Lol I always laugh when I see people talk up Dostoevsky and any 19th century writer. It's 2025 now and literature has improved in depth and characterization as much as any other field.
It was astonishingly good. It felt fresh, modern, and claustrophobically suspenseful in a way I wouldn’t have believed possible for a book that age.
If you don’t like it, fine. Preferences are a thing and we don’t all have to enjoy the same stuff. But to dismiss it as obsolete or out of touch is madness. It’s a classic for a reason.
Along those lines, I read “Moby Dick” last year for the first time. Now I’m annoyed with everyone who led me to imagine it as some dusty tome to slog through. It’s hilarious. Ishmael’s a sarcastic smartass with a lot to say.
Some of the classic are classics for a reason, ya know?
The main criticism for I have for Dostoevsky is that he's overdramatic. Yes it's great fun fiction and a vast improvement over the simpler, more idealized writing of much of his era, but some of the angst of his characters is simply cultural. He has a lot of religious influence in his work (which don't appeal to me as an atheist) and their struggles for the human soul is a symptom of his time. A Buddhist might say, just calm the fuck down man. Most people don't react to horrible situations by "crashing out", but via coping and rationalization and making the best of their situation, that's how you get consistent improvement and accrue generational uplift.
Later writers like Virginia Woolf is able to better integrate a variety of responses to suffering, post modernists like Tao Lin even gets overly detached (everyone hates post modernists). But I think the best novel about the human condition ever written, which handles the drama, but realistically, is probably by Elena Ferrante in 2011. I'm not highlighting any underrated work here lol, it's widely acclaimed, including called the best book of the 21st century by the NYT.
I like the religious lens of his work, though. I don’t personally identify with it, especially his particular brand of it, but that’s part of the work’s appeal to me. Similarly, I’m not an existentialist but it was neat to see the world that way through “L'Étranger” (even though Camus rejected the label).
But I do want to push back against the idea that we know vastly more about human nature today than in the 1800s. We’ve been formally studying western philosophy, intently and seriously, for at least 2,500 years. On a timeline between Plato and today, “C&P” was written 94% of the way to the finish line. We might have better models of some details now, but we’ve had a pretty solid knowledge of the fundamentals for an awfully long time. By analogy, Monet didn’t know jack about quantum physics, but he famously explored the subtleties of the appearance of light in nature.
I surely don’t want to take the position that older = better, either. You’re right: we’re still learning, practicing, and getting better! There’s still an awful lot of gold to be found in earlier works, though.
Most people I've known do not react rationally to horrible situations. Or even to good situations.
I think to argue that Dostoevsky is not among the best psychological novelists is to slightly misunderstand what he was trying to achieve.
But there is definitely still excellent fiction being written now. The last sumurai by helen dewitt, or the gray house by mariam petrosyan I would place with the likes of middlemarch and anna karenina.
It hasn't.
1. Many fields experiencing development over the past century or two are much newer than literature, which might as well be a synonym for thought. During that time, those newer fields were, or currently are, in their early rapid-growth phase.
2. Literature is deeply on the subjective side of "fields", so it's a lot easier to argue that it has changed, rather than that it has improved.
Provide one tiny bit of evidence for this. Do you seriously think that Shakespeare (for e.g.) did not have a profound understanding of human psychology?
We also have neurology as a science now. So that's one bit of evidence for the claim.
Of course Shakespeare had a profound understanding of human nature. And of course he did not have the working vocabulary and knowledge base of modern psychology which has been built up over time by many humans working together. Two things can be true.
The internet may increase the number of interactions, but decreases their quality.
Looking at most online interactions it looks to me that people show less empathy and understanding than they do IRL.
> Of course Shakespeare had a profound understanding of human nature. And of course he did not have the working vocabulary and knowledge base of modern psychology which has been built up over time by many humans working together. Two things can be true.
Does that help write better books. If the claim was true the best fiction would be written by psychologists and neurologists. Is it?
I think that knowledge is on the wrong side (for writing fiction) of Chesterton's distinction (in a work of fiction - I cannot remember which Fr Brown story) between understanding someone from the inside with empathy and from the outside with analysis.
Humans are great at figuring out how things behave before we have a great model of why they do it. And by Shakespeare’s time, we had a pretty good grasp on practical human psychology, even if we had less understanding of the mechanisms behind it.
I agree that we are great at figuring out things before we have a model of why things work. And we have a mountain of context to work from already. Shakespeare wasn't an idiot, and he wasn't in a vacuum but his 'context window' was 'smaller' than a lot of people today(quotes because dubious terminology).
Art is improving. Science is improving. human understanding, and communication of that understanding is improving too. That is my point.
(And maybe we already do have that person. I'm shamefully out of date with modern literature.)
Yes, but this doesn't prove that a modern author could produce a better text than a historically great author, which was the original line of thought. Or is there a specific modern text that you have in mind that proves the point?
How about 'more accurate' as a measure...
Then every text book is an example of this measure of better improving over time...
How about 'more representative of the human experience'... (or enjoy/like more)
Then we measure how well a human relates to a book: which is taste, a subjective quality that is notoriously hard to measure in any meaningful way. This measure becomes not a single measure, but a collective measure against the sum of humans who interact with it: an untenable standard - and biased towards the present anyway - which doesn't give charity to your position.
...So how do you measure a book to be 'better'? That's the neat part: you don't. You can measure what you 'like' more, you can measure 'features'... but we probably won't even agree on what makes a book 'better'. We like what we like, and most of us have a hard time even explaining why we like something.
Modern writers pull in more layers of depth, explain the ebbs and flows of motivations and identities through social forces and work more with complex ideas like self-deception and rationalization. Shakespeare's characters are generally reliable narrators in a way that later lit tends not to be.