Hacker News Reader

Comment by gizmo | Hacker News Reader

When people recommend Russian literature I'm always curious what they think about the other great Russian literary works. Because I find unnecessary complexity unbearable. I have no desire to read literature with 100+ named characters, unreliable narrators and Escher-like chronology. For some people narrative complexity is a draw but if I can't put a book down and come back to it two weeks later without having to start from the beginning it's just not for me.

View on HN

There's a certain literary canon of "men of genius" and often Nabokov is recommended from this reference frame; people rightly react to its invocation. "Don't be terrified of Pale Fire" frames "Pale Fire" as an impenetrable manifestation of the essence of genius, implying that if you were at the right level you'd get it, but—condescendingly—it's still "okay" if you don't get it! That framing is nonsense. It's a thing that's fun for some people, and a certain kind of lit-bro mistakingly believes that what they like is what's genuinely Good and what every smart person should like. I expect your aversion is actually to that voice which takes for granted that "smart-sounding" is equivalent to literary merit for everyone else, too.

In fact, Pale Fire is quite a straightforward story, with a creative form with some puzzles to decipher if you feel like it. Or you can brush past them; the suspicious presence of contradictions is a delight in itself. It was fun for me at 22 but at 33 I would not go back and read it—I don't recall it being particularly deep, but it was a good time. I'm more interested in the other Russians now. Not that Nabokov, Tolstoy, or Dostoevsky have anything to do with each other. One would never think to group them at all if they hadn't written in the same language.

You could maybe tie Nabakov's humor to Gogol or Bulgakov, but he doesn't tell complex stories like Tolstoy or the longer Dostoevsky books. Maybe Pale Fire is like Notes from the Underground or Crime & Punishment in a way, but his work isn't really traditional Russian Lit. Nabakov's got as much in common with Joyce & Pynchon as any Russian writers.

> I have no desire to read literature with 100+ named characters

Personal share ... I had the same hesitance about getting into Tolstoy. I read The Death Of Ivan Ilyich -- it's short and has few characters. Absolutely loved it. That sealed the deal so I'm working through Anna Karenina now. I'm reading the Rosamund Bartlett translation and it's just superb so I don't really care about the torrent of names and characters. It's worth it IMO.

+1 for The Death of Ivan Ilyich, it's a marvelous example of an author depicting something you (probably) haven't experienced and nonetheless convincing you that's what it's really like.

You might try some of the shorter ones. e.g. from the 19th century: Gogol's short stories, Dostoevsky's "The Double", Turgenev's "Fathers and Children". They weren't all baggy monsters!

plus a billion for Turgenev. Bazarov is the original hipster

also Pushkin's Queen of Spades

While I understand your point of view, and even share it from time to time, if art were limited to those works that were easily accessible, the world would be much poorer for it.

Think of how different the world would be if all Beethoven composed were Für Elise-type pieces, and he never composed anything as complex--and inaccessible--as his Grosse Fuge.

In my experience, my favorite books have been the ones that required me to work a little.

Admittedly The Brothers Karamazov has a lot of characters, but, it does run linearly! And it's not so hard to refer to the Wikipedia article for a character list as necessary.

I think the problem is some people expect to not have to do any work when reading literary novels.

I find that literature that requires work does not provide more food or insight into the human condition or a sense of wonder (or whichever benchmark you choose) than simpler and more accessible works. If complexity is not what makes the work valuable, what purpose does it serve? I posit that for some people complexity for the sake of complexity _is_ the appeal.

I just wanted to point out the logical gymnastics you just performed here: I find it true, thus it is true universally.

Your initial premise: "I find that literature that requires work does not provide more food or insight into the human condition..."

Your conclusion from this premise: "If complexity is not what makes the work valuable, what purpose does it serve?"

And you answer your own question with a cynical take: "I posit that for some people complexity for the sake of complexity _is_ the appeal."

This makes me want to kick myself for reading Hacker News to be illuminated about the arts.

Still, I love user lermontov!

I made no such universal statement. Some people enjoy hard things simply because they are hard. My claim is that this can also result in people thinking some literature is better than it is, because people draw satisfaction from the effort itself.

Okay, I got that.

The point you might be missing is that some people might enjoy hard things not only because they are hard, but because only through their laborious efforts is the true brilliance of the work revealed.

Since that is the entirely conventional take on literature I couldn’t possibly be missing that.

(Edit: re-reading what I wrote earlier I can see how it can be read that way. My bad. )

For me it's not even that, it's simply that The Brothers Karamazov and other novels like it have historicity and depth to them in a way that modern-style light popcorn novels never do. The hardness therefore is more incidental than the means to an end in itself.

And for what it's worth, there's plenty of modern-style "hard" novels that I've enjoyed immensely as well, including House of Leaves, Infinite Jest, Shogun, The Pillars of the Earth, and [pick any Neal Stephenson novel published this millennium].

Off the top of my head, every book I can think of that provides deep insight into the human condition does require putting in some work. Let's take as an example "Night" by Elie Wiesel, a book that is written so simply it is typically assigned in middle school (that's when I read it). Well, it was assigned in school for a reason -- there's a lot of work to put in to learn more about the history of the Holocaust, concentration camps, and specifically the death marches, as well as the actual full biography of the author (the novel is an autobiography but it only covers one early part of his life).

Exactly - if a work really was so simple that it required no work to understand it, what insight could it possibly give into the human condition? Plenty of "simple" works are reliant on the reader already having done work to grasp it, from growing up in the right country/culture/subculture to learning the right things in school.

That’s why I talked about unnecessary complexity. Of course many hard things in life are worthwhile. I don’t think anybody would argue otherwise.

Well, yes, unnecessary complexity is unnecessary by definition. The argument is over which complexity is unnecessary.

What are some examples of complex works? What are some examples of simpler, more accessible works?

The Penguin Classics edition of TBK contains a character guide which is indispensable for western readers.

I am not really well read on Russian literature (work in progress), but my impression is that they are all over the place in terms of complexity and accessibility. There's rube-goldberg contraptions of genius like Pale Fire, and at the same time short stories that are boiled down to the bare essence of a feeling like Chekov's In the cart. And Tolstoy can write a tome like War and Peace, while also writing Master & Man which approaches Hemingway in its brevity and efficiency.

Nabokov's stories and reputation are intimidating, but if you drop your anxiety over missing the point, he's still a very entertaining, passionate writer. I definitely missed a lot when I read Pale Fire, but I still enjoyed it a lot, even being naive and taking everything at face value.

Read Solzhenitsyn or Bulgakov (earlier works like Heart of a Dog, not MM)

Pushkin’s short fiction is often great (if uneven, especially the early stuff) and doesn’t (can’t) do the 1,000 characters and complex chronology thing.

Ivan Bunin's works are simple, short and brilliant. BTW Nabokov translated some of them.

Tolstoy writes pretty straightforward narrative doesn't he?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com