We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.

Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]

Samizdata quote of the day

Raskolnikov, the main character in “Crime and Punishment,” is not much of a role model.

But not to worry, because nobody whines about how literature has led them into ax-murdering or body dysmorphia or about how poorly the page represents reality.

They save those accusations for movies and TV.

Amy Alkon

24 comments to Samizdata quote of the day

  • Lee Moore

    But not to worry, because nobody whines about how literature has led them into ax-murdering or body dysmorphia or about how poorly the page represents reality.

    Au contraire. If wikipedia is to be believed, lefty critics of Dostoevsky piled straight in to complain that Crime and Punishment did not represent reality :

    The novel soon attracted the criticism of the liberal and radical critics. G.Z. Yeliseyev sprang to the defense of the Russian student corporations, and wondered, “Has there ever been a case of a student committing murder for the sake of robbery?”

    And just to show that nothing ever changes, a Guardian columnist was also on hand with the traditional party line :

    Pisarev, aware of the novel’s artistic value attempted in 1867 another approach: he argued that Raskolnikov was a product of his environment, and explained that the main theme of the work was poverty and its results.

  • CaptDMO

    But….but….video games!
    And according to Catcher In The Rye, killing a Beetle would REALLY impress Jody Foster!
    I wonder where Valerie Solanas got HER manifest inspiration?

  • Nicholas (Unlicenced Joker) Gray

    People are more prone to react to what they see than what they read! Reading can be done at your own pace, but cinema sets the pace. This is why the movie ‘Starship Troopers’ would have had more of an impact in spreading libertarian ideals (voluntary citizenship, etc.) than the book.

  • bobby b

    “Pisarev, aware of the novel’s artistic value attempted in 1867 another approach: he argued that Raskolnikov was a product of his environment, and explained that the main theme of the work was poverty and its results.”

    He completely misses the point that, as a transgendered vegan, Raskolnikov was horribly Othered by the flesh-eating patrio-normative power structure. THAT was the force that gave him his conviction that he wasn’t just normal.

    Or, it was the endless series of microaggressions and microtransgressions and micro-underappreciations that finally led him into his safe space away from the deplorable racist normals.

    Or he was actually an allegorical Palestinian . . .

  • Fraser Orr

    Much as I love Amy’s writing, I have to disagree here. Stupid people don’t read Dostoyevsky, but they do watch Texas Chain Saw massacre. Dostoyevsky, for all his skill as a writer cannot possibly hope to engage the full faculties of a young impressionable person the way grand theft auto, or one of the many FPS games can. So it is a silly comparison. It is stupid people who emulate these terrible things, and so the comparison with high brow literature just doesn’t seem apropos at all.

    FWIW, I have no doubt at all that some of these gruesome games play a significant role in desensitizing people to horrible violence, and don’t doubt that that has some impact on violence and murder in our society. I’m not saying it is all the game’s fault, but it would take considerable credulity to suggest that the correlation in the rise of such things with the popularity of such games is entirely coincidental.

    Every writer from Dostoyevsky to Dr. Seuss has an agenda, and attempt to influence the mind of their readers to some degree. No doubt they succeed. But they only have words on a page. Movies are far more immersive than books, and video games vastly more so than movies. One would surely expect that influence that we expect from books to be vastly magnified with increasing levels of immersion.

    (BTW, I have never read Dostoyevsky. I avoid Russian literature because it is almost all so damn depressing, and I’d rather be happy. Which is, coincidentally, the reason I don’t play these gruesome video games too.)

  • the other rob

    Fraser Orr – that reminds me of when SWMBO asked what I thought of Rand’s We The Living.

    I replied “It’s the archetypal Russian novel. Nobody wins, everybody loses. They all die.”

  • Julie near Chicago

    So try The Fountainhead…or Atlas Shrugged.

  • As Julie implies, the Fountainhead has a happy ending. So does War and Peace.

    Of course, you have to work through quite a few pages containing some quite depressing stuff before getting to them.

    So I’m sort-of with Julie, but if Fraser and the other rob would rather read the Narnia stories or similar, I’m sort-of with them too.

    I think I’ve mentioned here before that I grew up in a room whose bookcase contained no-longer-relevant 30s left-book-club-type stuff: communist propaganda by R. Palme Dutt, Stalin’s short course on the history of the communist party (two copies of it), heavy-handed future-fiction about the coming revolution in the US (set in years before I was born), etc. You think Dostoevsky is depressing! (Or is too long for what it offers! Or has a heavy style! Or is boring!)

