How could a backwater country, the frozen hellhole of Europe, produce the greatest novelists the world has ever seen? The only answer is suffering. Suffering is the father of all that is beautiful, true and poetic. Now all you book loving Marxists and utopians who dream of a sterile life in pursuit of harm reduction can cry yourself to sleep over this very harsh fact.
>Suffering is the father of all that is beautiful, true and poetic
>Marxists and utopians who dream of a sterile life in pursuit of harm reduction
There is no conundrum there. I have to give the commies this one. Suffering is the environment in which the pursuit of harm reduction has the most fertile ground.
This is plain wrong on many levels, the great Russian writers were not suffering from cold or similar existential threats, they were nobles for the most part. They were a highly educated elite.
Also, Russia being seen as a frozen hellhole, where you do hard physical labour for 12 hours a day in negative 40 degrees, fueled by vodka as there's barely anything to eat is the product of communist destruction. As far as I know the peasants lived just as any other peasant, it's just that they had underdeveloped industry compared to Europe. Kind of funny, as the industrialization didn't do much good for the quality of life for masses in the West in the 19th century, and Russia lacked the class of workers that the communism were supposed to help. So they artificially created it destroying everything else in the process.
If what you wrote were true, why did Russian literature die with the last tzar? Stalin sure inspired gulag slaves and starving peasants.
>As far as I know the peasants lived just as any other peasant
They didn't. They were slaves (serfs).
>Also, Russia being seen as a frozen hellhole, where you do hard physical labour for 12 hours a day in negative 40 degrees, fueled by vodka as there's barely anything to eat is the product of communist destruction.
It really isn't
Beautiful art arises from suffering because it's a coping method. You wouldn't need it in a utopia.
There is no utopia. Utopia means boring yourself to death, i.e. suicide.
>Suffering
Nah, probably living in a monarchy does this to a man
>How could a backwater country, the frozen hellhole of Europe, produce the greatest novelists the world has ever seen
suffering is good for art
Those pictures are completely inaccurate, just highly romanticized paintings. Stop sharing this moronic image.
there are tons of photos of tolstoy and dosto and it's very accurate
>i have autism
I bet you are mexican, colombian or venezuelan
These aristocrats were not suffering. The answer is not suffering, but an atmosphere that is conducive to literature. For France and Russia, this meant an "enlightened" absolute ruler and a handful of noble elites who set the fashions and live by the toil of peasants. When art and literature is solely in the hand of the elites, it is not degraded by the tastes of the masses, and it does not seek to please the greatest number. There needs to be a rigid social hierarchy and a class of elites who care about more than money. A people can be suffering and not have the leisure to think and create great literature, and so a large underclass is required.
Dosto and Chekhov were not really rich
They were people who were born incredibly wealthy who had an easy path set for them which would leave them living a life of comfort and luxury
The suffering of the Russian authors was not dependent on living in a backwards country
>Excluding a very small portion of North Africa, not a single good author has come out of Africa.
I don't agree with your hypothesis.
Most Africans live happily
>not having iPhones or Burger King at your door means suffering
also, suffering requires higher cognition, something Sub africans lack. You wouldnt say fish suffer.
What kind of profoundly stupid dumbass of a human worships suffering?
Courage before the inevitable is good.
Grit teeth and a resignation to insurmountable dangers are good.
Torturing people and whipping yourself are madness and evil.
>What kind of profoundly stupid dumbass of a human worships suffering?
No one has said anything about worshipping suffering. Rather that suffering is a necessary evil for the advancement of art. You don't tell people who go to the gym to get buff that they worship suffering, you instinctively know that suffering is the prerequisite for a buff figure.
>The only answer is suffering. Suffering is the father of all that is beautiful, true and poetic
this is very arguably an apotheosis . you are correct, nobody explicitely stated we should worship suffering, but to conceive of it these above terms strongly associates suffering with truth, goodness and beauty (attributes of God in monotheistic faiths).
I just get the heebee jeebees when people go beyond courage and into madness with their delight and worship of suffering. During wartime there are always some very dark souls that prove a certain subset of humanity truly delights in death, misery and destruction. My Lai massacre is an example.
Such persons, I think, tend to view struggle/battle/suffering as good in a way that no human should.
>Such persons, I think, tend to view struggle/battle/suffering as good in a way that no human should.
I see Art as good and understand that suffering is the fertile womb of all great art. The Greeks understood this better than anyone. Please, spare me of the rest because we live in a time where most people believe in the complete opposite of what I just laid out and as a consequence we are witnessing how stale all forms of art have become.
As for truth, I believe that the only truth anyone can assert about the human condition is that one will suffer. It is out of this understanding that we try to overcome mere dreadful existence by creating transcendent meaning through art.
>believe that the only truth anyone can assert about the human condition is that one will suffer.
I am not a Buddhist or a Buddhologist, but this is the First Noble Truth. I don't disagree that suffering is at the heart of our being, for it suffers at all times.
I agree our time is too averse to suffering, in a very grotesque materialism.
Will you agree that a rhetoric which leads to ecstasy in violence is a grave danger? I am not a censor, I am an advocate for responsible usage of language.
Another product of our era is the tremendous loss of appreciation for the power of words. With this has come the dissapearance of artful public rhetoric in the west. And also the rise of rhetoric and speech which is totally reckless and going to get us all killed.
