know we in Ukraine use to observe how the Government tries to cancel everything Russian. This logic really considers the Jews weren't choose to listen any German compositor at least by the time of end of the war. Even some famous Ukrainian artists such as Malevitch are being cancelling here right now instead of merging all of his outcomes as cornerstone of our Ukrainian culture what else do you expect to hear about Russian ancient writer from Ukrainian now? Air strikes from Russian side have become really ubuquitous this winter season who knows weren't some of it launched by any of Dostoevsky's offsprings.
Not everyone evaluates books from the point of view of politics. Kim was a great novel that basically earned Kipling the Nobel prize at a crazy young age, and it reads like a love letter to India (until the end, when it becomes a dumb spy novel). Was Kipling jingoistic? Sometimes extremely so. That doesn't mean he didn't write anything worth reading.
Luckily, it seems like the common folk have more sense than this. Recall (pun totally intended) the reaction of SF residents to funding renaming of schools to erase the specter of colonialism instead of funding math programs.
> Luckily, it seems like the common folk have more sense than this.
Not sure about that, honestly. As reading of longform text has declined with the rise of the smartphone and other distractions, and the literary-fiction publishing market is converging internationally, a significant amount of people who still read fiction represent demographics that like to view art through a contemporary political lens, often specifically North American-centric notions of race, gender, and power even if the reader hails from somewhere else.
> He's most famous book is basically "don't read western philosophy cause you'll start murdering people
huh? Isn't anticolonialism usually not a big fan of western philosophy? I mean it seems to me quite a reasonable conclusion of some anticolonialist theories that Western Philosophy supports murder if not actually forcing it.
Several errors in what you replied to, but that wasn't among them.
The 1807 Act specifically was about the slave trade not slavery, and it wasn't the first even in the UK (there's several options for the UK including 1772, 1799, 1843, 1883, 1953, 1998, 2010, or that it's still in some sense ongoing).
USA beat the UK for importing slaves by a few weeks. "British North America" (AKA "Canada before it became its own country") passed in 1793 the "Act Against Slavery".
> USA beat the UK for importing slaves by a few weeks
Do not pretend for a moment that USA was leading on anything here.
1. UK had already abolished importation of slaves. No-one could be a slave in the UK since 1778 (Scotland, Eng\Wales was earlier). If you "imported" a slave to the UK, they would become free.
2. The ~1807 US/UK laws were far from equivalent - the UK act was abolishing the trade completely. The US was only ending importation. Domestic / inter-state trade was unaffected.
3. The US law came into effect 6 months after the UK one.
The day Jefferson passed that 1807 act, his 100s of slaves got a little more valuable. Who needs imports when you can abuse 16 year old enslaved girls? As he signed this act, he was, yet again, impregnating Sally Hemings so that in 1808, his 7th bastard child born was into slavery. The birth was recorded in the Farm Book alongside other livestock.
You can add the Scottish example to the other list of years I'd already given, there was no sense of the US genuinely "leading" on that when I'd already said 1772 and 1799 — the point was simply that the 1807 act was also not much of a sign of genuine leadership.
The UK government was basically forced to do what it did thanks to campaigns against slavery, not because the politicians themselves were fully on board with it; and even more recently, despite how "we ended slavery"
has become as much part of the national identity as "The" Magna Carta, the conversation about the Edward Colston statue in Bristol wasn't as one-sided as the conversation about the Jimmy Saville statue:
It was a long campaign but the moral argument had won broad support in the population and parliament. It was literally the UK government trying to get this passed. Prime Minister William Pitt was an abolitionist as was his successor William Grenville that passed this bill. This specific bill was passed by a near unanimous majority.
Earlier bills under Pitt had passed the commons but fallen in the more conservative Lords claiming to protect "the national interest". I believe the strategies that helped tip the balance was salami-slicing to just abolish trade rather then total abolition while arguing that continued trade would lead to slave rebellions as had been seen in French colonies thus it needed to be stopped not just out of moral necessity but national interest too.
You seem intent on corrupting history to do what? Attack some straw-man concoction of British national identity? Stop it.
> I believe the strategies that helped tip the balance was salami-slicing to just abolish trade rather then total abolition while arguing that continued trade would lead to slave rebellions as had been seen in French colonies thus it needed to be stopped not just out of moral necessity but national interest too.
Y'see, I count that as "the bare minimum done because they were forced to not because they wanted to".
Knowing that if you don't, it's going to be expensive is part of "being forced to". Getting around to it only when there's overwhelming pressure in one direction rather than 50%+1 is "dragging your feet".
The margin of what passed is on the one hand, the fact that it was only peaceameal — as demonstrated by literally all the other years on that list — is the other side of that coin.
To a degree I see a point to this, but it's more of "I see why you feel this way, but I don't agree".
Still, it is important to mention how imperialistic Russians were - you know Pushkin, for example, right? If a public figure espoused publicly such views on any nationality as he on Poles, they'd be cancelled right away.
Pushkin was extremist and nationalist, he was also seen as such. That is why he was propped up by the regime later on.
There is a reason why Ukrainians demolished specifically his monuments and why Russians are building them. It has zero to do with quality of prose and a lot to do with ... his extremism.
Piłsudski said in early 20th century that "in Russia even anarchists are imperialists" and he was basically right. And remains so to this day.
Russia managed to somehow do imperialism/colonialism and get away with it without reevaluating their past. Probably because they colonized white people.
Better to say that they colonized non-African or non-American indigenous people who could not be conveniently attached to vehement Trans-Atlantic chattel slavery or Catholic-conquistador narratives, because the Khanty, Buryats, Yakut, etc. have an appearance that is hardly what most people using race-based terminology would associate with “white people”.
I think this is an abuse of terminology. Colonial empires generally maintained a clear separation between the colonizers and the colonized. Russia usually tried to turn the conquered peoples into Russians. It's a different kind of oppression, and one which almost every nation state is guilty of.
This is a long discussion, if you want to have it I have LOTS of thoughts about it.
But short answer is - Russians absolutely have separation between colonizers and colonized. To this day.
In modern Russia the usual word to describe immigrants and non-ethnic Russians is "chorni" which basically means "blacks" and is used as a slur. There's discrimination, there's police raids on people hiring them in European part of Russia. They are overwhelmingly sent to die in Ukraine instead of "proper" Russians from the European part of the country.
> The BBC found that six of the 10 Russian regions with the highest mortality rates in Ukraine are located in Siberia and the far east. And that men from Buryatia, a Russian republic whose residents are descended from Mongols, are 75 times more likely to die than men from Moscow.
Even Ukrainians before the current war weren't treated as "proper" Russians - they were "smallrussians" - the country bumpkin stupid childish version of a "proper" Russian that have to be ruled by the Mother Rossiya or they will have a failed state forever. Basically the Russian version of "the burden of the white man".
