Let’s settle this once and for all, which country has produced a better array of literary talent?
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France v. Russia
Let’s settle this once and for all, which country has produced a better array of literary talent?
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Nothing Ever Happens Shirt $21.68 |
Definitely Russia. Would be interesting to hear some arguments for france though. I think not getting into against nature was sort of a deciding factor for me. Pere goriot was great but very far from masterful. Havent read madame blueberry yet. Count is obviously amazing and journey but idk. Ive read much more russian lit than france to be fair, but thats also because russian lit is so easy to be captivated by.
I'd be curious if you can name any Russian lit beyond Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Bulgakov, Chekhov. Also considering Russian literature began in the 19th century and was destroyed by the 20th century, I'm really curious as to what you've read. I know a few Russian authors besides the obvious ones I mentioned, and I'm not talking Turgenev or Goncharov or Pushkin, and I have to say France undoubtedly outclasss Russia even if we restrict France to 20th century writers.
Nta but Lermontov, Gogol, Fet, Tyutchev, Leskov, Bely, Blok, Solovyov, Khodasevich, Mayakovsky, Tsvetaeva, Mandelstam, Akhmatova - this is only the ones that are top of mind for me at the moment, there are probably at least 2x that many other prominent names I've caught over time and I'm far from a specialist. But I would imagine most people who unironically endorse Russian lit over French are basing their judgment 95% on Dostoevsky since their knowledge probably doesn't go very far beyond that level (case in point
). French lit still towers over Russian to a ridiculous degree.
I'm game to try the poetry, I try to walk very slowly through foreign language works with a translation for reference and just learn along the way, I'm already in the process of doing this with a few French works - so give me recs for the theater works if you want, that's the area I know least about. And perhaps more of a challenge, apropos of
, do you have a list (your own or just one you think is authoritative) of essential Balzac novels?
I'm not a massive reader of Balzac but I would say the most widely appreciated oh his romans are : Le père Goriot, Illusions Perdues, Eugénie Grandet, La peau de chagrin and Le colonel Chabert.
For entry level theater you can try Le mariage de Figaro in prose or Cyrano de Bergerac in verse. For Hugo, Hernani is the quintessential romantic manifesto in theater.
Denis Chernuhin
new zealand
France.
Higher quantity and quality of novelists and poets, but most of their best stuff isn't as well known nor has as much mass appeal as most of the 19th century romantic, naturalist, and realist classic novels.
Russian literature in the 19th century manages to be more preachy about socio-political commentary than both England and France.
Granted, I'm more of an aesthete than a thinker, so by my own standards I prefer French literature.
Might as well talk about Ireland vs. England, or America vs. England (neither of these is a perfect analogy to France/Russia, but they both get the point across). Chalk it up to IQfy's modern/philosophical bias, yet another example. I understand why it exists, but it's something one has to unlearn in order to actually understand and appreciate literature.
Based aesthete
Perhaps biased (e.g. both France and Russia were imitators when it came to Romanticism) but yeah this is basically the same point I'm trying to make.
Lol I think at the very least you have to admit that the "aping" went both ways. The only real distinction that can be made, looking at the whole picture from medieval times to now, is that Spain lags a little behind the others.
French Romanticism was undoubtedly influenced by English and German Romanticism, notably through the influence of Mme de Staël, Richardson and Byron, but for all that it differs from them and has a real identity of its own. Lamartine, its inventor, was essentially influenced by Rousseau and Chateaubriand, and almost all his sense of nature, his vocabulary and his Christianity come from them. French Romanticism, like the others, had deep roots as early as 1750, and even earlier, because it was in some way part of the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes launched in the 17th century in the Académie Française. He came to oppose classical rationalism, which was seen as reactionary (since it followed in the footsteps of 18th-century Voltairianism), by proposing the idea of monarchy and Catholicism as young and new. This specific historical context in post-revolutionary France forced French Romanticism to develop a very specific aesthetic theory, represented in Hugo's Preface to Cromwell.
All of which is to say that it's reductive to call French Romanticism an imitation only, when its true ancestor was Rousseau, and it differs essentially in its themes and theory from its counterparts.
t. never read anything by Hugo
Good point, you're right. I didn't think of them because coming from an English-speaking perspective I tend to associate Romanticism more specifically with poetry but yeah they were both huge. I haven't read Hugo yet, which of his works would you consider essential besides Les Mis?
nta, L'Homme qui Rit
absolutely kino.
