The reason Nabokov hated Dostoevsky so much was that he thought D. was a mediocre artist elevated because people thought his ideas were profound.

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Dostoevski, who dealt with themes accepted by most readers as universal in both scope and significance, is considered one of the world's great authors. Yet you have described him as "a cheap sensationalist, clumsy and vulgar." Why? 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.

You may want to take Nabokov with a grain of salt, though. He was massively arrogant and dismissed a lot of writers that are both popularly revered and central to many curricula:

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Interviewer: Is it true that you have called Hemingway and Conrad "writers of books for boys"? Nabokov: 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. What did you read when you were a boy? Between the ages of ten and fifteen in St. Petersburg, I must have read more fiction and poetry-- English, Russian and French-- than in any other five-year period of my life. I relished especially the works of Wells, Poe, Browning, Keats, Flaubert, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Alexander Blok. On another level, my heroes were the Scarlet Pimpernel, Phileas Fogg, and Sherlock Holmes. In other words, I was a perfectly normal trilingual child in a family with a large library. At a later period, in Western Europe, between the ages of 20 and 40, my favorites were Housman, Rupert Brooke, Norman Douglas, Bergson, Joyce, Proust, and Pushkin. Of these top favorites, several-- Poe, Jules Verne, Emmuska Orezy, Conan Doyle, and Rupert Brooke-- have lost the glamour and thrill they held for me. The others remain intact and by now are probably beyond change as far as I am concerned. I was never exposed in the twenties and thirties, as so many of my coevals have been, to the poetry of the not quite first-rate Eliot and of definitely second-rate Pound. I read them late in the season, around 1945, in the guest room of an American friend's house, and not only remained completely indifferent to them, but could not understand why anybody should bother about them. But I suppose that they preserve some sentimental value for such readers as discovered them at an earlier age than I did.

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Because of your mastery of our language, you are frequently compared with Joseph Conrad. Well, I'll put it this way. When a boy, I was a voracious reader, as all boy writers seem to be, and between 8 and 14 I used to enjoy tremendously the romantic productions-- romantic in the large sense-- of such people as Conan Doyle, Kipling, Joseph Conrad, Chesterton, Oscar Wilde, and other authors who are essentially writers for very young people. But as I have well said somewhere before, I differ from Joseph Conradically. First of ail, he had not been writing in his native tongue before he became an English writer, and secondly, I cannot stand today his polished cliches and primitive clashes. He once wrote that he preferred Mrs. Garnett's translation of Anna Karenin to the original! This makes one dream-- "ca fait rever" as Flaubert used to say when faced with some abysmal stupidity. Ever since the days when such formidable mediocrities as Galsworthy, Dreiser, a person called Tagore, another called Maxim Gorky, a third called Romain Rolland, used to be accepted as geniuses, I have been perplexed and amused by fabricated notions about so-called "great books". That, for instance, Mann's asinine Death in Venice or Pasternak's melodramatic and vilely written Zhivago or Faulkner's corncobby chronicles can be considered "masterpieces," or at least what journalists call "great books," is to me an absurd delusion, as when a hypnotized person makes love to a chair. My greatest masterpieces of twentieth century prose are, in this order: Joyce's Ulysses,Kafka's Transformation, Biely's Petersburg, and the first half of Proust's fairy tale In Search of Lost Time.

Well, you can't argue with the books he likes, but dismissing Conrad as a writer of romantic seafaring fiction for young boys is a bit off.

People who read literature with an intellectual score card probably annoy me as much as those who stubbornly insist that there's never any "hidden meaning", just pretentious over-analysis.

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Mixes:
> Maximum Elevation [Progressive House]
> DI.FM 26th Anniversary Guest Mix [Progressive House]
> Live @ Dance:Love:Hub London, 11.10.2025
> Higher Peaks [Progressive House]
> Dance:Love:Hub Afterparty (The Return) 23.11.24

Like these sets? Come see me play live at Kibosh in Manchester: https://www.instagram.com/kibosh.mcr/

quote:

Originally posted by MrJiveBoJingles Who's "insisting?"