Also let's not forget Stalin took food from the most fertile part of USSR - Ukraine - and distributed it to the rest of USSR/exported it, leaving millions of Ukrainians to die of starvation in Hlodomor. And then sent "proper" ethnic Russian colonists to replace the dead Ukrainians.
Russia did the same with Crimean Tartars, just using mass murder and expulsion instead of famine.
There were also other ethnic cleansing done by NKVD. They took adress/phone books, looked at the surnames, and arrested/murdered people based on the surname endings.
Russia absolutely was and still is a colonial empire.
You are making the mistake of assuming that ethnicities are disjoint categories that remain immutable over generations.
Russification has been going on for 1000+ years. Often organically, and often by forced policies. People abandon their languages and cultures and adopt Russian language, culture, and ultimately identity, until one day their descendants are ethnic Russians. Some maintain the ethnic identities of their ancestors, but many – often most – don't.
Plenty of other empires have attempted to assimilate the colonized population to some degree. It's not even an unusual aspect of colonization; historically it's been a ubiquitious aspect, in fact.
I'm Pole so I am biased, but... What was Soviet Union but another colonial project?
And not to even say of countries they annexed. If Baltic states were not in Europe, everyone would agree that it was plain colonial arrangement.
"We give them coal, and in return they take sugar from us."
Well the problem from my POV is that that exact empire he defended was persecuting millions of people, banning their languages, sending their people to forced labour camps, exterminating native people in Siberia, and keeping about 90% of the whole Russian society in serfdom (which in Russia was basically slavery).
You keep being "open-minded" about that, I prefer modernism and liberalism, thank you.
Yes, that's the worst of modern Western culture, the belief that it is superior to any other and you don't even need to hear someone who doesn't share your modern worldviews. The result of such ideas is a culture that will try to destroy everything else and in the end destroy itself.
Dosteovsky was criticized by his contemporaries for propagandizing the political entanglement of the orthodox church and the russian empire. He was condemned for this by non-russian orthodox christians including at least one greek bishop. So even by the standards of his time there was conflict about the political nature of his work.
There's not one "that perspective" in history from which to evaluate anything. The person you're responding to is using modern nomenclature but the problem they're point at is one that was clear to dostoevsky's contemporaries and was raised during his life.
The other products of the same time did criticized them too. Trying to paint the past people as a monolithic mass where everyone loved your hero, simply because you like his book and do not know much of who he really was in the context, is annoying too. Many famous writers are famous because they were political actors first. It was politics that got them famous in the first place. It was also politics that killed their or their opponents lives and careers too.
Also, the good stuff he produced is as much product of the time as the bad stuff. If you can celebrate someone, you should be able to accept also some less adoring evalution.
yikes, while your points about Dostoevsky’s views are worth discussing, proclaiming what is or isn't appropriate for this forum as though you're its arbiter seems presumptuous. surely we can engage without the obnoxious gatekeeping of the conversation...
Lot's of great people are terrible in some aspect or another. Seeking saints is counterproductive since this is not about celebrating these people's character but their great work.
The whole cancel culture is deeply misguided. It's analogous to expecting wisdom on everything from people who are extremely good at this one thing, but in reverse. It never ends well.
Russia’s ideology is based on the works of such. Look at the quote in the comments above. Dostoevsky approves any sin and logically derives that it will be forgotten. He does not merely condone sin, he rationalizes it, and in doing so, lays bare the grim inevitability of its absolution in the collective psyche.
Living in Kyiv, we were shocked, how a regular person can commit such crimes in a modern day effortlessly, and you can see how - by reading the mind of a russian in the form of a great prose.
Dostoevsky is a window into a sick mind of a crippled nation where death and torture is normalized and the life had no value for at least a millennia.
It is an ideological base of a russian culture, its code, captured by the mastermind who was able to feel it thoroughly.
"It's not a coincidence that one of the last public appearances by Putin before invasion of Ukraine was opening a Dostoyevsky centre in Moscow." [0]
Slavophilia is a concept that is hundreds of years old and is essential in understanding the historical and cultural differences between the West and Russia and of course how they interpreted the Enlightenment. This is on the level of importance of Orthodoxy versus Catholicism. It's fine of course to disagree with or dislike historical figures whose views you find abhorrent. Saying that they should not be discussed comes across as McCarthyism.
Not only English translations :) And the man was a real nazi. Hated Poles, Jews, French, Germans - anyone not Russian. This is where Dugin, Putin and other modern vampires draw inspiration from.
Nabokov's recommendations: http://wmjas.wikidot.com/nabokov-s-recommendations
I love Dostoevsky too much and am quite happy in my bias and echo chamber of that—he was one of the writers that I read in my early days, and to date, I feel that he changed a lot in me or resonated so much that I can't explain.
I believe Nietzche said this about him "the only psychologist from whom I had something to learn."
And one of my favorite quotes by him:
For, after all, you do grow up, you do outgrow your ideals, which turn to dust and ashes, which are shattered into fragments; and if you have no other life, you just have to build one up out of these fragments. And all the time your soul is craving and longing for something else. And in vain does the dreamer rummage about in his old dreams, raking them over as though they were a heap of cinders, looking in these cinders for some spark, however tiny, to fan it into a flame so as to warm his chilled blood by it and revive in it all that he held so dear before, all that touched his heart, that made his blood course through his veins, that drew tears from his eyes, and that so splendidly deceived him!”
Nabokov would have been an incredible online poster. What an incredible list. Thank you for sharing!
Someone should have A list for Gore Vidal, that would be interesting too.
And in song:
https://youtu.be/eKfvXBDSiU4?feature=shared
Great song, thanks. I was also reminded of this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2kWUJkRvVs
to point out what you probably intended, this is appropriately an english version of an early twentieth century russian song.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Those_Were_the_Days_%28song%29
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mMaz70bOd7w
There is a comment there with the lyrics (Cyrillic, yes) (@nickwilde9991)
hahah love it, thank you for sharing!
Oddly, many of his favorites for young people were my favorites when I was young.
So he was a computer enthusiast?
Obviously a Hemingway fan.
Amazing list by Nabokov, and "strong opinions" indeed
This deserves its own post!
This Substack post is a summary of an essay by Joseph Brodsky about Dostoevsky — but the post does not link or name the essay.
The essay is named "The Power of the Elements" and it can be read here on Google Books:
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Less_Than_One/N5Nzm2uih...
The author mentioned the name of the book in the very first paragraph.
Yes, it seems the essay inspired the post and it quotes excerpts from the essay but also has also some nice additional commentary.
The book in which they read the essay but not it seems the essay itself.
