Comment by throwaway74829 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway74829 | Hacker News Reader

Having read about 1 to 2/3rds through most of Dostoyevsky's books: I really believe they're over-hyped.

Same with Pushkin, Tolstoy, Bulgakov, and so on -- with the only exception of Solzhenitsyn.

I think the difference is I'm Slavic, speak a few of the languages, and come from the cultures that succeeded those authors; so they read mostly as sentimental, overly-emotional, and superstitious, i.e. what I feel are the worst parts of the mythologized "Russian soul." Their works don't feel new, novel, and original: I've seen parts and pieces of it, reflections of its essence, expressed all over the average Slavic person.

> Dostoevsky's genius lies in his deep understanding of human nature and of spelling out truths about it in ways that inspire reflection.

If you resonate with this statement, perhaps you should also watch Tarkovsky's The Mirror.

But for me, the only truth Dostoyevsky has shown me is that people are very flawed, are the source of all of their own problems, and that Fyodor was a deeply emotional person. But I am not, and I find his expression of those emotions to be grating.

I resonate more with the quotes in the Wikipedia article for Idyot:

> However the chief criticism, among both reviewers and general readers, was in the "fantasticality" of the characters. The radical critic D.I. Minaev wrote: "People meet, fall in love, slap each other's face—and all at the author's first whim, without any artistic truth." V.P. Burenin, a liberal, described the novel's presentation of the younger generation as "the purest fruit of the writer's subjective fancy" and the novel as a whole as "a belletristic compilation, concocted from a multitude of absurd personages and events, without any concern for any kind of artistic objectivity."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Idiot#Reception

What I've noticed is that Russian authors are disproportionately mentioned among anglos, and Dostoevsky is himself disproportionately mentioned among those authors.

My hypothesis is that it's not just the orientalist appeal of the "Russian soul" you mentioned but its combination with Christian themes which means it is still familiar and easy to understand for Westerners. A bit like the equivalent of a rockstar: titillating but not deeply challenging.

> What I've noticed is that Russian authors are disproportionately mentioned among anglos, and Dostoevsky is himself disproportionately mentioned among those authors.

On the Internet perhaps, but 19th Russian literature had and still has a literary impact in formerly Communist countries, India, and Japan. Maybe a certain kind of American is prone to over-stating Dostoyevsky's importance, but personally I would argue Tolstoy is more disproportionately mentioned.

> My hypothesis is that it's not just the orientalist appeal of the "Russian soul" you mentioned but its combination with Christian themes which means it is still familiar and easy to understand for Westerners. A bit like the equivalent of a rockstar: titillating but not deeply challenging.

Oddly enough, what appealed to me was the discussion of morality without the overt Christian proselytization. No hackneyed metaphor for Jesus or salvation. Just man, his actions in the real world, and how he and the audience must examine them.

If there is any "orientalist" familiarity to these works that I enjoy, it's how self-examination is presented as a knight's/bogatyr's quest rather than a self-pitying confession of weakness and sin.

> Their works don't feel new, novel, and original: I've seen parts and pieces of it, reflections of its essence, expressed all over the average Slavic person.

The problem with the classics is they become so inspiring to future artists and readers that the themes, parts and other things disseminate into the culture to become stereotypical and boring. It's a big chicken and egg problem often enough. What was slavic art like before these people I wonder. Something impossible to separate.

Yeah. If Russian classics contained some great life lessons, how do you explain Russia? Every kid reads these classics in school, and it's a shit of a country.

The truth is that you usually can't really act as much as you'd like on those life lessons.

do they really read it, or it's "in the curricula" but no one really gives a shit, there are a few standard questions-and-answers about them and that's it, no?

Well, they have to write essays based on these books to get passing grades. And I would guess wise teachers (who read all these books!) make sure that these essays cover main life lessons, right?

FWIW I grew up in Russian culture (Donetsk). Personally, I find XX and XXI century books WAY better, more relevant, interesting, useful, etc.

> make sure that these essays cover main life lessons, right?

interesting approach :)

I'm Hungarian, we had to "study" a few of the classics (some Russians included too). I never read any of them. We were supposed to read them during the summer break. I fell for that in the first year. Fuck that. Still managed to pass the tests, but there was no requirement of writing essays, or distilling great conclusions, or life lessons from the books.

But spent my youth glued to other books. And as the years went by I just noticed I don't really want to read about other people's misery in so much detail thank you, at least add some interesting details, like in crime thrillers.

> what I feel are the worst parts of the mythologized "Russian soul."

