alt Hacker NewsI might've conveyed myself poorly. Never said Dostoevsky wasn't great or not a relevant read! I was just reacting to the OP who seemed to say it's still the best ever. But we've improved everything, art, kites, the wheel. It's the same for literature, but you do have to get pretty deep into lit to see though.
The main criticism for I have for Dostoevsky is that he's overdramatic. Yes it's great fun fiction and a vast improvement over the simpler, more idealized writing of much of his era, but some of the angst of his characters is simply cultural. He has a lot of religious influence in his work (which don't appeal to me as an atheist) and their struggles for the human soul is a symptom of his time. A Buddhist might say, just calm the fuck down man. Most people don't react to horrible situations by "crashing out", but via coping and rationalization and making the best of their situation, that's how you get consistent improvement and accrue generational uplift.
Later writers like Virginia Woolf is able to better integrate a variety of responses to suffering, post modernists like Tao Lin even gets overly detached (everyone hates post modernists). But I think the best novel about the human condition ever written, which handles the drama, but realistically, is probably by Elena Ferrante in 2011. I'm not highlighting any underrated work here lol, it's widely acclaimed, including called the best book of the 21st century by the NYT.
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> Most people don't react to horrible situations by "crashing out", but via coping and rationalization and making the best of their situation, that's how you get consistent improvement and accrue generational uplift.
Most people I've known do not react rationally to horrible situations. Or even to good situations.
I think what is easy to overlook with Dostoevsky is that although he is arguably the inventor of the psychological novel, the characters in his novels are largely representatives of the impact of ideologies on the lives and psyches of real people or the impact of the psyches (as impacted themselves by their life experiences) on their choice of ideology. The taking of ideologies to their logical conclusion in his character's lives is what results in "hysterical characters".
I think to argue that Dostoevsky is not among the best psychological novelists is to slightly misunderstand what he was trying to achieve.
To be fair you have to be very deep into literature to criticize dostoevsky as "overdramatic"
Alright, I see what you mean now. Thanks for the explanation! Whether or not I agree, that’s a lot more nuanced than my earlier interpretation of your opinion.
I like the religious lens of his work, though. I don’t personally identify with it, especially his particular brand of it, but that’s part of the work’s appeal to me. Similarly, I’m not an existentialist but it was neat to see the world that way through “L'Étranger” (even though Camus rejected the label).
But I do want to push back against the idea that we know vastly more about human nature today than in the 1800s. We’ve been formally studying western philosophy, intently and seriously, for at least 2,500 years. On a timeline between Plato and today, “C&P” was written 94% of the way to the finish line. We might have better models of some details now, but we’ve had a pretty solid knowledge of the fundamentals for an awfully long time. By analogy, Monet didn’t know jack about quantum physics, but he famously explored the subtleties of the appearance of light in nature.
I surely don’t want to take the position that older = better, either. You’re right: we’re still learning, practicing, and getting better! There’s still an awful lot of gold to be found in earlier works, though.