Dostoevsky vs. Tolstoy, which is greater?

[Florestan]

Interesting, Brian. Happy New Year!

+ 1. Food for thought.

Straight away, I strongly disagree that Turgenev is a "lesser light". Heck, Wallace himself prefaces his article with a Turgenev quote...

[Florestan]

Happy New Year, Andrei. I read Diary of a Writer decades ago. I will re-read the work. As for Russian politics I find Boris Yeltsin and Peter the Great fascinating. I like reading about Russian politics, but I am glad I wasn't born in Russia/USSR.

Happy New Year to you too, Manabu!

Had I been born in Tsarist Russia in 1872 on the same social level I was actually born, ie educated lesser "bourgeoisie", I would have probably emmigrated immediately after 1918. 

[Florestan]

Wallace, for what it's worth, thinks better of Dostoevsky than Tolstoy because Tolstoy is more overtly preachy, while Dostoevsky lets the philosophical struggle take place within his characters. Both of them do have a tendency to create characters who are stand-ins for ideas but not especially interesting as characters; e.g. the saintly brother in Karamazov and Levin in Karenina. But Tolstoy happily inserts his own ideas straight into the narrative, most of all in the philosophy chapters of W&P, while Dostoevsky uses his characters as pieces on a chess board, and he uses the plot to prove which characters he thinks are right.

Never heard of this Wallace guy but I'd gladly buy him a beer vodka shot or two.

[Ganondorf]

I have never heard the name of the other writer, so while I cannot exclude confusion, it cannot be with this one. It must be Tolstoy and I am pretty sure that it is a minor scene in Anna Karenina or War and Peace. I think the guy's name is Sergei but I am not sure.

I seem to recall a mushroom picking scene in Anna Karenina. Then again, I have never completely read War and peace.

[Ganondorf]

I enjoyed reading your opposing view. I find your opinion very reasonable. Thank you for the insightful post, and Happy New Year.

Thank you and likewise! 

[Jo498]

Further above someone claimed that Dostoevsky's characters are actually not planned through and have a live of their own... So they are not merely chess pieces. As with most good authors there is a spectrum of some characters developed more than others. Alyosha was supposed to become the hero of a sequel, so he remains comparably one-dimensional in the (first and only) book; I don't think Dmitri and Ivan are one-dimensional.

I'd say (and I have not read either authors complete works but most of the better known ones) that at his best Tolstoy has more well rounded characters (incl. minor ones). Everything is more well rounded, whereas FMD's novels are sometimes more like dramas with only dialogue and hardly any background, descriptions etc. Vignettes like those hunts in "The Cossacks" or even shorter prose are examples of Tolstoy's supreme skill.
But with some others, probably worst in "Kreutzer Sonata" (and the parallel novella about adultery whose name I forgot, it's not quite as dark and more biographical) they are a preacher's puppets.

[Karl Henning]

I seem to recall a mushroom picking scene in Anna Karenina. Then again, I have never completely read War and peace.

This is non-definitive, of course, but offhand I do not recall any mushroom-picking (popularly called Quiet Hunting in Petersburg) in War and Peace.

[Florestan]

I think that in the context "greater" actually means "I like his work more".

Both are giants of literature which have been rarely equalled and never surpassed --- and this is a mere figure of speech: otomh I can't think of any writer post-Dostoevsky-and-Tolstoy who equalled them.

[Jo498]

I think it is in Anna Karenina. They are both minor characters but the scene fits with the "relationship" theme of the whole book, as it is failed attempt at a relationship.

I don't think it is nitpicking to point out aspects where one artist seems more successful than the other one, even when "faults" or failures don't mean that these are not great works nevertheless. It's ages that I read it but I was always quite convinced by the critique against Tolstoy's "Resurrection" that he tried something (roughly a variant of guilt and redemption) where Dostoevsky was much better, including *having actually been banned to Siberia himself*.

[Florestan]

It's ages that I read it but I was always quite convinced by the critique against Tolstoy's "Resurrection" that he tried something (roughly a variant of guilt and redemption) where Dostoevsky was much better, including *having actually been banned to Siberia himself*.

There is a musical counter-argument to that: Verdi. He never ever experienced in his life even a quarter of what his characters experience on stage.

Si vis me flere, dolendum est primum ipsi tibi is not a prerequisite of art, pace Quintius Horatius Flaccus. 

[Dry Brett Kavanaugh]

I think that in the context "greater" actually means "I like his work more".

Both are giants of literature which have been rarely equalled and never surpassed --- and this is a mere figure of speech: otomh I can't think of any writer post-Dostoevsky-and-Tolstoy who equalled them.

No. My question is asking which produced better works in the art of literature and which is a better author in general.

[Florestan]

My question is asking which produced better works in the art of literature and which is a better author in general.

And my answer is Dostoevsky because and only because I enjoy his works more than Tolstoy's.

I do not --- emphatically do not --- think there are any objective and measurable criteria upon which to decide which produced better works in the art of literature and which is a better author in general. As I said before, I am not aware of any writer born after them who equalled, let alone surpassed, them.

Btw, have you cast your vote in my Mozart vs. Beethoven thread? 

[Ganondorf]

There is a musical counter-argument to that: Verdi. He never ever experienced in his life even a quarter of what his characters experience on stage.

On the other hand, Verdi did say he worked like a galley slave during 1840s.  No offense meant, no matter how much of a hard worker Verdi was, that can never amount to The actual lot of a galley slave.

