[quote][cite]Posted By: Henry Irving[/cite][quote][cite]Posted By: BlackForestReds[/cite]Why the sudden change in your stance? ...........
Save your energy Henry, GH probably thinks Nikolai Gogol is a Russian search engine...[/quote]
I don't think that is fair. GH has said that ALL Russian authors are rubbish so obviously he has read them all otherwise he couldn't have reached that conclusion.
I thought Cancer Ward and One Day in the life of Ivan Denisovitch were very strong books exposing the evil and brutality of Stalinist Russia and so would have been write up GH's street.
Not so keen on Tolstoy. Five pages of descriptions on each character no matter how minor do my head in.[/quote]
Indeed, we can add Russian literature to the extensive list of things that GH is an expert in. I'm just wondering if Dostoyevsky used him as the inspiration for the character Prince Leo Nikolayevich Myshkin.
I'd recommend August 1914 if you like Solzhenitsyn - the outbreak of WWI from a Russian perspective written around several characters, some high born, others of lower caste, but having to deal with the bumbling inefficiency of the nobles who ran Russia's pre-war army. The story culminates with the destruction of the Russian army at the Battle of Tannenburg. Very similar in style to War & Peace except it looks to WWI rather than Napoleon's doomed invasion of Russia in 1812 and written in a far more modernist style - eliminating much of the descritive scene setting that is common for Russian authors, although that was a device used by many to confuse and bore the Tsarist censors from striking out too much detail or even rejecting the book entirely. Dostoyevsky and Turgenev used this device to put across their themes of existentialism and nihilism, wrapped in there are some subtle criticisms of the Russian aristocratic system in the 19th Century. Anyway, Anna Karenina is the most readable of Tolstoy's novels.
If you want to read anything on the horrors of the Soviet system, read "The Gulag Archipelago" as thorough a deconstruction of the Soviet penal system as you are likely to ever read. Solzhenitsyn experienced this first hand (which he covered in the First Circle) spending eight years in the prison camps and after in internal exile.
It seems to me P, that good art is good and bad art is...erm...bad..... or so I'm given to understand from reading this thread anyway!
Hope that answers your question.
Comments
Oh, the irony
Have a good weekend
...........
Save your energy Henry, GH probably thinks Nikolai Gogol is a Russian search engine...[/quote]
I don't think that is fair. GH has said that ALL Russian authors are rubbish so obviously he has read them all otherwise he couldn't have reached that conclusion.
I thought Cancer Ward and One Day in the life of Ivan Denisovitch were very strong books exposing the evil and brutality of Stalinist Russia and so would have been write up GH's street.
Not so keen on Tolstoy. Five pages of descriptions on each character no matter how minor do my head in.[/quote]
Indeed, we can add Russian literature to the extensive list of things that GH is an expert in. I'm just wondering if Dostoyevsky used him as the inspiration for the character Prince Leo Nikolayevich Myshkin.
I'd recommend August 1914 if you like Solzhenitsyn - the outbreak of WWI from a Russian perspective written around several characters, some high born, others of lower caste, but having to deal with the bumbling inefficiency of the nobles who ran Russia's pre-war army. The story culminates with the destruction of the Russian army at the Battle of Tannenburg. Very similar in style to War & Peace except it looks to WWI rather than Napoleon's doomed invasion of Russia in 1812 and written in a far more modernist style - eliminating much of the descritive scene setting that is common for Russian authors, although that was a device used by many to confuse and bore the Tsarist censors from striking out too much detail or even rejecting the book entirely. Dostoyevsky and Turgenev used this device to put across their themes of existentialism and nihilism, wrapped in there are some subtle criticisms of the Russian aristocratic system in the 19th Century. Anyway, Anna Karenina is the most readable of Tolstoy's novels.
If you want to read anything on the horrors of the Soviet system, read "The Gulag Archipelago" as thorough a deconstruction of the Soviet penal system as you are likely to ever read. Solzhenitsyn experienced this first hand (which he covered in the First Circle) spending eight years in the prison camps and after in internal exile.
grow up for gawd sake.
*in my opinion :-)
seconded have you heard of boreoffski
thanks for sinking AFKA or i might say what i really think of these very educated people
A nut to the nose should do the trick..
For someone who advocates a strong line on law and disorder (or should I say crime and punishment?) you seem to have a very short fuse.
I just read everyword on this "theme" and am still non the wiser.
Is art good or bad ?
Hope that answers your question.