    🙂

  • Helen C

    Try Solzhenitsyn. He had an underlying sense of humor that always catches a reader off guard and the ability to make subtle digs about the government that would easily have gotten him killed if they had been published in the Soviet Union. Try reading Ivan Denisovich and First Circle to compare the two types of prisoners.

  • Julie near Chicago

    Following Niall, I highly recommend The Fellowship of the Ring…. :>))

    Not following Niall, I’ve never felt compelled to read Tolstoy. *blush*

    . . .

    Niall: The Great Frog blesses your connective hyphens! [This is not a joke. The connections make comprehension easy as pie and smooth as silk. –Not that I’ve ever found making presentable pie-crust particularly easy. Tasty, yes (use lard). Presentable, only kinda-sorta. More *blush*.]

  • Fraser Orr

    Just to further my ignorance I will say I haven’t read Ayn Rand’s novels either (though I have tried, they are just to much like hard work. Though I did watch the movie of Atlas Shrugged, if that counts, but that was primarily because the woman who played Dagny was really hot.)

    And I’ll also say, to get away from our Slavic writers, I also detest Hemmingway for the same reasons. It is all so damn depressing, plus he portrays utterly ridiculous male and female stereotypes that they are almost cartoonish. I am quite shocked that he is so popular among the literary elite given how utterly PC they are and how utterly unPC he was. I have read quite a lot of Hemmingway, but that is because “they” made me.

    OK, having trashed all of modern literature I will now slink away into a corner with my copy of Harry Potter (which I really liked.)

  • Julie near Chicago

    Oh, Fraser, don’t do that! Read Faulkner, or maybe Erskine Caldwell, instead. (Jean Kerr, I think it was, once referred to a certain type of novel emanating from the pens of certain Southern U.S. writers as belonging to the “and-then-the-house-gave-another-lurch-as-the-termites-finished-the-east-wing school of writing.”) 😥 🙂

  • Alisa

    I honestly did try Atlas, a few pages left me totally cold, and so I gave up.

    Tolstoy is not nearly as depressing as Dostoevsky, but still, he was a Russian after all…

    Never even tried Solzhenitsyn, because I get depressed at the mere thought of Soviet labor camps, let alone dive into a book about them.

    Two more thumbs-up for the use of hyphens in compound adjectives and nouns.

  • Lee Moore

    I’ve never felt compelled to read Tolstoy. *blush*

    My introduction to Tolstoy came at the age of fourteen, when my school acquired a new “modern” English teacher. Instead of the usual grammar and stuff, he astonished us at the start of one lesson by instructing us to spend the lesson in the school library selecting a book to read. How we laughed at his naivety. A lesson spent choosing a book ! Not a gerund or participle to be seen. But I realised the evil scheme behind his apparently innocent proposal. Each of us would select a book, and then BANG! two weeks later we would be instructed to write an essay on our books. I saw a way out. I would choose the biggest fattest book I could find. So in two weeks time, when the essay was suddenly demanded, I should be in the happy position of saying “But Sir, I haven’t finished my book yet !”

    Before long I had stumbled on War and Peace, which looked ideal – I couldn’t seriously be expected to finish it before the end of term . Alas it was riveting stuff and I read it in every spare moment and clandestinely through quite a few lessons. I finished it within the two weeks and had to produce an essay all the same. It was not a complete disaster though. The new teacher imagined I was an eager beaver and cut me a lot of slack thenceforward. In fact I was the idlest dog in the class by an order of magnitude but it took the fellow at least a year to realise it after the War and Peace episode.

  • Brian Swisher

    Julie,
    I believe that quote is by Arthur C. Clarke, in one of his “Tales from the White Hart”.

    BTW, Tolstoy’s short stories are quite good. Humorous, too!

  • Julie near Chicago

    Brian, I did think it was some female, but of course you may well be right. My copy’s in a box somewhere, but what I remember best from it is the wonderful title, “The Defenestration of Ermintrude Inch.”

    Tolstoy? Short stories?? Humourous??? Gosh! Sounds like my cuppa! :>)

  • the other rob

    Julie – I did enjoy Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead is on my to read pile. I recall reading Cancer Ward (no excuse – the title was the warning) and Notes from Underground, in my youth. Probably some others that I forget but, these days, when I read fiction it’s usually SF of some variety.