[Dry Brett Kavanaugh]

It's not that Dostoyevsky is enigmatic or cryptic about the inner lives of his characters, it's that he himself didn't claim to fully understand what his characters thought or what motivated them. According to Mikhail Bakhtin, Dostoyevsky didn't adopt an omniscient creator stance to his characters, but rather a dialogic one. He heard them as fully autonomous voices, discourses standing on an equal footing with his own. There is evidence of this in Dostoyevsky's diaries, like a note to himself that he needed to clarify Raskolnikov's motivation for murder, acknowledging that he didn't fully understand it himself. He never did clarify it, and that was his genius. Characters that can be fully dissected and classified by an author are inherently unrealistic because, arguably, it is impossible for any person to understand another to that extent. In a similar vein Philip Rhav described Dostoyevsky as the first novelist to comprehensively explore the indeterminacy of characterization (paraphrasing from memory).

I love both authors and have read all of their long fiction, most of it more than once. I'm less keen on Tolstoy because he is a bit too obvious in his moral judgments. One knows, for example, that Constantine Levin (from Anna Karenina) is Tolstoy's ideal aristocratic land owner. I tend to find such characters tedious and unconvincing.

Me too. That describes me perfectly.

Michel de Montaigne said that great artworks possess some intention other than that of the artists.

[Brian]

Never heard of this Wallace guy but I'd gladly buy him a beer vodka shot or two.

Unfortunately, he is no longer on this earth, or I would too. He was a genius of criticism and analysis who also tried very hard (with of course mixed results) to revive the kind of philosophical fiction the Russians produced.

Michel de Montaigne said that great artworks possess some intention other than that of the artists.

Truer words rarely spoken!

-

I do think I need to revisit Dostoevsky especially, because my last interactions with him were in the clunky Pevear & Volokhonsky translations, and I remember enjoying Karamazov especially a whole lot more in a different translation back in college. The translation issue really vexes any attempt to decide which of these novelists were "greater" for an English speaker, especially since the two translators who did them all in a consistent translated style - Garnett and Pevear/Volokhonsky - are really idiosyncratic and weird.

[Jo498]

Translations seem to be particular vexing in the case of Russian authors, maybe because so few people (including prominent critics and journalists) in the West read Russian and can have a really informed opinion, compared with English, German and the Romance and Scandinavian languages. I sometimes get the impression that prejudices or judgments on translation are just echoed for years or decades by semi-knowledgeable people. (I have no idea about the English translations of the Russian classics, but I read German translations by half a dozen translator or so and some books in two translations and never found this to be such a huge difference, despite German feuilleton writers claims, but most of them don't know Russian, so their opinion is as good/bad as mine.)

[Dry Brett Kavanaugh]

I do think I need to revisit Dostoevsky especially, because my last interactions with him were in the clunky Pevear & Volokhonsky translations, and I remember enjoying Karamazov especially a whole lot more in a different translation back in college. The translation issue really vexes any attempt to decide which of these novelists were "greater" for an English speaker, especially since the two translators who did them all in a consistent translated style - Garnett and Pevear/Volokhonsky - are really idiosyncratic and weird.

Imho, Karamazov is somehow close to the Tolstoyian style and least/less Dostoevskyian.

[Artem]

I'd go with Tolstoy, just because he managed to avoid writing such sentimental abomination as the ending of the Brothers Karamazov.

They are both enjoyable writers. I'd definitely recommend The Idiot and The Demons as well as War and Peace and Anna Karenina to anybody. It is very easy to avoid Tolstoy's philosophy and just enjoy his characters and atmosphere, but I find it very difficult to relate when Dostoyevsky tries to push the pity button in his work.

Vladimir Nabokov's very opinionated lectures on Russian literature are worth reading. Here's a bit on Fyodor:

Dostoyevsky never really got over the influence which the European mystery novel and the sentimental novel made upon him. The sentimental influence implied that kind of conflict he liked - placing virtuous people in pathetic situations and then extracting from these situations the last ounce of pathos... Dostoyevsky's lack of taste, his monotonous dealings with persons suffering with pre-Freudian complexes, the way he has of wallowing in the tragic misadventures of human English words expressing several, although by no means all, aspects of poshlost are, for instance, ''cheap,'' ''sham,'' ''smutty,'' ''highfalutin,'' ''in bad taste.'' dignity - all this is difficult to admire. I do not like this trick his characters have of ''sinning their way to Jesus'' or, as a Russian author, Ivan Bunin, put it more bluntly, ''spilling Jesus all over the place.

"Dostoyevsky characterizes his people through situation, through ethical matters, their psychological reactions, their inside ripples. After describing the looks of a character, he uses the old-fashioned device of not referring to his specific physical appearance anymore in the scenes with him. This is not the way of an artist - say Tolstoy - who sees his character in his mind all the time and knows exactly the specific gesture he will employ at this or that moment".

[Jo498]

Admittedly, I have not read the two or three early Dostoevsky novels (Poor People etc.) but in the mature novels the main plot points are not virtuous people in pathetic situations, with a few exceptions (like Prince Myshkin or Sonya Marmeladova, and even they are not quite like Oliver Twist or Little Nell). He places morally dubious and psychologically complex  people in conflicting situations, e.g. Raskolnikov, Rogoshin, Nastassya in "The idiot", Dmitri and Ivan Karamasov, almost everyone in "The Demons" and "The gambler".

[milk]

I do think I need to revisit Dostoevsky especially, because my last interactions with him were in the clunky Pevear & Volokhonsky translations, and I remember enjoying Karamazov especially a whole lot more in a different translation back in college. The translation issue really vexes any attempt to decide which of these novelists were "greater" for an English speaker, especially since the two translators who did them all in a consistent translated style - Garnett and Pevear/Volokhonsky - are really idiosyncratic and weird.

Interesting. I remember those translations were touted as being so much better. I never read them. I don't know what I would have read in college. So, what ARE the best translations?
As a kid, I preferred Dostoyevsky's wild world even though the endings never made sense.