In the French-speaking world, Hugo is best known for his poetry, especially Les Contemplations and La légende des siècles, but if you can't read French verse, especially the alexandrine, it's pretty inaccessible. In his other works, as nta has said, L'homme qui rit is a great novel, and Notre-Dame de Paris, along with Les Misérables, forms his three greatest novels. As his theater is in verse, if we keep only the prose, we're left with the travelogue Le Rhin, which is a good read, but once again he's best known for his mastery of prosody and his gigantism.
t. never read anything by Bunin
France and it's not even close.
Victor Hugo himself styles all over everything Russia has ever produced.
>pitting Hugo of all people against the Russians
a randomly chosen Ivan Bunin short story completely mogs everything Hugo has ever written
Russia won
Russia has never created anything of merit, in literature or any other discipline of creativity. I am a Polish moderate.
Russia easily
*laughs in Dante, Petrarca, Boccaccio*
*shit no one cares about
Céline > Russia > France > the rest of the world
> implying it's not the same thing
France if only because they were able to ape their neighbours (Italy, England, Spain). Russia's neighbors were illiterate onion farmers, horsewiener slurpers and bugs.
I have a russian bias. Such a shit country was bound to produce great works on misery of humanity as a whole.
But what about all the shitskin nations, which have produced almost nothing of any value besides raw materials to export? India, the overcrowding, the poverty, the smells. Is Russian IQ maybe much higher
india holds the secrets to the universe. its a shame you're not smart enough to understand the significance of indian literature. read the vedas, upanishads, bhagavad gita, ramayana, mahabharat, adi shankaracharya's works, aurobindo's works, rabindranath tagore. a large chunk of indian lit is untranslated. put in the effort to reap the benefits.
What is good about those?
This ““ secret, as you say, does not really hold once one gets out of India. It’s amazing, how all of existence is, in fact, not suffering, when there isn’t shit all over the streets around you, and the women don’t all have the bodies of an amoeba
that literally has nothing to do with the topic at hand. indians look ugly. its a poor country. there's shit all over the streets. i'm not denying it, in fact, i never even wrote about it. its literature is still unbeatable. don't ask me what's good about it, read it and decide for yourself. you really think you've contributed to the conversation by making fun of india and indians? every single word you wrote is as pointless as your pathetic existence. every single post on this site can be boiled down to some tryhard attempt at insulting an entity in a comical way while completely ignoring the topic at hand.
Sorry, I know it’s pigheaded of me. My existence is nothing, just like yours. It’s just…I…I’m just not going to read it.
Russian literature began in the 18th century with poets pastiching Jacques Delille, and all their great novelists imitated novelistic structures invented by Balzac.
French literature, meanwhile, began in the 11th century with the Chanson de Roland, and gave rise to the chanson de geste, courtly literature, Arthurian literature, medieval mysteries, modern poetry with Villon and Marot, historical chronicles, the French Renaissance with its novels and drama, the fairy-tale genre with Perrault, preciosity, moralist authors, to French tragedy and classical poetry with Malherbe and Boileau, to revolutionary rhetoric, to French Romanticism with Lamartine and Hugo, to the Realists, the Naturalists, the Parnassians, the Decadents, the Symbolists, to Surrealism with Breton, to Existentialism, the Theatre of the Absurd and the Nouveau Roman, and all this is only in terms of style. If we want to add the history of ideas, we haven't finished probing the importance of France for letters.
Balzac is dogshit, 90% filler.
>Russian literature began in the 18th century with poets pastiching Jacques Delille, and all their great novelists imitated novelistic structures invented by Balzac.
So it is good?
>Chanson de Roland, and gave rise to the chanson de geste, courtly literature, Arthurian literature, medieval mysteries, modern poetry with Villon and Marot, historical chronicles, the French Renaissance with its novels and drama, the fairy-tale genre with Perrault, preciosity, moralist authors, to French tragedy and classical poetry with Malherbe and Boileau, to revolutionary rhetoric, to French Romanticism with Lamartine and Hugo, to the Realists, the Naturalists, the Parnassians, the Decadents, the Symbolists, to Surrealism with Breton, to Existentialism, the Theatre of the Absurd and the Nouveau Roman
So it's trash?
>sartre
Le existentialist
>Dostoevsky
HET eksestentsialist!
Ok guy sure
French literature is heavily connected to the French language (even moreso than Russian literature) so it is hard to judge fairly if you can’t speak it
All Russian literature is just "sad man looks out from window and thinks about Jesus" for 1200 pages.
No I will not elaborate further because what I posted is the truth.
read Dostoevsky's 'Demons'
I agree. I can't believe Communism created art *face palm*
France because I'm into their decadent shit.
As much as I hate France as a country, it does have some very nice literature.
You don't hate us, anon.
