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Old December 14th, 2013 #21
Matthaus Hetzenauer
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Originally Posted by Fred Streed View Post
So, MH, what have you decided on "War and Peace"? If you do read it you probably won't regret it.

When I commented about finding the Russian literature strange I didn't mean that as a put down. It is all the more reason to read them. Russia isn't something that can be ignored.
I think I'm going to postpone it for now (and the first of the year's definitely out), but who knows, maybe sometime down the road in 2014 I'll get to it.

Of all the great responses to my question, one word alone stands out in regards to whether or not I should read War and Peace, and that's Bardamu's "traction"; that which he didn't experience while reading the book. That's very telling to me; it's key as to whether or not I'm going to like a particular work.

It's taken me as long as 150 pages to "get into" a particular book; before that book put the hook into me, i.e., gained any traction. And the drift I get from Bardamu is that the novel more or less plods along. Now before I take on any book 1,000+ pages, fiction or non, I'm going to do my absolute best to make as sure as sure can be that, when done, I'm going to be glad I read it. I mean, BFD if you trudge through a book 3, 4, 5 or even 600 pages and you wind up not liking it; shit happens. But if I did read a monster the size of W&P and came to find that it was nothing but one big fat waste of time, I'd be very, very pissed at myself for not having gone with my gut instinct. Besides, though the only work I've read of Tolstoy is his novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich, I can't say that I'm all that impressed with the man.



p.s. As far as putting, or not putting, down Russian lit goes (and I know you weren't): it doesn't matter to me, Fred, whether people do or not; literature is art, and all art's subjective. When I first got into classics way back when, all I read were the Brits and Americans; folks such as Dickens, Hardy, Stevenson and Eliot; Hawthorne, Twain, Faulkner and Steinbeck. I was under the delusion that the Russians -- and to a lesser extent, the French -- were nothing but a bunch of total fucking bores; people that only pretentious, stuckup Ivy League eggheads read. But then as my tastes in literature became more sophisticated, more refined (hate to use that word, but I can't really think of a better), I gradually drifted into the Russians and French, and came to really appreciate them. So it goes.
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Old December 14th, 2013 #22
Matthaus Hetzenauer
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Originally Posted by Solskeniskyn View Post
Thanks for the link to the Revilo article, interesting reading.

So as regards the critique of what some regard as the pretentious, long winded, over-hyped, perceivably non-western, sometimes sentimentally christian moralizing -nature of the Russian likes of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, I'll agree that there is a measure of truth to that.

"The Brothers Karamazov", for example, with its claim to fame of being a work of great philosophical magnitude, I regard as overrated, and "The Idiot" too (though I still consider them being worth the time to read), as the christian strain in them is so dominating, to their detriment.

Now (keeping to Dostoyevsky): Cristianity is not exactly void in "Crime and Punishment" (which I regard as one of the best book I've ever read, in agreement with Matthaus) or "Notes from the Underground" either, but the difference is that you there have such gripping, convincing portraits of real, complex characters, offering a deep look into the human soul of some seriously troubled people, that isn't hinged to the christian smothering moral universe to an extent to make it feel alien and repellent.

Raskolnikov ("Crime and Punishment") is probably the fictional character that has made the strongest impression on me, all categories...hell, come to mention it, I think it's about time for a re-read, it's been a while since.
A great post overall...

I first read C&P (and The Idiot) in paperback format ca. 1990 and absolutely loved it; couldn't put it down for the life of me. It sinks its hooks into the reader right from the get-go; with Rasky evading his unpaid bitch of a landlord and walking on over to the house in which he is contemplating his crime...but really not all that intent on actually carrying it out.

A few months back I scored a used hardcover of the book, and I too plan rereading it in the near future. One of the best psychological studies of the criminal mind ever; if not the best.
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Old December 23rd, 2013 #23
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I just finished reading War and Peace for the first time. It's a mix of narrative, history and philosophical treatise. I found it most interesting in the simpler, domestic scenes rather than the philosophical sections and the sections describing combat and military strategy.
 
Old May 13th, 2014 #24
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More than 2/3 into it. Safe to say you can see where Gandhi got his ideas from. Great book though.

Quote:
Many historians tell us that the French failed to win the battle of Borodino because Napoleon had a cold, and if he hadn’t had a cold the orders he issued before and during the battle would have marked him out even more clearly as a genius, and Russia would have been destroyed and the face of the world would have been changed. To those historians who maintain that Russia was formed by the will of a single man, Peter the Great, and France was turned from a republic into an empire, and the French army marched into Russia all by the will of a single man, Napoleon, the argument that Russia retained power because Napoleon had a bad cold on the 26th of August must seem highly persuasive.