My favorite course I took in college was a Russian Literature elective my first semester. I fell in love with Dostoevsky when we read Crime and Punishment and I ended up writing my 25 page term paper on him and his role in the proto-existentialist vs nihilism movement in Russia in the 1860s. There will always be a part of me that wishes I had taken my career in that direction instead of computers :)
Reminds me of an interview with Fields Medalist Laurent Lafforgue, where he mentioned that at one point, he had only been interested in literature, particularly Dostoevsky, and couldn't understand how anyone could bother with mathematics, but that he later realized that mathematics could also convey profound truths.
Please consider an advice: try using some of your spare time on that interest. You never know.
> There will always be a part of me that wishes I had taken my career in that direction instead of computers :)
Well, it's not like there's money in that direction, so the computer work can provide money for the Russian literature/philosophy interest.
If you’re a young man in your twenties looking for structure and morality in a setting of first-world postmodernity, TBK is an incredible opiate. Much better than alcohol or Call of Duty.
That said, I’m skeptical its wisdom will help us carve out a new future that’s better for everyone. I think Cloud Strife’s journey in the original release of Final Fantasy VII is better-suited to that.
I love The Brothers Karamazov so much. I don't think there has ever been a story told that made a better case for being a good person.
I think the most important lesson we have to learn in our modern world is that there aren't good or bad sides.
Most stories told follow the path of the hero's journey, in which the hero obtains some great power and learns to use it for good, generally by destroying some great villain.
In reality, there are no villains and there are no heros. There are only good and bad actions. And every person does bad actions everyday, out of ignorance, out of convenience, out of ego, out if ideological allegiance. There is also very little in the way of greatness in every day life.
And there is no other cure than to do what Alyosha does. Try to do good. Alyosha does not judge anyone, he has genuine compassion even for the worst of men. Alyosha has no great skill, is not endowed with any great intelligence and is sometimes socially awkward. He sometimes gets his affairs out of order and makes mistakes. He is not an island: he relies on the moral support of his mentor (the famous monk) for a good part of the book, and is devastated when he dies. And he never does anything which could not have been done by anyone else.
But he, at every point, chooses to do the good, as well as he can. At one point, during a time when one of his brothers was wanted for murder and his whole family drama is in full force, while going around town trying to do things to help, he sees a kid which is being bullied by other kids which are throwing stones at him. Alyosha shoos away the other kids, and inquires into this lone kid's drama. He then spends the rest of the day helping the kid, with his problems, instead of rushing to fix his own. It never even occurs to him not to act in this way.
And it not only helps the community for him to act in this way. But it also, as it were, helps his own "soul". While other characters go insane, or have manic episodes, Alyosha can bear the tragedies because of his own conduct.
What’s TBK?
Most likely "The Brothers Karamazov".
The Brothers Karamazov
I dont know, I came away basically agreeing with Ivan's ideology. Was a pretty depressing experience personally just to further confirm my ideas of society fracturing without religion without really offering a realistic replacement.
Signed up to write this comment. Hi folks.
It appals me how much praise dostoyevsky and such still get, without any attention to a lot of the context around it.
The prime reason his (and of most other russian writers) legacy and importance to world culture is the fact that they were backed by an empire. Try and think, for once, why you tend to know about Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, but (usually) don't know about literally everyone else from east europe?
The answer is simple. While russian culture was supported, promoted, encouraged. The culture of their colonies was suppressed, imprisoned, executed.
It's about time Dostoevsky and Gorky and so many other russian writers get the same treatment Kipling did.
Dostoevsky was a horrible person, a staunch chauvinist who denied the basic existence of other nations and cultures on then russian territory, stating they're just an obstacle on russia's imperial path.
And not only were many of them plain bad during their life, their art was (and is) weaponized, to manufacture an image of russia that lifts it from the evil things they did (and are doing) into being something interesting, something positive. To erase cultures of those russia enslaved from the map of the world.
It's "Crime and punishment" scaled up -- fuck the victim, they're not interesting. Just look at the murderer though -- fuck the fact he axed a granny, look how deep his soul is!
Joseph Brodsky, who is so complimented in the article, also wrote one of the most filthy and nauseating poems i ever read (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Independence_of_Ukraine). Before the author continues with their adorement of both Brodsky and Dostoevsky, i highly recommend they read that one. And Dostoevsky's statements regarding Poles, Ukrainians and Serbs.
Such ignorance to the reality of who these people were is disgusting.
It's always the martyr-complex guys who love Dostoyevsky.
I feel the same way about Marx
I think his idea in Crime and Punishment of there being a class of 'special' humans is pretty interesting and enduring.
Isn't Dostoevsky's idea in Crime and Punishment that there are humans who feel like they are 'special' (and thus can become monsters when they act on that belief) as opposed to the idea that a 'special' class of humans exists?
I think that is the idea, yes, but it's open to interpretation as all art is. It could be they exist but Rodion wasn't one of them.
It's been a long time since I read it, but my takeaway was that he was depicting the true nature of humanity. Specifically, that people are neither fundamentally good or evil, but are fallible beings that react to their circumstances.
> "[...] Reading him simply makes one realize that stream of consciousness springs not from consciousness but from a word which alters or redirects one’s consciousness."
This has a slight ring of Derrida and/but I find it a very interesting point. The "stream of consciousness" really does seem like a stream of the words themselves, each one in reflection of the previous and anticipation of the next. The flowing is not just in the writer's mind but the reader's as well.
Dostoevsky is one of those authors whose works absolutely require deconstructive double reading. :-)
As a Russian I can tell you: don't go there. You won't understand Dostoevsky fully without growing up in the Russian culture, full of depression, fatalism and похуизм (I don't give a damn attitude). Reading classic Russian literature is the right way to depression and craziness. Just don't do that.
I've read my fair share of Russian literature, and I never felt depressed from it. If anything works like the Notes from the Underground or the Overcoat reassured me of my sanity in the face of an irrational society and have often confirmed long held yet elusive suspicions I had on how people actually think or behave.
Sounds good but doesn't add up. I think his writing's legacy is due more to the time it was published, it's translations into other languages and boosters like Freud who thought BK what the greatest novel ever written. That opinion gets echoed a lot, but thinking about literature in a ordinal sense is a little absurd. For me, the ruble ammouts in BK were almost meaningless. I just assumed 3,000 or 5,000 rubles was a shit ton of money, but def less than a million dollars today.
Personally I believe that Kahlil Gibran's work is also immortal.
I got the privilege to read some of his original Arabic works (being Arabic speaker). Although he used to write directly in English, his works in Arabic are definitely immortal.
Indeed, reading him in Arabic is a different and better world.