No I do. Try not surrending to a country in a matter of weeks. Or leaving Paris purposefully unoccupied in order to protect art. Or maybe I dont like people being elitist about bread. Maybe I like having food not go moldy after 4 days.
It's a shame all my favorite philosophers and writers are French.
You even made me reply to myself and look stupid,even though I am actually stupid(you didn't need to know that). Frick you.
Ha ha.
If you can't read both of them in their respective languages, you are all judging by reading shitty English translations. Therefore, if aren't both fluent in French and Russian, you shouldn't voice your shitty opinion.
Russia wins. There's just absolutely no question, I can't even think of anything French that comes close to Turgenev
my heart says russia but my head says france
this mf is superior to every other author and it's not even close
goethe is based as frick. the last great universal man. truly incalculable genius. made contributions in law, mathematics, art, the novel, the story, poetry, plays, politics... nothing his mind didn't touch
Why the frick has Nabokov not been mentioned once in this thread
USA has the strongest literary tradition in the last 200 years
*50 years
>Russian lit
Stellar 19th century, tapering off into 20th
>French lit
Has no real Russian competition in other time periods, but not as good in the 19th-20th as Russia (barring philosophy)
Russian literature was top heavy in the 19th/20th centuries. The French probably have more books worth reading from that period. Off the top of my head
Balzac
Hugo
Dumas
Zola
Nerval
Flaubert
Baudelaire
Rimbaud
Lautreamont
Stendhal
Yourcenar
Proust
Celine
Maupassant
Beckett
Bloy
Gourmont
Schwob
Yeah this is essentially what I was going to say. Russia has two all-time great 19thc. novelists to France's one, that's about the only category where they have them beat. If you look at it in terms of overall depth, France is solidly ahead even in 19thc. novels, and for 19thc. poetry, it's not even close, despite the greatness of Pushkin. If you open it up to the 20th, the poetry is on more even footing and the novels are not particularly remarkable on either side except that Proust tilts the scales massively in favor of France (Beckett is also a first-rate novelist but he's a weird case in terms of national attribution and he's not really necessary in order to make the case). And honestly I've had incredibly mixed feelings about this over the years but I do think you have to give them some credit for Oulipo, the nouveau roman, and whatever Blanchot was, whereas Russia after Pasternak was a nonentity afaik. I don't think Nabokov's English works can be called Russian novels, sorry. I will say I despise pure coomerism/edginess in the vein of de Sade and find it mind-numbing, but France can stand tall without that, however much they may like it.
Keeping in mind, of course, that this is ignoring the time between the Song of Roland and Lomonosov, in which France was consistently vying for the title of greatest literary nation, and Russia was a swamp. Anyone with a serious interest in Russian literature would be well aware that one of its defining works is inspired by the miraculous feat Peter accomplished in turning Russia into something resembling a civilized nation. I like them and their soulful schizo nature but let's have a sense of proportion here, please.
I’ve literally never heard of any of those people except Samuel Beckett, and that doesn’t sound like a very French name to me.
France. Russian literature is nonsense for pseuds.
It’s actually very simple and straightforward. Dostoevsky/Tolstoy mog all of the European authors combined, lol. You have what, Shakespeare, Goethe? France my ass, ahaha, at least comparing Russia to England or Deutschland would save you the embarrassment. Now cope, dogs, cope.
>Dostoevsky
What melodramatic, shallow, philosophically wrongheaded hack novels are now the peak of literature. Dostoevsky has as much going for him as the average American network show, and I do believe that the similarities between his writing and the writing of the worst American television is the reason for his continued popularity in this country.
Dostoevsky has tainted the art of literature perhaps more than any other writer. Frick him, frick those who admire him, and frick Nietzsche for legitimizing his trash.
It's a draw!
>The discorse on the side of Russia keeps revolving around Dosto and Tolstoy
>One poster mentioned Pushkin
>Another namedumped a bunch of Silver Age poets
>that's it
This thread has no authority to speak on this matter
Chekhov is good, of course. Bulgakov filtered me. I count Nabokov as Russian and he is masterful. Turgenev, never read. But just dosto and Tolstoy are already enough to btfo France. They have nobody on that tier as novelists.
You need to be Bunin - maxxing
Yea I've only read four of the ones I mentioned and only two of them at an age where I was actually equipped to understand them. The other anon also mentioned Chekhov and Bulgakov. But this is an extremely general topic talking about the entire literature of two different countries over hundreds of years, even an actual scholar would be focused on one or the other, it's always going to rely on some degree of second-hand judgment and generalization.
Let’s settle this once and for all, which country has produced a better array of literary talent?
Russia, because I hate France