By that reckoning the conclusion is inescapable, as inescapable as the conclusion arrived at jokingly by Voltaire (without knowing who the joke was on) that the Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Night was due to Charles IX suffering a touch of indigestion. But to anyone who cannot accept that Russia was formed by the will of a single man, Peter the Great, and the French empire was created, and the war with Russia set up, by the will of a single man, Napoleon, this kind of argument will seem not just weak and unreasonable, but contrary to all human experience. The question of what causes historical events will call for a very different answer, that the course of worldly events is determined on high and it depends on the complex combined will of all the participants, Napoleon’s influence on these particular events being no more than peripheral and fictitious.

At the battle of Borodino Napoleon never fired a shot and didn’t kill anyone. All of that was done by the soldiers; hence he did no killing of his own.
The soldiers of the French army set out to slay Russian soldiers at Borodino not because of Napoleon’s orders, but because they wanted to. The whole army, Frenchmen, Italians, Germans and Poles, hungry men dressed in rags and weary from the long campaign, took one look at the army that barred the way to Moscow and came to one conclusion: if the wine was uncorked it had to be drunk.
If at that point Napoleon had told them not to fight the Russians they would have killed him and gone on to fight the Russians, because by now it had become inevitable.

Last edited by Chad Wentworth; May 13th, 2014 at 09:33 AM.
 
Old May 15th, 2014 #25
Matthaus Hetzenauer
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Chad and Clancy:

I made up my mind about two weeks ago that I am going to read War and Peace after all (sometime before the summer's out, at latest). Now I'm going to allot myself 200 pages; if it doesn't grab hold of me by then, I'm simply going to lay it aside and cut my losses.

To judge from the homework I've done on the book, and the opinions I've received in this thread, it appears as though I'm going to like it. If not, why then, I'll have you two to blame...won't I?

Yay! or Motherfucker! -- what's it gonna be?
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Old May 15th, 2014 #26
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Originally Posted by Fred Streed View Post
Yes, I kind of get that feeling about them too.

Yockey talks a little about this in Imperium IIRC.
I always thought Pierce ridiculously overplayed that idea that we can't understand how other races think. I don't believe that at all. I can feel how niggers and jews think. Asians are somewhat harder.

Once you grasp that other cultures/races are different...then it's not too hard to understand them, as long as you keep paying attention and noticing things. It's never easy, I wouldn't say, but it isn't easy to understand how your own relatives think either.
 
Old May 15th, 2014 #27
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"Notes from the underground" is another great psychological portrait of a neurotic outsider by Dostoyevsky.

"White Nights", and "The Gambler", is two shorter ones by him that I remember from the top of my head that also made an impression on me.

As regards the latter, having spent a year or so myself grinding out a decent but not to glamorous living on internet poker

some years back when I was fresh out of school, and
But you can win at poker; you can't win at the sort of games that Doestoyevsky was playing. He was too dumb to figure that out. This goes just fine with his ending up a religious crank. "oy, redeemed I must be." I also disagree on Raskolnikov. I can't give specifics beyond when I read it, I thought, no, that is not how someone would feel after doing what he did. I didn't think it was realistic at all, I thought it was more of a morality play. Murderers feel remorse...for getting caught.

Last edited by Alex Linder; May 15th, 2014 at 09:54 PM.
 
Old May 15th, 2014 #28
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I liked Notes from the Underground. I did read The Idiot, it's ok but nothing great.
 
Old May 16th, 2014 #29
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Be honest now: Have you really read War and Peace?
Fuck no.

Nevertheless I'll attempt it eventually. Maybe I should have started it instead of the Crime and Punishment re-read.

MH, let me know when you begin your reading of it. If you haven't already. I'll follow your protocol of 200 pages and maybe we can do some fruity book club discussion if you're open to it (and any other members, if interested).
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Old May 19th, 2014 #30
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Fuck no.

Nevertheless I'll attempt it eventually. Maybe I should have started it instead of the Crime and Punishment re-read.

MH, let me know when you begin your reading of it. If you haven't already. I'll follow your protocol of 200 pages and maybe we can do some fruity book club discussion if you're open to it (and any other members, if interested).
Get ready, Thad, I'm bowing up the courage to tackle it now, and I'll probably crack it sometime in late June; but I will let you know the exact date at least a week in advance. Hey, this could be fun -- we'll compare notes; rag or rag not on the count; all that happy horseshitsky.