The fetishizing or worshipping of suffering is always a component of the worldview of the death squads, where and when they are seen. My own language here has lost strength by this process of decreasing rhetorical awareness and ability. Words such as love, peace, Nazi, racist and Death Squad have no power anymore due to lazy and hypocritical usage.
I'm sure this sounded good in your mind
yes it did and continies to. stop posting without content.
Whose the top right?
Schup Amipitisky
Gavrila Derzhavin
>the frozen hellhole of Europe, produce the greatest novelists the world has ever seen?
Did they. The trash they produced has more in common with the worst of American television than with the great other other countries have produced. I really think their enduring popularity really does come from the similarity (likely due to direct influence) on that kind of media.
Because they had an intellectual elite who spoke and read French thanks to the reforms of Peter the Great. There's no Russian culture of note before that.
High IQ Europeans? Why do you ignore reality so mightily? And why would you admire all that they wrote yet disregard all their warnings about the israelites?
Werent almost all of them aristocrats
>How could a backwater country, the frozen hellhole of Europe, produce the greatest novelists the world has ever seen?
The ottoman turks , or the qing chinese, persians(in the 18th-19th) century were of the same level of development and hold much less literary achievements. The reason for russia's rich array of authors is french cultural influence, and, most of these authors, or anyone who could even write for that matter, were rch aristocrats or in their immediate influence, not much suffering there(dostoevsky could settle down and be a military engineer but he chose the path of gambling and misery)
>The only answer is suffering
No. It's just that russians are more spiritual than people in the west, with wider consciousness and shit. We are simply closer to God than all of you.
In my teens i used to think this is just a propaganda trick, but later, speaking with people all around the world, i realized this is true.
They were no different from other peasants, except for a bad government and a bad economic system, both under the Tsar and under the communists.
Gtfo hylic
No, we ARE. Spiritual stuff can manifest itself in many unexpected forms, it can even leak through some shit. Look at India...
And im not talking solely about writers, but about russian people as a whole.
Yes, today's writers are not that good, though, as i just said, spiritual can manifest itself in many unexpected forms, and you can find a lot of wisdom even in shit-tier fiction about tanks in ancient Egypt, if you know what i mean...
How does that spirituality manifest itself? I don't want to generalize an entire nation based on stereotypes and bad anecdotal experiences, but here in western Europe, russians tend to be sees as a people that are prone to violent crime and drug abuse moreso than any spiritual or intellectual endeavors. It's certainly very hard for me to see any similarity between the characters in a Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky novel and any Russians I've ever met.
>How does that spirituality manifest itself?
Kinda any way you like.
>violent crime and drug abuse
This way, too.
>we are
You mean "were". Nobody is talking about any contemporary russian writers.
Russian exceptionalism. Somehow everyone else has recognized your people largely as a cancer, and as a slave-people. You've pushed back against this and cope that you're actually special and a chosen people.
That is exactly because you all are just hylics and demon-possesed shitheads, controlled by satanist israelites.
Ah, alright.
>speaking with people all around the world, i realized this is true.
You spoke to some morons outside of Russia, and it confirmed your bias that Russians are special, as if it isn't evident to everyone who speaks to Russians that they themselves are completely out of touch with reality due to the propaganda that they consume their entire lives.
Especially nowadays, the internet is full of braindead Russians who expect that everyone else are lying as much as they are. Truth is not even a consideration, except the selective weaponized application of it in the instances where it proves useful. But this cannot be! The Russians must actually be a spiritual special chosen people. It's everyone else who are wrong and sheep. That's just embarrassing.
Im speaking to you who(allegedly) is not a moron, and your words are only supporting my point. You are dumb and anti-spiritual, it is impossible to try and change your mind - its like talking to a kid about rocket science.
You are also saying nothing. Russians occasionally make this claim of being some kind of a special übermensch chosen people because they have a historical inferiority complex (and because it helps their imperialistic claims). They want to be both great, and underdogs.
I'm anti-spiritualist because I'm challenging your unfounded claim of Russians being super-spiritual. I'm just "dumb" because of that, and that's it. You only need to ask how Russians are seen outside of Russia. But of course that would only strengthen your theory because they're obviously just dumb and not as spiritual as you, so they can't recognize your superiority. Again, embarrassing.
They're all over-rated.
Great-grandfather Pushkin was from Africa
Looks like a tanned German.
Right answers only. How do I get into Russian lit?
What genres are you interested in?
What do you expect to get from Russian lit?
Fiction or non-fiction?
Fiction mostly. I expect great literature.
Can't go wrong with any of the big ones. Anna Karenina, War and Peace, Brother's Karamazov and Crime and Punishment all have their reputation for a reason.
Okay
I think this is something like an immune response to the vaccination of European culture. In the late 17th and early 18th centuries, Russia absorbed a large amount of European culture. It took a little less than a hundred years to master this and develop an answer, and at the beginning of the 19th century Russia began to “give back.” This coincided with Europe's fascination with folk and national things, so Russia began to create a Russian national culture. Which soon went for export. And another factor is that during these 100 years, Russia visited a period of 300-400 years. That is, Russian literature, due to catching-up development, developed 3-4 times faster and was at the cutting edge of life.
Suffering, of course, provides good material for literature, but in itself it only generates groans.