Was introduced to Dostoyevsky by my girlfriend in high school. Read Crime and Punishment and was enraptured by it. Happy memories
I perceive this thread in the same way as the praise of Hanns Johst.
With the perceived potential of separating work from its author being inversely proportional to the amount of attention devoted to both (Raskolnikov attitude towards Poles as something on the surface, though it's infiltrated with Russian chauvinism at a much deeper level).
With overlooking the fact that it is being used as a weapon (together with the unified Russian language created by Pushkin) for erasure of entire cultures. I'd stress this out: this is not a weapon in a museum. We are talking active phase. And the more obscure the relations above are, the higher the penetration rate.
Disappointing.
For whoever appreciates Dostoevsky, I recommend reading Lev Shestov.
“Non-Russian readers do not realize two things: that not all Russians love Dostoevsky as much as Americans do, and that most of those Russians who do, venerate him as a mystic and not as an artist. He was a prophet, a claptrap journalist and a slapdash comedian. I admit that some of his scenes, some of his tremendous farcical rows are extraordinarily amusing. But his sensitive murderers and soulful prostitutes are not to be endured for one moment—by this reader anyway.” V. Nabokov, [0]
I really recommend Nabokov's full lecture on Dostoyevsky [1], plus obvs all the of the lectures in the series are brilliant.
[0] https://lithub.com/on-dostoevskys-199th-birthday-heres-nabok...
[1] Lectures on Russian Literature, Vladimir Nabokov, https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/stock/lectures-on-rus...
Nabokov is the proof that being a genius writer doesn't always imply having good taste. For example, see his opinion on Henry James, Faulkner or Camus.
The man wrote what he wanted to read and hated everything else.
I think that in general some artists are this way and that makes what they produce different from anyone else. Jonathan Blow for example is snobby and hates a lot of stuff, but his intense and specific ideas about the way games should be has led to some very interesting and thoughtful work
Dostoyevsky wrote the most boring unpalatable stuff i had the misfortunate to read in school. Nabokov’s assessment was 100% correct.
I read Crime and Punishment as a teenager and I enjoyed it quite a bit. Raskolnikov’s misadventures are not ‘fun’ but as a psychological exploration of guilt (or lack thereof), it was very interesting.
I like Notes from the Underground and his other short stories (like the Double) even more.
Not by a long shot. War and peace is the classic long read, but outside of Russian literature you also get authors like Victor Hugo and Les Miserables.
Also, depending on your tastes, Charlotte Bronte and other similar period writers were equally bland or significant.
Or Proust’s seven volumes.
i disagree. i'm reading the brothers karamazov right now and i find it so entertaining. such rich drama and conflict.
A dissing with two of my favourite authors as protagonists, thank you!
A small extract of “Transparent Things" by Nabokov that I love so much: how a Caran d’Ache pencil is built. An incredible travel through space and time!
https://thenabokovian.org/node/53398
> Non-Russian readers do not realize two things: that not all Russians love Dostoevsky as much as Americans do,
This is probably true. But Russians' opinion shouldn't matter the slightest about him for the rest of us.
Of course. But it’s worth recognizing that you like a translation of D, not his original works.
This criticism is all the more poignant given that it comes from Nabokov. He is one of the few authors for whose works the Russian and English versions are almost equivalent; he was bilingual and did the translation himself.
> But it’s worth recognizing that you like a translation of D
Probably he just lucked out, and all his translators are geniuses. Tho this would be a more remarkable skill, than just being a literary genius..
BTW I usually like derivative works, in every arts.
If a translator makes changes, and she is only right 60% of the time, that's still a net positive. I encourage every translator to make changes, if they think they can make the text better.
Just because someone is not Russian doesn’t mean they can’t read Russian.
> slapdash comedian
> extraordinarily amusing
Nabokov is a genius but not once did i get this vibe ever, much darker, almost hopeless.
Dostoevsky is funny, but his humour is very subtle and can be easily lost in translation. And being funny and dark are not mutually exclusive things, there is a whole genre of tragicomedies, after all
All the “Amazon classics” have audible included which can make it go quickly. The dinner table conversation with a host which had consumption was quite amusing. Agree on darkness.
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Something wrong with the way Dostoyevsky wrote them, according to someone who died in 1977.
I had to look up what "soulful" even means because I see it used so infrequently: "expressing or appearing to express deep and often sorrowful feeling" — while I cannot guess what would appeal to someone who would hire a sex worker as that isn't my thing in the first place, nor can I guess to the lived lives of those who so work, what I can say is that "observing someone being openly sad" doesn't pattern match my ideal for a fun time either when reading or when getting off, even though that is an entirely sympathetic and believable personality trait for a character who is a sex worker.
Especially believable in the case of characters that Dostoyevsky, who died in 1881, would have written about — not only because of the stereotype that Russia is even more grim than Country/Blues paints the USA, but also because while things like chloroform for childbirth pain relief had been used by Queen Victoria this was only in 1853 for the first use on the 8th child, but still advised against it for the 9th child in 1857*; or that likewise "it's a good idea to wash your hands between autopsies and assisting midwifes in childbirth" was only even noticed (and not immediately well received) in 1847.
* including by religious figures even though she was the head of the church
Way to blow up a point into absurd! Nabokov wrote about tiring of specific patterns and cliches obviously
I don't think that is at all obvious from OP's comment. Reading "But his sensitive murderers and soulful prostitutes are not to be endured for one moment" the straightforward interpretation is that the writer doesn't like when a prostitute is represented as soulful.
If the problem is not the soulful prostitutes per se, but something more specific that makes it cliche, I think the quoted phrase could have expressed that better.
pretty cliche itself I'd say. Like a teen who thinks sarcasm is highbrow.
One cannot write without tropes, and not only because the attempt itself is such a trope.
That doesn't mean one cannot find Flanderization to be annoying, not even a decade (at least) before the character after which that TV Tropes entry was named, was created.
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His works will live on regardless of the culture or the time it was written. As long as there is Poverty, Guilt consciousness, Morality his works would be relevent.
I did not bow down to you, I bowed down to all the suffering of humanity.
This cannot be put an expiry at..
I don't find his work to be immortal, in fact I find his writing full of all the worst late 19th century writing cliches, and thus extremely dated.
this tbh.
the only reason crime and punishment isnt a short story (which it was planned to be) is that dostoyevsky lost a lot of money drinking and gambling.
so he stretched it out every way he could conseivably do so, as he was paid by content length
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Well one example would be how the characters are all extremely overdramatic and prone to hysterical outbursts at the slightest provocation, or how they enter a fever if they get into an argument, etc.
This is very obvious after reading something like George Eliot's Middlemarch, who has a very realistic depiction of the characters rather than Dostoevsky's overly dramatic approach. The latter, imo, just makes the characters impossible to empathise with, because they act in ways that no common human ever acts.