    There are two books that I have never finished and likely never will: The Silmarillion and Heller’s Something Happened.

  • Julie near Chicago

    other rob,

    I’m not up to reading about the Soviet camps either…too depressing, as Alisa says, and frankly too frightening. I haven’t read any Solzhenitsyn, but you did prod me into skimming the Great Foot’s article on Cancer Ward. It does not seem very cheery. :>(

    I have two copies of The Silmarillion; one on my own dime (hah!) and one a gift from my mother. I do so want to like it! Alas, I don’t seem to be able to get into it. :>((

    The Heller book I’ve never heard of.

    I still love SF — the Great Frog rains a thousand blessings upon you for using the proper title and not the bastardized, bowdlerized, downright blasphemous “sci-fi” label; and Isaac Asimov has been known to express agreement on that — Ahem. I still love SF, but probably the latest I’ve read was Zelazny’s “Amber” series. Which IIRC is maybe more fantasy than SF. My reading nowadays runs to thrillers, preferably technothrillers, except there are so few really good ones. (To my taste, that is. *g*) But if it has a good story and a style that engages me, I’ll read it, whatever it is. ;>)

  • The Silmarillion is for people who liked reading the appendices in LotR and wanted more of them. (Full disclosure: one of those people is a certain Niall Kilmartin.) If you re-read the appendices every time you re-read LotR, you will love the Silmarillion, but if you’re the kind of lightweight afficionado whom us true Tolkien fans recognise is not really serious – the kind who, on their 25th re-reading of LotR decide to skip some of the appendices – then you may not like the Silmarillion. It has occasional beautiful passages but some of it has more in common with an appendix, a list of dramatis personae, a plot summary or an explanatory footnote. You have to read it for what it mostly is, not as a LotR prequel which it only rarely is.

    The Fountainhead starts slow and even poorly. The first page (the ‘hook page’ as a writing professional would call it) could well do with a rewrite toning down a little the authoress’ adoration for her hero’s ability to make an impression on those who nominally disagree. But if you get past that very early part, she slowly and steadily begins to develop her theme. By the middle, you find yourself at the home for retarded children (how could anyone possibly disapprove that, right?), feeling her absolute horror at the way the PC baddies have gleefully desecrated the temple of the human spirit with their worship of failure. Like Wouk in “The Cain Mutiny”, she deliberately gives herself a very hard sell and then rises to the challenge of selling it nevertheless.

  • Alisa

    BTW, as regards Solzhenitsyn, I do have this on my definite-must-read list.

  • Helen C

    Alisa – You can almost read the first one, August 1914, as a history of the Battle of Tannenberg. Of course, it is fictionalized because it is really a story about the lieutenant and his family, but he did such a good job on the historical parts that it is accurate enough to use in conversation. The relationship between Samsonov and Rennenkampf is brilliantly written. I always know more about that part of the war than any other because I read this book (even the pages started falling out; I kept it closed with a rubber band until my husband bought me a nice copy as a gift).
    For those of you worried about Solzhenitsyn being gloomy, yes, there are parts that are sad and awful, but his stories are about overcoming the awful parts of life. He survived the cancer, the gulags, the exile. Mostly he is a story teller and not all of his stories are tragedies. He even wrote a play called The Love Girl and the Innocent. Plus, the protagonists of his stories are heroes, given the time and place in which they lived. They teach how to survive against insurmountable odds.

  • Alisa

    Thank you Helen, noted to myself.

    I have a digital copy in Russian – isn’t capitalism awful?

  • Laird

    Niall, I must confess that you would not even consider me a non-serious Tolkien fan; I’ve only read LoTR once (and didn’t bother to finish the third book). Too long, too tedious, too many extraneous characters (what is the purpose of Tom Bombadil?), and too damned much Elvish poetry! (I’d skip ahead after the second stanza.) And of course I’ve never read the footnotes, let alone the Silmarillion. I looked at it once in a book store and put it back. Truly, I can’t understand people who claim Atlas Shrugged is too boring to bother with but will re-read LoTR numerous times. De gustibus non est disputandum, I suppose. But I have read The Hobbit several times.

    Alisa, I didn’t know about those novels. Perhaps I’ll try them one day. Thanks for the tip.