I think I understand. I like reading postcolonial literary criticism because it asks us to consider any kind of national literary identification with skepticism. So I gotta ask: when you were growing up, what American literature did you encounter and what did you think of it?

FWIW I think I like Gogol's and Maxim Gorky's short stories most of all the Russian lit I've read.

It's odd that you regard those 19th/early 20th century authors as overly-emotional. In my experience, these works were much more blunt in their self-examinations of the human condition than the other European and American authors I've read. As for questions:

What do you think of Russian-American writers like Ayn Rand and Nabokov?

In your view, what philosophical fiction provides a "deeper" and less antiquated understanding of today's "Russian soul"?

What American/European/foreign works do you or other Slavs consider to be world-shaping?

If you're looking to understand today's "Russian soul" and you're good at understanding metaphors, I'd recommend to just read the lyrics of "The Russian Field of Experiments" by Egor Letov, the most famous Russian punk poet:

https://lyricstranslate.com/en/russkoe-pole-eksperimentov-ru... (translation #1 seems to be the most accurate although not perfect)

Or you can read the lyrics while listening to the song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCLuW7jDnM8

Thank you for the recommendation.

Perhaps I'm missing something, but my general understanding of the song is that every pursuit of ideals in Russia has brought about ruin and unless man butchers his own aspirations, the cycle of pursuit, destruction, and loss is only going to repeat itself.

If so, then that's a very nihilistic assessment on life (albeit an eloquent one) but not a wholly original concept. I guess I was hoping for something a little more novel or profound with a more explicated psychological/epistemic position behind it. Something beyond philosophical pessimism.

Here's how I understand it.

First, there's a famous Tyutchev poem from 1866 which is known by pretty much every Russian

    Russia cannot be understood with the mind alone,
    No ordinary yardstick can span her greatness:
    She stands alone, unique –
    In Russia, one can only believe.

(This is essentially word-by-word translation.)

So Tyutchev claims that Russia is so unique it cannot be analyzed. I think "The Russian Field ..." represents an analysis of Russia's uniqueness through enumeration of paradoxical archetypes which Russian culture holds, which makes Russian history/existence itself paradoxical, and thus uniquely fucked up.

The song mentions elements of the following archetypes/themes:

1. greater aspirations - God, etc. 2. lust 3. brutality, desire for destruction 4. desire for greatness/domination

Of course, they are present in every human culture. However, song combines them in a paradoxical way. It's as if different layers which are supposed to be distinct are brutally mixed. And the resultant mix is not pretty.

How did it happen? The song does not answer directly, but we can figure from the history: Russia's societal development got delayed, particularly, in XIX century. It was still an agrarian country with deeply religious population, but at the same time it got aspirations to play a global role.

So e.g. suppose you're a peasant. In Church you've heard there's God, God set Tsar to rule Russia, you're supposed to love your Tsar or you're a bad man. Then you're recruited into an army and go to war and shoot at other people. Why? I guess nobody would explain, but presumably God wants and because you love Tsar you have to do it.

The song might reference this retarded societal development in line "On the patriarchal landfill of obsolete concepts", "patriarchal" referencing Orthodox Christianity and Tsar-father as a head of everything.

Thus we have a mixture of 'greater aspirations' layer with 'brutality of war', e.g. in song this paradoxical mixture is referenced e.g. in "Laws of etiquette for mortars" line. There the word for "etiquette" is actually more vague term which can be found in Bible teachings, so it hints of mixture of ethical teachings with howitzers.

But then Russia went from insanity of Orthodox monarchism straight into the insanity of communism, famous for its double-think, etc. So Russia's collective unconscious never had a chance to clean up and unmix different layers, but got even more confused.

As a result, greater aspirations did not become a guidance, but merely a veneer hiding the brutality.

You can see this happening now - Putin talks about God, unity, saving brothers, etc. But people are brutally killed and raped. And for Russians it makes sense, it is a part of an archetype - God. Greater good. Howitzers go BOOM. They are used to this.

I asked my friend "So you want to save Russian-speaking people in Mariupol from "nazis". Why are you bombing the city?!" He replied: "Of course, it makes sense - that's how liberate a city from nazis, you gotta bomb it, that's how they did it in WWII". For him, it makes sense, he saw that in movies.

So anyway, I don't think it's nihilism. Letov describes some dark fucked-up archetypes under a veneer of Russian culture, but he doesn't make predictions about the future here (aside from a possibility of these archetypes materializing - which we see, unfortunately).

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