Tolstoy Vs. Dostoyevsky

I read Tolstoy more often. The short novels – Hadji Murad, Master & Man, The Kreutzer Sonana – have the same rich plenitude of the door-stoppers. I rather dislike Ivan Ilych, though.

how does crime and punishment make you cringe?

i started reading Anna Karenina in the park last weekend but had to pack up when some little girls kept singing Frozen songs. (It was a small park.)

were there trains?

i get it

I found Anna Karenina agonizing the last time I read it. The Anna-Vronsky relationship is just "sin is actually pain don't u see" all the way through.

The family scenes among the Rostovs in War and Peace are some of my favorite reading ever, and Natasha in particular is such a vivid human being.

Toylstoy's strength imo is in the depiction of superficially ordinary people and interactions, whereas Dostoevsky takes more pleasure in the ridiculous and the abject -and their interaction with the pious (hence the abundant roffles).

If forced to choose I go Tolstoy, but it's a tough choice.

While Anna Karenina has some beautiful passages (especially the hay harvest), I couldn’t wait for the train to come.

Full disclosure: I’ve read just about all of Dostoevsky’s major works and a few others, while all I’ve read of Tolstoy is Anna Karenina.

Chesterton said something like, it’s the excess of rationality that causes madness, not the lack of it. Dostoevsky’s characters are like that. They want to fall back on their own resources to explain the world—make a system, you know—but the human mind is actually not well equipped to do that, so they break under the weight. For him this is an image of modernity. There was never an author as reactionary as Dostoevsky and it’s a testament to his power as a writer that people on ilx—progressives—can read him and feel anything besides a need to rebel against his idea of what a human being is. We’re supposed to believe in reason and autonomy ans all that stuff you know.

Tolstoy in the end also developed a kind of tragic, Christian vision but a much milder one that isn’t really incompatible with humanism.

There is some thread on here where I say that Dostoevsky was a horrible guy whose books represent the most perverse instincts of the imagination. But now I think he’s good. Few authors stick with me like him. I read crime and punishment straight up half my lifetime ago and I remember it.

Of all the great Russian authors though Gogol is the most deranged and also the best. He’s another one, though, who was paranoid of modernity.