This is common in 19th century writing, but in the 20th century it seemed to improve. One of the reason George Eliot is so praised is because she eschewed that convention far earlier than authors like Dostoevsky.
Thank you, fair enough
a writer's financial situation does not make art immortal.
it cites faulkner, too, and he famously wrote "as i lay dying" while he was broke and working at the university electric plant.
> a writer's financial situation does not make art immortal.
That was not the point of the article. The point was that the narrowness of circumstance - living between riches and poverty and what type of person can handle that (not to mention the unique problems that might come up with that) - requires someone that can balance that sort of situation.
how is that not "a writer's financial situation"?
Because that's a manifestation of the struggle, not the struggle itself.
so am i struggling with my art or my financial situation? genuinely trying to understand what you're saying.
Like most literary analysis, GP's remarks ("narrowness of circumstance") are bullshit. The title "What Made His Work Immortal" was completely off-topic.
Dostoyevsky was truly great and could see the true and important things about the world, while Nabokov's contribution to literature will not be remembered past this century. One foresaw what the death of absolute good would do to the world—the casual mass murders of millions in places such as Germany, Cambodia, Stalinist Russia. The other is famous for Lolita.
“Don’t be afraid of anything, ever. And do not grieve. As long as your repentance does not weaken, God will forgive everything. There is not—there cannot be—a sin on earth that God will not forgive the truly repentant. Why, a man cannot commit a sin so great as to exhaust the infinite love of God. How could there be a sin that would surpass the love of God?
Think only of repentance, all the time, and drive away all fear. Have faith that God loves you more than you can ever imagine. He loves you, sinful as you are and, indeed, because of your sin. It was said long ago that there is more joy in heaven over one repentant sinner than over ten righteous men. Go now, and fear nothing. Do not be offended if people treat you badly. Do not hold it against them. And forgive your departed husband all the harm he did you. Become truly reconciled with him. For if you repent, you love, and if you love, you are with God. Love redeems and saves everything.
If I, a sinner like yourself, am moved and feel compassion for you, how infinitely much more will God! Love is such an infinite treasure it can buy the whole world and can redeem not only your sins, but the sins of all people. So go and fear no more.”
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov (pp. 64-65). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
There was no shortage of casual mass murder before the 20th century, not infrequently perpetrated by religious orders. The Mongol invasions in the 13th century, An Lushan rebellion in China in 750, Albigensian Crusade in the 12th century... it´s a long list I´m afraid - we are not a tame species.
It's a good quote for orthodox christians, I'm not sure it would make anyone else want to read dostoevsky though. I'm a dostoevsky liker and orthodox christian myself so this isn't an issue for me but in this venue I feel like you could have made a better choice for representing him.
It's interesting what people take from this passage. I was primed by alangau's statement that Dostoevsky predicted the death of absolute good, and the mass slaughter of millions, when I read
> There is not—there cannot be—a sin on earth that God will not forgive the truly repentant.
To me, this sends a horrifying message. A self-righteous individual can kill millions, wake up to the terrible reality of their act, repent, and be bathed in the joy of a loving god's forgiveness. They need suffer only a moment's guilt, before proceeding fearlessly back into the world.
And yet, according to alangau's sibling comment, the passage was deeply moving to him. Perhaps my horrified response is a deep motion of sorts, but that isn't a typical usage of the phrase "deeply moved."
That is an interesting view of it. I mentioned this elsewhere but I happen to share a religion with dostoevsky so this idea is familiar to me and no longer jarring. It does violate a certain idea of fairness or consequence that most people subscribe to, and that contradiction is all over the gospels so it really is one of the original ideas of christianity.
And ultimately this view of repentance is kind of unhelpful in a practical way when dealing with incredibly damaging behavior. We can't really judge the sincerity of someone's repentance, ultimately it is between them and god. We can restrain them from being in a situation where they could commit that act again though, just in case.
Something I think about often is an event that occurred in my home town when I was a young adult. A child, 12 or 13, old enough to know better, was playing with the stove and set the house on fire. One of their siblings died in the fire.
How do you react to that as a parent? You love the child, have to go on raising them. No punishment even makes sense, the idea of taking away the nintendo or whatever is simply grotesque, and what could be accomplished by anything proportional to the consequence? The only thing left is forgiveness. I think this is how it is with god and your hypothetical monster.
While I do understand your point, there's a difference between being irresponsible and being willfully murderous. Personally, having grown up among orthodox christians, I've seen too many cases of self-righteous people lapsing and committing bad things and then finding comfort in their religiousness. "Be afraid of believers, they have gods that forgive their sins" - that kind of thing.
* They need suffer only a moment's guilt, before proceeding fearlessly back into the world.
It is not a true repentance if one can wash off their guilt in a moment. True repentance is eternal burn.
> They need suffer only a moment's guilt, before proceeding fearlessly back into the world.
Well, maybe not. Dostoevsky was Orthodox, so I don't know how he would think about this...
From a Catholic perspective sin has both temporal and eternal consequences. God can forgive a truly repentant person any sin, ordinarily through the ministry of the Church by the power and authority of Christ, establishing or returning a person to the life of divine grace in their soul, but the temporal consequences of their sin/s may remain to be repaired.
By analogy, suppose my neighbor became unreasonably angry with me, becoming so incensed that he threw a rock at one of my windows causing it to shatter. Then, after a day of cooling off, he apologized and asked forgiveness. Now suppose I granted him forgiveness, moved by his sincerity and a mutual desire to repair the relationship. The shattered window remains — the glass needs to be cleaned up, and a new window must be purchased and installed. Maybe my neighbor has the resources and skill to do the repair himself; or maybe he can pay directly or reimburse me for contract labor; or maybe he can't afford the repair but promises to pay me back; or maybe one of his family members pays me instead. One way or another, the window will be repaired and my neighbor bears responsibility for it.
So sin, generally, is like this, from the Catholic POV. If the forgiven sinner is not able to make repair before their life ends, then they will suffer in purgatory after death before enjoying the beatific vision. The purification will be more severe depending on the number and gravity of sins. Some mystics claim to have been informed about souls that will suffer in purgatory flames hotter than those of damnation until the last moment before the general judgment, so terrible were their sins and unrepaired consequences of the same.
What would you have chosen to represent him?
I think it's important you choose what affects you most. I was deeply moved reading this when I was atheist, so who am I to say what will and will not move others?
I'm not sure, I think the strength of his writing isn't well captured in quotes. But it seems like this one resonates with more people than I expected so I concede I was wrong about this.
Wow. Your quote was the first time I’ve read any Dostoyevsky and it had tears welling in my eyes. I will absolutely find more to read. Thank you.
