HN Reader

Sounds good but doesn't add up. I think his writing's legacy is due more to the time it was published, it's translations into other languages and boosters like Freud who thought BK what the greatest novel ever written. That opinion gets echoed a lot, but thinking about literature in a ordinal sense is a little absurd. For me, the ruble ammouts in BK were almost meaningless. I just assumed 3,000 or 5,000 rubles was a shit ton of money, but def less than a million dollars today.

I think Dostoevsky is due a critical reevaluation from the POV of anticolonialism. He's most famous book is basically "don't read western philosophy cause you'll start murdering people - and if you did - don't worry, forced labour camp and unconditional surrender to orthodox christianity and tzar will cure you".

He's a Russian Kipling, just worse and sucking the emperor's dick much harder.

“Non-Russian readers do not realize two things: that not all Russians love Dostoevsky 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.” V. Nabokov, [0]

I really recommend Nabokov's full lecture on Dostoyevsky [1], plus obvs all the of the lectures in the series are brilliant.

[0] https://lithub.com/on-dostoevskys-199th-birthday-heres-nabok...

[1] Lectures on Russian Literature, Vladimir Nabokov, https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/stock/lectures-on-rus...

His works will live on regardless of the culture or the time it was written. As long as there is Poverty, Guilt consciousness, Morality his works would be relevent.

I did not bow down to you, I bowed down to all the suffering of humanity.

This cannot be put an expiry at..

My favorite course I took in college was a Russian Literature elective my first semester. I fell in love with Dostoevsky when we read Crime and Punishment and I ended up writing my 25 page term paper on him and his role in the proto-existentialist vs nihilism movement in Russia in the 1860s. There will always be a part of me that wishes I had taken my career in that direction instead of computers :)

@kristjankaim is correct - this sure isn't Nabokov. Example: "Immortality of Dostoevsky’s art is unquestionable; his art will likely continue to live on."

Wait... which is it?

a writer's financial situation does not make art immortal.

it cites faulkner, too, and he famously wrote "as i lay dying" while he was broke and working at the university electric plant.