Why did Nabokov call Dostoevsky "a cheap sensationalist"?

>>7333970
because dostoevsky was a reactionary with poor prose

>muh_reforming_waifu.exe
he's totally a sensationalist.

nabokov was literally autistic. His writing was good but his taste was absolute shit

>>7333991
his reviews were based. though, yeah, he went full autism on kafka. that was ugly.

Nabokov's criticism is hit or miss. His judgments of great writers are usually interesting but idiosyncratic bordering on perverse. I wouldn't take him seriously.

Check out the following review of Nabokov's translation of Eugene Onegin; it has an interesting viewpoint on Nabokov's personality and characteristics as a thinker.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1965/jul/15/the-strange-case-of-pushkin-and-nabokov/

>>7333972
Dostoevsky was a socialist, m80.

It's a well known fact that Nabokov was a total pleb.

>>7334437
>/lit/

>>7334074
Socialism was reactionary at the time.

>>7333970
He was right, Dostoevsky is for undergrad sentimentalists.

>>7334437
I'm not sure you know how Russian nobility works, anon.

>>7335505
He was a great writer - but a total pleb.

>>7335597
>pleb
www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2y8Sx4B2Sk

>>7335604
Say that to my face, fucker, not online.

>>7334074
>Dostoevsky was a socialist
Until he wasn't

Dostoevski the publicist is one of those megaphones of elephantine platitudes (still heard today), the roar of which so ridiculously demotes Shakespeare and Pushkin to the vague level of all the plaster idols of academic tradition, from Cervantes to George Eliot (not to speak of the crumbling Manns and Faulkners of our times).

Nabokov wants art. He doesn't want to read the author's half assed beliefs served up through prose because the author can't cut the mustard in top flight academic discussions.

I think a character getting a fever and lying in bed for ten weeks was the 19th century equivalent of *unzips dick*

>>7335609
Post address

http://lib.ru/NABOKOW/Inter03.txt

Non-Russian readers do not realize two things: that not
all Russians love Dostoevski as much as Americans do, and that
most of those Russians who do, venerate him as a mystic and not
as an artist. He was a prophet, a claptrap journalist and a
slapdash comedian. I admit that some of his scenes, some of his
tremendous, farcical rows are extraordinarily amusing. But his
sensitive murderers and soulful prostitutes are not to be
endured for one moment-- by this reader anyway.

D E S T R O Y E D

>Is it true that you have called Hemingway and Conrad
"writers of books for boys"?

That's exactly what they are. Hemingway is certainly the
better of the two; he has at least a voice of his own and is
responsible for that delightful, highly artistic short story,
"The Killers." And the description of the iridescent fish and
rhythmic urination in his famous fish story is superb. But I
cannot abide Conrad's souvenir-shop style, bottled ships and
shell necklaces of romanticist cliches. In neither of those two
writers can I find anything that I would care to have written
myself. In mentality and emotion, they are hopelessly juvenile,
and the same can be said of some other beloved authors, the
pets of the common room, the consolation and support of
graduate students, such as-- but some are still alive, and I
hate to hurt living old boys while the dead ones are not yet
buried.

>>7335622
You've never read Dostoyevsky, have you?

"My position in regard to Dostoevsky is a curious and difficult one. In all my courses I approach literature from the only point of view that literature interests me-namely the point of view of enduring art and individual genius. From this point of view Dostoevsky is not a great writer, but a rather mediocre one-with flashes of excellent humor, but, alas, with wastelands of literary platitudes in between."

"In Crime and Punishment Raskolnikov for some reason or other kills an old female pawnbroker and her sister. Justice in the shape of an inexorable police officer closes slowly in on him until in the end he is driven to a public confession, and through the love of a noble prostitute he is brought to a spiritual regeneration that did not seem as incredibly banal in 1866 when the book was written as it does now when noble prostitutes are apt to be received a little cynically by experienced readers."

"A good third [of readers] do not know the difference between real literature and pseudo-literature, and to such readers Dostoevsky may seem more important and more artistic than such trash as our American historical novels or things called From Here to Eternity and such like balderdash."

>>7335634

I've never read Dostoevsky, that's right. And unless you can read and understand Russian, neither have you, my dear patrushka!

*falls in to fever*
*converts to Christianity*

>>7335643
*fucks young girl*
*dies*

Quality novel 10/10 Nabokov.

Nabokov was sexually abused as a child

>>7335648
you haven't read Nabokov
>>7335653
you're just insane

>>7335657
>you haven't read Nabokov

Just like you haven't read Dostoyevsky.

So why are you talking shit like you know shit?

>>7335659
I have read both, I wasn't the guy you're responding to. Yeb vas

>>7335657
>you're just insane
of course he was sexually abused as a child, there's no other reason he would be obsessed with pedo shit and include it in both lolita and ada

>>7335653
Nabokov got raped as a kid?

No wonder he's so anally pained.

>>7335660

Wow, a Russian speaker on lit!

>>7335660
>>7335667
cyka.

>>7335648
The difference is you are criticizing the plot, whereas the other guy is criticizing Dostoevsky's writing skills

>>7335674
>whereas the other guy is criticizing Dostoevsky's writing skills

He oversimplified Crime and Punishment to show it was shit. I oversimplified Lolita to show how you can do that to any work.

>>7335664
He's reliving the teenage love affair he had with a peasant girl before he had to flee Russia for being a blue blood. If you'd read The Original of Laura, you'd see that all those characters, not just in Lolita and Ada, were a conglomeration of her and Flora, the missing American child he studied in great detail. The Titian and Giorgione comparison alone shows a writer of greater imagination and scope, with more literary constraint than Dostoyevsky's dancing in the streets.