The quote is truly the quintessence of Dostoevsky's works. A classic orthodox christian hodgepodge base, served with heaviest spicing of obligatory suffering of all kinds - both physical and mental, all perversely portrayed as a virtue.
It's kinda like alcohol, and if we go with this comparison - Dostoevsky promotes drowning in it as a salvation. Put bluntly, that shit ruins lives, not mends them. But Dostoevsky does not just write about it, he carefully designs the whole narrative to make it look like the only logical choice and wholeheartedly promotes it. And that's why I just can't stand his works, despite all their psychological, artistic and linguistic/literary merits. This insane cultural gap is simply too big to cross for me.
It all makes sense in historical and cultural context, of course, but that's exactly what puts an expiration date on Dostoevsky's works. They're a product or a very specific culture, and thus will no longer be relevant when their parent culture will finally wither away (and, personally, I sincerely hope it naturally does, for I see it as way more harmful than positive).
There are literature works that would remain relevant for a long while, but Dostoevsky is not one of those.
Just my own personal opinion.
I read the quote in Alyosha's voice, I don't remember if it's really him. I'm by no means a Dostoyevsky expert and I read the book, halfheartedly, a long time ago. So please do your own thinking when I say that Ivan, not Alyosha, is closest to the author's heart.. he wrote about the three brothers because he was trying to resolve the conflicts between (at least) 3 archetypes of the Russian soul! Too humble he was, to try to generalize that to the world, but the downside is, later readers can't help but put in their own interpretations, or selectively quote stuff that aligns with their lonely hearts..
I believe those words are said by the elder Zosima in one of the early chapters when he has several visitors. Not Alyosha - although it's been several years since I've reread the book.
Ah thanks! I do, now, remember the foul stench of Zosima's body :)
Again, liberal amounts of salt/lime may work, to stop it from turning allegorical.. https://www.quora.com/What-do-you-think-Dostoyevsky-was-expr...
In my experience, people often conflate forgiveness, reconciliation, and redemption. They are distinct things. People also often do not understand the role repentance plays (evangelical Christians are _especially_ prone to miss it entirely).
We can forgive someone for horrific things they've done, even when they are utterly unrepentant. Forgiving them is changing our attitude about the harms the offender did from anger and hatred to acceptance and peace. This does not mean saying "what they did was okay," but rather accepting that they chose to do something horrible, learning to make peace with their hurtful choices, and focusing on healing the damage to ourselves and others rather than seeking to injure the injurer.
Reconciliation is mending a damaged relationship between two (or more) people, as much as it can be. Unlike forgiveness, true reconciliation requires that all parties make an effort - the injured party must put in the work of forgiving the offender, and the offender must do the work of repenting.
"Repent" now means "make a show of acting sorry" in evangelical Christian circles, but genuine repentance is very different. It is recognizing the harmful choices you have made and truly regretting them, and as a natural outgrowth of that regret, choosing to do what you can to heal the damage you have done. It means accepting the consequences of your choices; a repentant offender expects to be distrusted and treated differently for their crimes, and does not resent it, realizing the shattered relationships (emotional, familial, civil, and otherwise) are part of what they chose. Without repentance, others may forgive an offender, but reconciliation is not possible - if the injured continue a relationship with the aggressor, it is necessarily a stilted, broken, fragmented one.
Redemption is rarer and harder to achieve than either forgiveness or reconciliation. It is when reconciliation succeeds and goes beyond success, giving birth to something fuller and more beautiful than what was first broken. Adapting the words of my lost-yet-beloved faith, "He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and there will be no more death or sorrow or crying or pain. Behold, He is making all things new."
This is not, in my experience, how conservative Protestant evangelicals use these words. However, in the decades I practiced Christianity, I slowly found these ideas in the Bible, despite the ludicrously-wrong exegesis practiced in US churches, by reading the texts many, many times. I find a great deal of truth and wisdom in them, considered this way. I hope perhaps my explanation can help you understand why so many people resonate with the message recorded in the Gospels, and the one that Dostoevsky so loved.
suffering can reflect virtue if it's a reaction to guilt, it just shows that people have capacity for moral self reflection
If you think the point of your work is what you end up being famous for, then you have no moral ground to stand on
How should one decide what to read?
Huh?
If you're going to write a book, for other people to read, you ultimately want people to understand and recognize your ideas/the point of your work. It has nothing to do with morality.
I'm talking of the poster, judging the Lolita author for being famous for Lolita. Thinking that judgement is through fame is a morally depraved, evil outlook
Oh I see. I don't disagree with you point then, but the context here is 'immortal works' and that's definitely strongly correlated with the popularity of the work. 'Immortal work' ~= 'still popular long in the future'
How should one judge a writer if not by the body of their work?
You didn't judge the writer by their body of work. You judged the author by which works are famous.
If I write a cautionary tale about the seductive evils of fascism,
with an unreliable narrator who's a cog in the evil machine, and obviously deluded about it,
and deeply unpleasant detailed descriptions of the awful cruelty perpetuated by the nazi regime,
and some fascists really like my book, because detailed descriptions of awful nazi cruelty are their jam, and they really identify with my evil, unreliable, deluded narrator
and a lot of people haven't read my book, but they know the kind of person who like my book - fascists
should I be judged by the popular reception of my work?
Yes if your work encourages there to be more fascists
With this chain of events, at minimum you should be judged as someone who failed and accidentally created a fascist book.
But also, it is a bit suspect chain of events. Because it is quite unlikely that your books describe Jews in much sympathetic human way. Fascists would not like that. You wrote a book about suffering fascist and per your book ideology, fascism is bad when the fascists themselves suffer. That is just critique of concrete fascist regime from the point of view of the fascist.
@kristjankaim is correct - this sure isn't Nabokov. Example: "Immortality of Dostoevsky’s art is unquestionable; his art will likely continue to live on."
Wait... which is it?
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I fail to see the connection between Dostoevsky and air defence. Following the same logic, I should stop listening to Beethoven (because of nazis), or drive a Honda because of unit 731. Say whatever you want, but people will listen to Tchaikovsky and read Tolstoy hundreds of years from now.
You know we in Ukraine use to observe how the Government tries to cancel everything Russian. This logic really considers the Jews weren't choose to listen any German compositor at least by the time of end of the war. Even some famous Ukrainian artists such as Malevitch are being cancelling here right now instead of merging all of his outcomes as cornerstone of our Ukrainian culture what else do you expect to hear about Russian ancient writer from Ukrainian now? Air strikes from Russian side have become really ubuquitous this winter season who knows weren't some of it launched by any of Dostoevsky's offsprings.