I often am. I don't see why I'd ever read literature for its own sake again, if all experiences I've had thus far were far from rewarding... but I always end up giving literature a second, a third, and then a fourth chance

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quote: Originally posted by SYSTEM-J Exactly why I said he's doing it wrong. People who think literature has no worth, or is "masturbatory" if it doesn't contain some philosophical conclusion or statement on the human condition do not understand the joy of text. quote: Originally posted by MrJiveBoJingles It just seems like philosophically oriented people sometimes have a narrow idea about what fiction is "for," like there has to be some kind of "argument" or "philosophical conclusion" in there for it to be worth the read, or else they have to justify their reading of it with some kind of intellectual superstructure about "social critique" as with Kafka. If that's what fiction is for, why not just read bullet-point summaries of the "ideas" each work contains and save the time?

Because the context matters.

There's a very good reason why I do like books: they give the author an idea to expand a thought as much as he wants. There's a lot of room to argue, debate, give counter-examples and, if you're writing fiction, it's an awesome way to showcase your ideas and how they could apply to the real world. Like the narrator of Dosto's "Notes from Underground" talking throughout the book about his life: It does feel like a guy spitefully grumbling about his misery, and giving good well-written insights one after another. And, the best of all - it feels real. Osamu Dazai, one of the few authors I like, is the same. He makes you get in touch with your inner pathetic insecure self in a way no one I know has been able to imitate. That's the sort of fiction I like, because reading a book is an investment, time wise. If I'm going to spend a few hours doing something, I want to get something out of it that I can truly enjoy. I don't even need to agree with the author, as long as I keep an enlightening thought lingering in the back of my head.

That doesn't mean I think non-philosophical/non-scientific fiction is worthless, however. I just happen to belong to a different target audience: if I want to chill out and just enjoy a story for its own sake, I'd rather watch a film.

The last film I watched and that I really enjoyed was very empty. "Live Free or Die Hard" has no philosophical ideas behind it, no scientific insight, no nothing. It was just pure escapism, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I just can't bear to spend too much time on escapism.

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There you go again. No philosophical musing = escapism? You're missing the point massively.

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Mixes:
> Maximum Elevation [Progressive House]
> DI.FM 26th Anniversary Guest Mix [Progressive House]
> Live @ Dance:Love:Hub London, 11.10.2025
> Higher Peaks [Progressive House]
> Dance:Love:Hub Afterparty (The Return) 23.11.24

Like these sets? Come see me play live at Kibosh in Manchester: https://www.instagram.com/kibosh.mcr/

quote:

Originally posted by SYSTEM-J There you go again. No philosophical musing = escapism? You're missing the point massively.

Mind you, I think art in general is essentially escapist... and I wouldn't say all of philosophy is devoid of escapism either.

But, I think it is your turn now: what point am I missing?

Edit: It's kind of amusing that, while I'm criticising literature, no one noticed I've got the portrait of a famous poet in my avatar

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Originally posted by Lira Mind you, I think art in general is essentially escapist... and I wouldn't say all of philosophy is devoid of escapism either. But, I think it is your turn now: what point am I missing?

Well, I called it the "joy of text" earlier, which basically means an appreciation and enjoyment of the skill and power of literary writing.

I think the big problem is treating a piece of literature as a gigantic signifier serving only to denote a signified, where what is signified is the important part. That's a very linguistic way of treating art in general.

If you actually appreciate literature you don't necessarily treat it as a mere intellectual puzzle, or as a roundabout way of getting a point across. You have an appreciation for skillful and intelligent storytelling, characterisation, portrayal and evocation, and the ability to move you emotionally. One of the books I mentioned - Use Of Weapons - doesn't necessarily have a profound statement about any Big Issue, but I think it's a brilliant piece of literature because the ending was so powerful. It absolutely floored me - there was a period of minutes afterwards like I'd been hit by a hammer, unable to think about anything else. The many techniques and the skill of their deployment that went into creating that effect are worth savouring and appreciating. It's like appreciating how and why a great piece of music moves you.