>>7335682

My first point was about Dostoevsky serving up half baked philosophy in a novel shaped shell, while Nabokov wants to see talent. Then I commenced the trolling while you failed to answer my original point.

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Hey OP, I felt the need to improve your waifu. She's cute, but she's mine now.

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Don't worry OP, you can have her pure version.

>>7335765
light of my life

>>7335765
>filename + 666
:o

>>7333999
>he went full autism on kafka.
elaborate please

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>>7335783
never talk to a entomologist about vermin

>>7335800
Actually a marked improvement on the original.

>>7335800
>corrugated
>removing gigantic

Goddammit Nabokov.

>>7335717
>you failed to answer my original point.

You didn't have a point to begin with, but fine.

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>>7335822
He really thought about it

>>7335836
Oh, so he was one of those kinds of people.

I bet if he was working today, he'd routinely contribute to Wikipedia and get really angry when people tried to revert his edits.

>>7335800


I really disagree with these edits.

Destroys a great deal of the tone which makes the story so charming.

Nobokov is good but there is something that always underlies his writing, like an autistic inability to function on any wavelength not his own.

Also that bug is so fucking off, Nobokov please, to fit under a bed that bug would not be gigantic at all it would be comically small. The real shape would be much more squat and flat and long like an alligator more than a tortoise.

>>7335844
omfg nabokovian wikipedia is the greatest idea in the history of humanity. why can we not have nice things there is no god etc etc

>>7335849
>Also that bug is so fucking off, Nobokov please, to fit under a bed that bug would not be gigantic at all it would be comically small.
>disagree with the edit that takes out gigantic from insect
nabokov turned it down to being close to 3' big compared to kafka's GIGANTIC for a reason m8. learn to read

>>7334074
clearly you've never read Demons m80

>>7335622
Art for the sake of art is more like it.
The ignorance of people who say things like this astounds me.
If academia was not complete hiveminded folly, then I can assure you dostoyevsky would have considered himself a part of it, but this wasn't the renaissance anymore.

This idea that he just didn't have the intellectual chops is retarded, because dostoyevsky in fact does not present Christianity in any kind of straightforward manner, everything is contradiction with him, he rests nowhere in the world.
This is really a central theme with Christianity that he was trying to lay out; that you can't have your cake and eat it too; you can't have the truth -and- live by it, because living is human, and the second you live as a human you lose that perspective with which to see truth.

>>7333970
Dostoevsky was a Christian, so that he's a cheap sensationalist goes without saying.

>>7335908
He was a Christian socialist. Extremely against atheist socialism. In the Brothers Karamazov, for instance, he is very critical of atheistic socialism, but then says Christian socialism is the goal of the Church. He makes a tremendous distinction between atheistic socialism and Christian socialism, in the dialogue Ivan and Muisov have with Zosima.

>>7335857
As gregor samsa awoke one morning from a troubled dream he found himself edited by a gigantic autist. His bed had also been placed on stilts, and the painting in his room had been replaced with a precise replica 1/2 the size in order to maintain continuity.

>>7336074
closer but still needs work

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>>7336045
Bop on outta here bruh.

>>7335800
Why the hell is he doing edits on a translation.

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>>7335741
Nah, you should have left the cross. The purity of the Christian symbol contrasted with the vulgarity of the cleavage makes it even hotter.

Dostoyevsky is a chief sensei on the List

>>7336490
Haha holy fuck yr right. (Can we lower the cut of her dress, family?)

>>7336308
You haven't read his foreword to his translator's notes on his corrected English translation of his own work, Glory/Podvig, a fictional version of his later autobiography, Speak, Memory, which he took the trouble to write in English to avoid such problems of translating Russian into English, and which he still had to correct the title for UK readers, US readers, and when it was translated into Russian, so that mere mortals could pronounce it.

Nobody understands prose or meaning in any language in which he wrote better than Nabokov does is the upshot. I did say full autism but it's devastatingly competent autism

>>7335857
Except for an insect anything bigger than a rat is gigantic.

I haven't read Nabokov. Can anyone tell me if he has any depth of ideas, or is his work purely superficial?

>>7336724
I thought tripfags thought they were smart... that's why they want credit for their posts... I'm an idiot...

>>7336677
but ungeheuer is used for sea monsters [Seeungeheuer] and that type of thing.

he was monstrously large. nabokov's estimation of three foot is small for a monstrously large insect.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bhoWfC1L9k
as you can see a monstrously large insect can easily be twice the size of a tank.

>>7335511

Socialism was right wing?

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>>7336917
>reactionary movements are always right-wing

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>>7335741
>>7335765
>>7336490
>>7336595
This is pretty prophetic.
I wonder if you guys would cry if I misted you with holy water.

>>7336979
>thinks reactionary movements aren't right-wing
>posts image of a reactionary right-wing leader

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>>7334014
>Since Mr. Nabokov is in the habit of introducing any job of this kind which he undertakes by an announcement that he is unique and incomparable and that everybody else who has attempted it is an oaf and an ignoramus, incompetent as a linguist and scholar, usually with the implication that he is also a low-class person and a ridiculous personality

Nabokov openly admitted that he preferred style over substance and Dostoyevsky's style isn't particularly special. Then there's also >>7335626: many educated Russians just don't hold Dostoyevsky in such high regard. The older members of my family actually say "pulling a Dostoyevsky" as an insult; they associate it with sentimental, self-absorbed forced drama.

>>7336979
They literally are

>>7337978
>farage
>reactionary or right wing