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Not everyone evaluates books from the point of view of politics. Kim was a great novel that basically earned Kipling the Nobel prize at a crazy young age, and it reads like a love letter to India (until the end, when it becomes a dumb spy novel). Was Kipling jingoistic? Sometimes extremely so. That doesn't mean he didn't write anything worth reading.
Life is complicated.
In the event that happens, and I'd not be surprised, I'd still expect him to remain just as popular with readers.
Luckily, it seems like the common folk have more sense than this. Recall (pun totally intended) the reaction of SF residents to funding renaming of schools to erase the specter of colonialism instead of funding math programs.
> Luckily, it seems like the common folk have more sense than this.
Not sure about that, honestly. As reading of longform text has declined with the rise of the smartphone and other distractions, and the literary-fiction publishing market is converging internationally, a significant amount of people who still read fiction represent demographics that like to view art through a contemporary political lens, often specifically North American-centric notions of race, gender, and power even if the reader hails from somewhere else.
Which book would this be? His catalog, the great bulk of it anyway, is quite prolific.
Crime and Punishment, obviously.
But he was a russian empire/orthodoxy apologist through and through, except for a brief period early on (which earned him the gulag).
Wow, I got something completely different from that book. It's crazy how two people can read the same thing and have drastically different takeaways.
In fact what he's talking about is a very common analysis of Crime and Punishment in literary criticism.
Two movies, one screen.
Just think: if that's what he took away, he probably thinks killing old ladies is good enlightened capitalism.
I think presenting the philosophy you disagree with as leading to murdering innocent people is bad writing.
Much better to say they are Nazis or rapists or both, and be done with it :)
> He's most famous book is basically "don't read western philosophy cause you'll start murdering people
huh? Isn't anticolonialism usually not a big fan of western philosophy? I mean it seems to me quite a reasonable conclusion of some anticolonialist theories that Western Philosophy supports murder if not actually forcing it.
Western philosophy at the time ended slavery, serfdom and challanged religion and god-given right to rule.
All of which Dostoyevsky tried to defend.
Don't get me wrong - early western democracies weren't perfect or even close. But it was still an enormous improvement over what came before.
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Slavery was banned first in 1807 by British Empire.
... for white males (completed that sentence for you)
Several errors in what you replied to, but that wasn't among them.
The 1807 Act specifically was about the slave trade not slavery, and it wasn't the first even in the UK (there's several options for the UK including 1772, 1799, 1843, 1883, 1953, 1998, 2010, or that it's still in some sense ongoing).
USA beat the UK for importing slaves by a few weeks. "British North America" (AKA "Canada before it became its own country") passed in 1793 the "Act Against Slavery".
But for your claim, the UK 1807 Act named specifically "Africa" so it definitely wasn't about white male slaves: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=hxqhA3st7CcC&pg=PA140#v=...
> USA beat the UK for importing slaves by a few weeks
Do not pretend for a moment that USA was leading on anything here.
1. UK had already abolished importation of slaves. No-one could be a slave in the UK since 1778 (Scotland, Eng\Wales was earlier). If you "imported" a slave to the UK, they would become free.
2. The ~1807 US/UK laws were far from equivalent - the UK act was abolishing the trade completely. The US was only ending importation. Domestic / inter-state trade was unaffected.
3. The US law came into effect 6 months after the UK one.
The day Jefferson passed that 1807 act, his 100s of slaves got a little more valuable. Who needs imports when you can abuse 16 year old enslaved girls? As he signed this act, he was, yet again, impregnating Sally Hemings so that in 1808, his 7th bastard child born was into slavery. The birth was recorded in the Farm Book alongside other livestock.
You can add the Scottish example to the other list of years I'd already given, there was no sense of the US genuinely "leading" on that when I'd already said 1772 and 1799 — the point was simply that the 1807 act was also not much of a sign of genuine leadership.
The UK government was basically forced to do what it did thanks to campaigns against slavery, not because the politicians themselves were fully on board with it; and even more recently, despite how "we ended slavery" has become as much part of the national identity as "The" Magna Carta, the conversation about the Edward Colston statue in Bristol wasn't as one-sided as the conversation about the Jimmy Saville statue:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statue_of_Edward_Colston
> The UK government was basically forced
Forced? You clearly don't know the history.
It was a long campaign but the moral argument had won broad support in the population and parliament. It was literally the UK government trying to get this passed. Prime Minister William Pitt was an abolitionist as was his successor William Grenville that passed this bill. This specific bill was passed by a near unanimous majority.
Earlier bills under Pitt had passed the commons but fallen in the more conservative Lords claiming to protect "the national interest". I believe the strategies that helped tip the balance was salami-slicing to just abolish trade rather then total abolition while arguing that continued trade would lead to slave rebellions as had been seen in French colonies thus it needed to be stopped not just out of moral necessity but national interest too.
You seem intent on corrupting history to do what? Attack some straw-man concoction of British national identity? Stop it.
> I believe the strategies that helped tip the balance was salami-slicing to just abolish trade rather then total abolition while arguing that continued trade would lead to slave rebellions as had been seen in French colonies thus it needed to be stopped not just out of moral necessity but national interest too.
Y'see, I count that as "the bare minimum done because they were forced to not because they wanted to".
Knowing that if you don't, it's going to be expensive is part of "being forced to". Getting around to it only when there's overwhelming pressure in one direction rather than 50%+1 is "dragging your feet".
The margin of what passed is on the one hand, the fact that it was only peaceameal — as demonstrated by literally all the other years on that list — is the other side of that coin.
To a degree I see a point to this, but it's more of "I see why you feel this way, but I don't agree".
Still, it is important to mention how imperialistic Russians were - you know Pushkin, for example, right? If a public figure espoused publicly such views on any nationality as he on Poles, they'd be cancelled right away.
Pushkin was extremist and nationalist, he was also seen as such. That is why he was propped up by the regime later on.
There is a reason why Ukrainians demolished specifically his monuments and why Russians are building them. It has zero to do with quality of prose and a lot to do with ... his extremism.
Piłsudski said in early 20th century that "in Russia even anarchists are imperialists" and he was basically right. And remains so to this day.
Russia managed to somehow do imperialism/colonialism and get away with it without reevaluating their past. Probably because they colonized white people.
> Probably because they colonized white people.
Better to say that they colonized non-African or non-American indigenous people who could not be conveniently attached to vehement Trans-Atlantic chattel slavery or Catholic-conquistador narratives, because the Khanty, Buryats, Yakut, etc. have an appearance that is hardly what most people using race-based terminology would associate with “white people”.
They also colonized Finns, Balts, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Poles, etc.
I think this is an abuse of terminology. Colonial empires generally maintained a clear separation between the colonizers and the colonized. Russia usually tried to turn the conquered peoples into Russians. It's a different kind of oppression, and one which almost every nation state is guilty of.