And Alex: Do try Crime and Punishment, and then tell me what you think of Dostoevsky. It's a Jekyll and Hyde-type split personality psychological thriller that'll grab anyone with something more than uncultivated, proletarian tastes (hate to sound like a pompous ass with the highbrow elitist adjectives, but it's the best I can come up with at the moment). And fuck what Henry James had to say about it (parphrasing: "I almost couldn't finish it; in fact, it almost finished me"); he whose yawner of 300+ page novel The American, which I should've knocked off in a week, at most, has left me in a narcoleptic limbo for over three goddamn weeks now, and is about to finish me. He's got balls knocking Fyodor's shit, lemme tell ya.
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Old May 19th, 2014 #31
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I did read The Idiot, it's ok but nothing great.
BZZZDT! Oooh, I'm sorry, Alex! that's the wrong answer. The correct answer is "It is fuckin' great!" Johnny, what consolation prizes do we have for our departing contestant?

Dink, er, I mean Wink -- in addition to a year's supply each of Wet-Naps towelettes and Kotex feminine napkins, we have the 2014 revised edition of Get Your Loopy Head Out of Your Dumb Ass and Appreciate Genuine Literature, published by Oxford University Press!



(as if I should have to use this smilie...)
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Old May 19th, 2014 #32
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I've finished about 2/3 of it. Pretty good. Read Anna Karenina a while back, pretty good as well, along the same lines.
Doestoyevsky is in another category in my view, especially Crime and Punishment and Brothers Karamazov. Nothing from the british comes close to this, the best books i've ever read. The christian element in Karamazov is irritating, but the rest is brilliant.
The Idiot on the other hand was incomprehensible to me.

The russians certainly are different than the british of the same period. I've read most of Hardy, Dickens and Stevenson and it's completely different. Stevenson was most enjoyable, Dickens funnier and Hardy is gloomier.
 
Old May 19th, 2014 #33
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Originally Posted by Matthaus Hetzenauer View Post
Get ready, Thad, I'm bowing up the courage to tackle it now, and I'll probably crack it sometime in late June; but I will let you know the exact date at least a week in advance. Hey, this could be fun -- we'll compare notes; rag or rag not on the count; all that happy horseshitsky.
It will be a long summer.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Acer
The christian element in Karamazov is irritating, but the rest is brilliant.
re: Crime and Punishment. The Christian existentialism is antagonizing me this time around. I cannot speak for Brothers.
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Old May 21st, 2014 #34
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I've finished about 2/3 of it. Pretty good. Read Anna Karenina a while back, pretty good as well, along the same lines.
Doestoyevsky is in another category in my view, especially Crime and Punishment and Brothers Karamazov. Nothing from the british comes close to this, the best books i've ever read.

The russians certainly are different than the british of the same period.
It's nice to hear you're enjoying W&P; it only encourages Thad and I that much more to finally tackle the monumental motherfucker.

And yes, the Russians are "different" from the 19th century British (or anyone else for that matter). Rather than the romantic, they tend to focus more on the tragic and psychological elements of a man's actions and consequences.

I used to wonder why it was that Russian novelists, given the harsh and brutal history of their semi-barbaric nation (barbaric as opposed to the more civilized and "advanced" of west Europeans) were able to write such powerful and impassioned works that made their western contemporaries' look like kiddie-lit in comparison; and the answer is obvious: experience, bud, trumps imagination any ol' time when it comes to writing fiction; it's as simple as that.
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Old May 21st, 2014 #35
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It will be a long summer.

Yup.

Late last night I started DH Lawrence's Women in Love. But hey, don't let the Alcott-Austen-Bronte Sisters-like title fool you; these are two sisters who aren't squeaky clean innocents (though mid-20s cherries at the start of the book) in quest of their knights in shining armor. Uh-uh; far from it according to the homework I've done and what I've read thus far. I'm only on page 20, thereabouts, and already I'm hooked.

p.s. next up is *gulp* War and Peace.
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Old May 21st, 2014 #36
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Chad and Clancy:

I made up my mind about two weeks ago that I am going to read War and Peace after all (sometime before the summer's out, at latest). Now I'm going to allot myself 200 pages; if it doesn't grab hold of me by then, I'm simply going to lay it aside and cut my losses.

To judge from the homework I've done on the book, and the opinions I've received in this thread, it appears as though I'm going to like it. If not, why then, I'll have you two to blame...won't I?