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Mixes:
> Maximum Elevation [Progressive House]
> DI.FM 26th Anniversary Guest Mix [Progressive House]
> Live @ Dance:Love:Hub London, 11.10.2025
> Higher Peaks [Progressive House]
> Dance:Love:Hub Afterparty (The Return) 23.11.24

Like these sets? Come see me play live at Kibosh in Manchester: https://www.instagram.com/kibosh.mcr/

quote:

Originally posted by SYSTEM-J dismissing Conrad as a writer of romantic seafaring fiction for young boys is a bit off.

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quote:

Originally posted by SYSTEM-J Well, I called it the "joy of text" earlier, which basically means an appreciation and enjoyment of the skill and power of literary writing. I think the big problem is treating a piece of literature as a gigantic signifier serving only to denote a signified, where what is signified is the important part. That's a very linguistic way of treating art in general. If you actually appreciate literature you don't necessarily treat it as a mere intellectual puzzle, or as a roundabout way of getting a point across. You have an appreciation for skillful and intelligent storytelling, characterisation, portrayal and evocation, and the ability to move you emotionally. One of the books I mentioned - Use Of Weapons - doesn't necessarily have a profound statement about any Big Issue, but I think it's a brilliant piece of literature because the ending was so powerful. It absolutely floored me - there was a period of minutes afterwards like I'd been hit by a hammer, unable to think about anything else. The many techniques and the skill of their deployment that went into creating that effect are worth savouring and appreciating. It's like appreciating how and why a great piece of music moves you.

Yeah, I just can't see literature that way after the advent of cinema.

The way I see it, films tell histories, books give ideas. So, when you say the plot is interesting and whatnot, I can't help but think "Good, I'll wait for the movie to come out"

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On the topic of SF writing as mediocre, I tend to agree with the statement that it's more about materialism than 'spirituality'. Writers tend to get bogged down in technical details which obviously interest them, such as "the ship had an ion engine which worked by such and such method..." which bores the shit out of everyone else.

However, this isn't confined wholly to SF. I also found Lord of the Rings painful in this respect; there is a whole chapter where Tolkien drones on about how old Bilbo is in hobbit years and how much that equals in other races' years. Military books by authors like Tom Clancy and Michael Crichton can also do this, wasting too much time on telling you what gun the character is using and how many rounds it shoots et cetera.

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Originally posted by bas I always liked William Gibson's writing.

Why don't you like it anymore?

JBJ I would recommend Isaac Asimov. I've always liked his writing because it's a good story with a science fiction backdrop, not a science fiction geek fest with a story to carry it. As such, I've found his prose tends to be more accessible and pleasing.

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Originally posted by Lira Yeah, I just can't see literature that way after the advent of cinema. The way I see it, films tell histories, books give ideas. So, when you say the plot is interesting and whatnot, I can't help but think "Good, I'll wait for the movie to come out"

Pretty limited perspective, if you ask me. There's more than one way to tell a story.

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Mixes:
> Maximum Elevation [Progressive House]
> DI.FM 26th Anniversary Guest Mix [Progressive House]
> Live @ Dance:Love:Hub London, 11.10.2025
> Higher Peaks [Progressive House]
> Dance:Love:Hub Afterparty (The Return) 23.11.24

Like these sets? Come see me play live at Kibosh in Manchester: https://www.instagram.com/kibosh.mcr/

quote:

Originally posted by SYSTEM-J Pretty limited perspective, if you ask me. There's more than one way to tell a story.

Indeed, that's what different directors are for

(It's just a matter of personal taste here, really, it shouldn't be read as a statement against different ways of seeing literature)

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