This is a long discussion, if you want to have it I have LOTS of thoughts about it.
But short answer is - Russians absolutely have separation between colonizers and colonized. To this day.
In modern Russia the usual word to describe immigrants and non-ethnic Russians is "chorni" which basically means "blacks" and is used as a slur. There's discrimination, there's police raids on people hiring them in European part of Russia. They are overwhelmingly sent to die in Ukraine instead of "proper" Russians from the European part of the country.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/russias-ethnic-minorities-...
> The BBC found that six of the 10 Russian regions with the highest mortality rates in Ukraine are located in Siberia and the far east. And that men from Buryatia, a Russian republic whose residents are descended from Mongols, are 75 times more likely to die than men from Moscow.
Even Ukrainians before the current war weren't treated as "proper" Russians - they were "smallrussians" - the country bumpkin stupid childish version of a "proper" Russian that have to be ruled by the Mother Rossiya or they will have a failed state forever. Basically the Russian version of "the burden of the white man".
Also let's not forget Stalin took food from the most fertile part of USSR - Ukraine - and distributed it to the rest of USSR/exported it, leaving millions of Ukrainians to die of starvation in Hlodomor. And then sent "proper" ethnic Russian colonists to replace the dead Ukrainians.
Russia did the same with Crimean Tartars, just using mass murder and expulsion instead of famine.
There were also other ethnic cleansing done by NKVD. They took adress/phone books, looked at the surnames, and arrested/murdered people based on the surname endings.
Russia absolutely was and still is a colonial empire.
You are making the mistake of assuming that ethnicities are disjoint categories that remain immutable over generations.
Russification has been going on for 1000+ years. Often organically, and often by forced policies. People abandon their languages and cultures and adopt Russian language, culture, and ultimately identity, until one day their descendants are ethnic Russians. Some maintain the ethnic identities of their ancestors, but many – often most – don't.
No, it's just a different flavor of colonization.
Plenty of other empires have attempted to assimilate the colonized population to some degree. It's not even an unusual aspect of colonization; historically it's been a ubiquitious aspect, in fact.
I'm Pole so I am biased, but... What was Soviet Union but another colonial project? And not to even say of countries they annexed. If Baltic states were not in Europe, everyone would agree that it was plain colonial arrangement.
"We give them coal, and in return they take sugar from us."
Kipling is one of the greatest authors in the English language. His work is acclaimed, universally, by anyone with taste.
So to compare Dostoevsky to Kipling is high praise!
> unconditional surrender to orthodox christianity and tzar will cure you".
While I don't personally lean that way myself, I'm also not close-minded enough to dismiss the possibility outright.
Well the problem from my POV is that that exact empire he defended was persecuting millions of people, banning their languages, sending their people to forced labour camps, exterminating native people in Siberia, and keeping about 90% of the whole Russian society in serfdom (which in Russia was basically slavery).
You keep being "open-minded" about that, I prefer modernism and liberalism, thank you.
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Yes, that's the worst of modern Western culture, the belief that it is superior to any other and you don't even need to hear someone who doesn't share your modern worldviews. The result of such ideas is a culture that will try to destroy everything else and in the end destroy itself.
Dosteovsky was criticized by his contemporaries for propagandizing the political entanglement of the orthodox church and the russian empire. He was condemned for this by non-russian orthodox christians including at least one greek bishop. So even by the standards of his time there was conflict about the political nature of his work.
There's not one "that perspective" in history from which to evaluate anything. The person you're responding to is using modern nomenclature but the problem they're point at is one that was clear to dostoevsky's contemporaries and was raised during his life.
The other products of the same time did criticized them too. Trying to paint the past people as a monolithic mass where everyone loved your hero, simply because you like his book and do not know much of who he really was in the context, is annoying too. Many famous writers are famous because they were political actors first. It was politics that got them famous in the first place. It was also politics that killed their or their opponents lives and careers too.
Also, the good stuff he produced is as much product of the time as the bad stuff. If you can celebrate someone, you should be able to accept also some less adoring evalution.
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yikes, while your points about Dostoevsky’s views are worth discussing, proclaiming what is or isn't appropriate for this forum as though you're its arbiter seems presumptuous. surely we can engage without the obnoxious gatekeeping of the conversation...
it's particularly ironic considering he's discussing Dostoevskiy behaving just as his discussion itself of Dostoevskiy behaves. So silly.
Lot's of great people are terrible in some aspect or another. Seeking saints is counterproductive since this is not about celebrating these people's character but their great work.
The whole cancel culture is deeply misguided. It's analogous to expecting wisdom on everything from people who are extremely good at this one thing, but in reverse. It never ends well.
Sure. I just wish I can recount these wise words to my friends killed by russians army.
I'm sorry to hear that, its terrible what's happening in Ukraine right now but its not a dead writer who is doing it.
It absolutely is.
Russia’s ideology is based on the works of such. Look at the quote in the comments above. Dostoevsky approves any sin and logically derives that it will be forgotten. He does not merely condone sin, he rationalizes it, and in doing so, lays bare the grim inevitability of its absolution in the collective psyche.
Living in Kyiv, we were shocked, how a regular person can commit such crimes in a modern day effortlessly, and you can see how - by reading the mind of a russian in the form of a great prose.
Dostoevsky is a window into a sick mind of a crippled nation where death and torture is normalized and the life had no value for at least a millennia.
It is an ideological base of a russian culture, its code, captured by the mastermind who was able to feel it thoroughly.
"It's not a coincidence that one of the last public appearances by Putin before invasion of Ukraine was opening a Dostoyevsky centre in Moscow." [0]
0 - https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1gxhtcs/comment/lyh...
Let's not fight death people, move on and stick with the good things
Slavophilia is a concept that is hundreds of years old and is essential in understanding the historical and cultural differences between the West and Russia and of course how they interpreted the Enlightenment. This is on the level of importance of Orthodoxy versus Catholicism. It's fine of course to disagree with or dislike historical figures whose views you find abhorrent. Saying that they should not be discussed comes across as McCarthyism.
Didn't Dostoevsky spend time in Siberia, and basically just miss being executed for offending the Czar?
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Not only English translations :) And the man was a real nazi. Hated Poles, Jews, French, Germans - anyone not Russian. This is where Dugin, Putin and other modern vampires draw inspiration from.
Hated Poles, Jews, French, Germans - anyone not Russian.
But that does not make one a Nazi.
Thinking that it does dilutes the discussion.
Well, nazis had not been invented yet in 18xx, but same line of thinking.
Then they probably should have picked a qualifier besides "real".
It just leads to garbled thinking, this kind of random sloshing-of-words-around.