Yay! or Motherfucker! -- what's it gonna be?
30 more pages to go. The only issue I have is with Tolstoy's view of history: he thinks it's a product of the masses. Today we know otherwise. To him Napoleon is basically an overconfident idiot who was lucky every step of the way throughout his career up to 1812. Btw, thanks for the great recommendations in these threads.
 
Old May 27th, 2014 #37
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Thad, my good man:

I know I said I'd give you a week's notice before starting on W&P, but curiosity got the best of me and I cracked it Sunday (I'm now on page 129 of the Modern Library edition of the book). Sorry, dude...

That said, so far, so good, I'm happy to report; and here's one thing I found -- though trivial and pointless, obviously -- to be somewhat interesting ( I say somewhat because this titanic tome clocks in at a formidable 1386 pages; thus I reckon it's going to take a while to get really interesting):

I don't know whether it's Toltoy's kinky sense of what he finds sensual in a woman, or whether the typical 19th century Russian male found it so, but when describing the physical features of a young aristocrat, one whom he deems "beautiful", he just about creams his jeans over "the down covering her upper lip", and the fact that she's decidedly "plump." And in the following chapters, where- and whenever running across this Siberian Husky, he zeroes all over again in on this teenage cruiserweight's peachfuzz mustache (imagine what the broad's going to look like when say 30 or so; fuck). And this isn't the first time I've read a 19th century Russian classic wherein the author raves over women with hairy upper lips. I've read both Dead Souls and the Brothers Karamazov within the last six months; and in one of the two, I can't remember which, the writer also pants like a dog over downy lips on Russian females. Stuh-rrrrange shit, eh?



p.s. Um, I did mention that the above was trivial and pointless, right? Just checking...
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Old May 27th, 2014 #38
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Thad, my good man:

I know I said I'd give you a week's notice before starting on W&P, but curiosity got the best of me and I cracked it Sunday (I'm now on page 129 of the Modern Library edition of the book). Sorry, dude...
ya filthy goy bastard

I can start it in the next few days; by the start of June makes sense. I see you have the Constance Garnett translation. I'm weighing my options there though generally I don't give a shit about translation politics.

At least the early returns are good...
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Old May 28th, 2014 #39
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ya filthy goy bastard

I can start it in the next few days; by the start of June makes sense. I see you have the Constance Garnett translation. I'm weighing my options there though generally I don't give a shit about translation politics.

At least the early returns are good...
LOL! Yeah, I am one sneaky, filthy little prick, ain't I? (Thad thinks he's going to get on my good side by flattering me. Hah!)

But hey, don't worry about me getting too far ahead of you -- I've got my mitts in Mark Twain's short stories, Shakepeare's plays, Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, and my latest jewel of a find, the New Oxford Book of English Prose as I'm reading W&P. I got off to a fast start on the book just to get the feel of it; and as I said, it doesn't exactly start off with a bang. But to me the most interesting little yarn thus far is when this renegade of a soldier bets his comrades that he can guzzle a bottle of rum while sitting on the ledge of a three-story window with his legs dangling oustside and without hanging onto anything at all for support. (The crazy bastard pulls it off, btw; but of course I, cruel and sadistic s.o.b. that I am, was hoping he'd take a header and go splatsky.)

Yes, I do believe my translation is that of the Great Garnett (I can't recall reading any translation of a Russian classic that wasn't), but as the first couple pages are missing, I can't be sure. And I'm with you, bud: I could give a flying fuck about translation politics. I'm not an Eng Lit scholar per se; just a blue-collar man who truly loves the western classics. Let the so-called experts duke it out over whose translation of what is the most accurate; I could give two shits.

p.s. Re: Garnett...

I read somewhere not long ago that Garnett's translations of the Russian classics have been "superceded." Superceded? How the hell do the translations of one once considered tops in her field (in the 1930s and '40s, I believe) become superceded? To me it doesn't make much sense...
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Old June 2nd, 2014 #40
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Now on Part V, Chapter Two (p. 392, I believe, of the Modern Library edition) with "only" 994 pages to go.

This book just keeps getting better and better, lemme tell ya. The hook is definitely set and the "If-it-doesn't-grab-me-by-page-200-then-fuck-it" standard I set for myself at the start is now a distant memory; though I am anticipating some lulls as it's almost impossible to scrawl a work of this length w/o encountering a yawner or two (or three or four) in the narration. Nobody's that good, I don't give a damn who they are.

Jump on it when you can, Thad; I seriously doubt you'll regret doing so. Yeah, the sheer size of the fucker is a bit intimidating, but once in a couple hundred pages or so and odds are you're not going to mind at all. Who knows -- you/I just may wind up wishing it were longer.
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