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“The Idiot” Savant: On Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Idiot

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Re: “The Idiot” Savant: On Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Idiot

#51

Post by ismail-khan »

throwaway84742 wrote: post #14
_blz2 wrote: post #6

This novel, along with 'Crime and punishement' deal with completely opposite personalities. One has a very optimistic view of the world, the other, Raskolnikov from Crime and Punishment, despises it and justifies violent crime with this mentality. Wonderful works, both of them. Unlike many, I read TBK first and decided to read Dostoevsky's other works and fell in love. Notes from the underground will always hold a sp…

As a Russian, I don’t understand how Americans can “get into” Dostoevsky or Tolstoy. The cultural background required to understand them is simply not there, so you’re getting maybe 50% of what’s there, and that’s an optimistic estimate. Likewise, I’m not sure I fully understand Hemingway, Steinbeck, etc. I enjoy their work, to be sure, but I’m afraid not to the extent Americans enjoy it. Thus far I have not found an…

> As a Russian, I don’t understand how Americans can “get into” Dostoevsky or Tolstoy. The cultural background required to understand them is simply not there, so you’re getting maybe 50% of what’s there, and that’s an optimistic estimate.

I'm from Pakistan, and I've adored everything I've read so far of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. I don't think you need so much cultural background to "get into" either author. In fact, part of why I enjoyed War & Peace and Anna Karenina so much is precisely because of the uncanny parallels between 19th century Russian aristocrats and modern Pakistani society. As just one example, the view of French as a more modern, cultured language vs Russian parallels how English is viewed in Pakistan.

I'm sure I must have missed out on some cultural context. But I would say I missed perhaps 10% of what's in the books, not 50% :)

Re: “The Idiot” Savant: On Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Idiot

#52

Post by jnsaff2 »

jackschultz wrote: post #11
_blz2 wrote: post #6

This novel, along with 'Crime and punishement' deal with completely opposite personalities. One has a very optimistic view of the world, the other, Raskolnikov from Crime and Punishment, despises it and justifies violent crime with this mentality. Wonderful works, both of them. Unlike many, I read TBK first and decided to read Dostoevsky's other works and fell in love. Notes from the underground will always hold a sp…

Interesting timing, because I just started Notes from Underground yesterday. I have to say, I'm a really big fan of Russian literature for some reason. Crime and Punishment, to me, seemed pretty straightforward, where we knew the problems Raskolnikov was having, and pretty sure of the ending where he'd confess and be punished (clearly from the title). Whereas The Brothers Karamazov if I remember, was somewhat more of…

I second Master and Margarita, epicly funny at times and more high energy but still very deep in it's approach to humanity.

Re: “The Idiot” Savant: On Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Idiot

#53

Post by pandaman »

throwaway84742 wrote: post #50
pandaman wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GEB (Hofstadter's book) has a chapter about exactly this. Using Crime and Punishment as an example it is shown how different translations struggle with the lack of context.

His essay about machine translation is quite illustrative of the issues of cultural context as well. Even the best translations lose a substantial chunk of meaning, because it’s often not just what the author said, but also how he said it, which particular words were used, and subtle other meanings and gradations attached to that particular choice of words (and, in Russian, the word order as well). When I was growing…

Indeed, while a separate issue from cultural context of 19th century Russian literature, translation is a literary genre by itself. I also noticed that Americans are generally unaware of this. Not that I'd blame them. I wouldn't care about translation myself if I had been a native English speaker and enjoyed immediate access to the enourmous body of English literature :)

Re: “The Idiot” Savant: On Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Idiot

#55

Post by joshjkim »

_blz2 wrote: post #41
joshjkim wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i immediately fell in love with dostoevsky's work (just finished my third read of TBK), but it took me a long time to get into david foster wallace - now, i think of them as very similar. DFW is known for a lot of things (long books, footnotes on footnotes, early death) but to me at the end of the day both infinite jest and the pale king (his posthumous novel) are both incredible works that ultimately deal with exist…

I gave up reading Infinite Jest after getting 10-15% into it. I decided to come back to it later but never got back to it. It was somewhat difficult for me (not American). But this was a few years ago. Will try it again sometime soon.

ya, i did the same, took a few tries - i actually ended up reading the pale king first, might be worth trying that. it's shorter (around 500 pages) and i think written in a more digestible/measured manner - still a DFW work, the plots are barely discernible until pretty late in the work but there's less gymnastics to the writing, i like to think because he was more mature at that point but maybe the editor played more of a role since it was posthumous, who knows!

Re: “The Idiot” Savant: On Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Idiot

#56

Post by emodendroket »

throwaway84742 wrote: post #14
_blz2 wrote: post #6

This novel, along with 'Crime and punishement' deal with completely opposite personalities. One has a very optimistic view of the world, the other, Raskolnikov from Crime and Punishment, despises it and justifies violent crime with this mentality. Wonderful works, both of them. Unlike many, I read TBK first and decided to read Dostoevsky's other works and fell in love. Notes from the underground will always hold a sp…

As a Russian, I don’t understand how Americans can “get into” Dostoevsky or Tolstoy. The cultural background required to understand them is simply not there, so you’re getting maybe 50% of what’s there, and that’s an optimistic estimate. Likewise, I’m not sure I fully understand Hemingway, Steinbeck, etc. I enjoy their work, to be sure, but I’m afraid not to the extent Americans enjoy it. Thus far I have not found an…

I'm actually reading Crime and Punishment now, and the edition I'm reading has pretty frequent footnotes explaining all the Russian cultural references. But really, it goes beyond being Russian, doesn't it? You'd miss stuff if you weren't very familiar with the Bible, or by virtue of the fact that the Imperial Russian system it's set in no longer exists, or if you hadn't read Hugo or Pushkin, or a million other things. I'm not sure anybody catches everything casually reading the book, or even through years of study.

Hemingway himself considered himself pretty influenced by Russian authors. It's often speculated that his terse writing was in part influenced by Constance Garnett's translations of them.

Re: “The Idiot” Savant: On Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Idiot

#57

Post by emodendroket »

clipperton wrote: post #19
throwaway84742 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Russian, I don’t understand how Americans can “get into” Dostoevsky or Tolstoy. The cultural background required to understand them is simply not there, so you’re getting maybe 50% of what’s there, and that’s an optimistic estimate. Likewise, I’m not sure I fully understand Hemingway, Steinbeck, etc. I enjoy their work, to be sure, but I’m afraid not to the extent Americans enjoy it. Thus far I have not found an…

What sort of cultural points might be missed on a non-Russian person reading Dostoevsky? I just finished Crime and Punishment a couple months back and am curious, if you have the time.

Not that guy, but, Dostoevsky is pretty frequently referencing thinkers and cultural currents that were important in Russia at the time he was writing, and there are references like the "yellow card" and "ordinary paper" that are just totally opaque unless someone explains them to you.

Re: “The Idiot” Savant: On Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Idiot

#58

Post by emodendroket »

throwaway84742 wrote: post #49
dalacv wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are not the first Russian I have heard say that about Dostoevsky.

That’s because Russians themselves find it difficult to fully contextualize Dostoevsky. A couple hundred years from now they may not be able to do so at all, and the full depth will become inaccessible to anybody other than historians of the period in which Dostoevsky lived. Russia is still similar enough to that so a Russian of today can fill in the gaps as she reads the books. Not just what happened, that part is t…

People still read Shakespeare, whose world was even more remote from the one that English speakers live in today. Heck, they read Homer and Virgil and Ovid.
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