Slava's Correct Culture Take.
The entirety of Russian classical literature is mind-numbing, hopeless, grotesquely verbose, self-important borefest, tremendously overhyped by terribly depressed people with a longing to feel more cultured.
The entirety of Russian classical literature is mind-numbing, hopeless, grotesquely verbose, self-important borefest, tremendously overhyped by terribly depressed people with a longing to feel more cultured.
I am not joking.
Dostoyevsky couldn't construct a believable plot, would never be bothered to come up with a three-dimensional character, made all women look like his two lovers and basically delivered his own half-insane sermons, without even disguising them as dialogue...
Dostoyevsky couldn't construct a believable plot, would never be bothered to come up with a three-dimensional character, made all women look like his two lovers and basically delivered his own half-insane sermons, without even disguising them as dialogue...
Tolstoy had a slightly better ability to tell stories, but could not stop himself from ejaculating a trainload of stupid and unnecessary philosophy all over them in random places, because he honestly didn't trust the reader to just figure his thoughts out through the plot...
Chekhov had only two modes: depressing and suicidal, and his true genius was to convince people that his moody-teenager bitchy bullshit about supremely unlikeable people is ingenious comedy and/or satire...
Gogol could do both plot and humor, but could not escape being depressing either. The one time he tried to write an uplifting story, it came out as blathering Czarist propaganda chock-full of anti-Semitism, where the main character kills his own son and ks burned alive in the end
Chernyshevsky could not write and should have been issued a restraining order from stationery by the courts. Full stop.
Turgenev could bore the knickers off a Puritan preacher's wife, which he would never do, because, according to his stories, every single woman is a tender virgin ready to faint on command. His endless descriptions of fucking birch trees are more interesting. And they are torture.
Lermontov and Pushkin should have stuck to verse, because their prose is outrageously mediocre, and Lermontov's in particular could have been written by a Emo 10th-grader for a second-marking period essay without really trying too hard.
Real Russian literature begins in the XX century, when people who grew up on Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky decided that, wait a minute, couldn't we do this with, like, humor, interesting characters, engaging stories and about 170% less preaching?
Bulgakov, Zoshchenko, Ilf/Petrov, Babel
Bulgakov, Zoshchenko, Ilf/Petrov, Babel
... and post-war greats like Strugatsky brothers, Dovlatov, Voinovich. And spilling into the XXI century, with (the very early) Pelevin, Akunin and Sorokin. This is where it's all at.
Leave XIX c. bullshit to pretentious bores.
Leave XIX c. bullshit to pretentious bores.
True story. My only experience in stage craft was playing the main role in a Chekhov play in school. I was given it because, as the goalkeeper of the soccer team, I could be trusted to believably dive on the stage while pursuing a rabid finger-biting dog.
https://twitter.com/severija_b/status/1484169357223628802?t=ykNAW3n3wJigJ4vzu2xDVA&s=19
The dog was a pretend dog. We didn't have a dog we could trust to run across the stage and sit on it for 15 minutes. I had to dive after a pretend dog and then pretend to be mad at it.
Which still meant that the integrity of Chekhov's story or characters was in no way compromised
Which still meant that the integrity of Chekhov's story or characters was in no way compromised
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