Discuss

No the Symposium is.

It's one of the best in its own realm (novels). It's hard to say if it's better than something like the Aeneid or the Symposium.
Maybe the best from its time.

>book about a woman
fucking cringe lmao. dostoevsky's worst is better than tolstoy's best.

The Brothers Karamazov is the supreme summit of all literature

the best work of literature ever created was written in your language
translations are worth reading but you can't identify the 'best work of literature' through them

Eh, no.

I've never reread a book in my life. Am I missing something?

I've worked with a lot of dying people and reading this I got the impression Tolstoy has been around a few of them as well.
An accurate, and therefore moving, portrayal of what the title suggests.

The politics of womanhood is far more tragic and complex than that of men. Men are apes when compared to the emotional anguish of women. Dostoyevsky is alright, not nearly as good a writer though his ideas are more intriguing. Tolstoy is far more accomplished however.

Get the fuck outta here you fucking estrogen filled FREAK. Fuck women and fuck their gay little "emotional anguish" Protip: WOMEN are the #1 cause of this so called "EMOTIONAL PAIN WAH WAH". Let them taste their medicine. Malignant cunts, all of them. ALL OF THEM! No exceptions. Well, maybe my grandmother. But aside from that they're all terrible beings that feast on the pain and suffering of others, both of their gender and of mine. Also don't you even dare to refer to Dostoevsky as "ALRIGHT" ever again you god forsaken pleb. Nobody gives a shit about tolstoy's so called "ACCOMPLISHMENTS" I piss on them.

Probably the best novel ever written, but it's not even on the same planet as the Divine Comedy.

you're probably missing a lot, so reread

I'm reading it right now in a French translation. Boring as shit, the prose reads like a newspaper article (maybe it's just the translation), and it's just a summary of the life of a random Russian official who gets married to a cunt and hates his life but likes to drink with his buddies and play whist, and he goes from one city to another, from one job to another and he wants to get paid more. I'm waiting for it to pick up, but it's just plain dull for the moment.

>waaah why won't Chad give me his big fat cock and listen to me complain about the neurosis induced by my poor inner life and buy me expensive shiny stones and boots and coats
Yeah sure why not. But not for me, thank you.

I enjoyed it, but I have the same issue with Tolstoy that I did with David Foster Wallace in that they were both extremely privileged morons who condescendingly preached their faggy ideas of morality unto people whom, if given the chance, would have eagerly kicked in their shit. All of the pages in regards to Serfdom and Tolstoy's overblown handwringing is worse than Dostoevsky's histrionic women. The best novel in the canon of world literature in regards to the conflict of the human spirit is Brothers Karamazov; for social consciousness, Les Miserables (which Tolstoy read and, in a moment of rarity, given his competitive side, praised); for aesthetic achievement and influence upon how all of literature thereafter would be written, Ulysses; and for having the biggest dick to wave in the faces of all literature subsequent and prior, Moby-Dick. Anna Karenina is great for having strong elements of each of these novels, but it does not surpass them in their relative intensity. It's also held back by Tolstoy being an immense faggot.

Remembering it, it makes me wonder why the fuck I'm on this website, ruminating about life

Fuck you all, I'm outie

Attached: 1548100191593.png (650x975, 1.04M)

have sex

Les Misérables is shit though, you really expect me to believe that Jean Valjean did nineteen years for stealing a loaf of bread?
It's very preachy and manichean, the poor are kind and innocent, the rich are mean beyond what even makes sense (the Thénardiers's attitude towards their employee, who shouldn't have fucked anyone outside of marriage anyway), I mean there's a reason they make great cartoons and musicals of this shit, it has a black and white morality.
All of Victor Hugo's work is extremely naive this way. Just read Les Derniers jours d'un condamné, through all the novel you sympathize with the idiot who's on death row, and you're manipulated by the feelings into joining Victor Hugo's crusade against the death penalty, but he never tells you what crime he committed in the first place. Well you just need to add ONE sentence to completely shift the perspective of the novel: "His name was Marc Dutroux."

see you tomorrow

Gets killed by curtains

Ulysses

>Les Mis is shit
It’s better than anything Tolstoy wrote, which is saying a lot since Tolstoy is great.

>19 years for a loaf of bread
They explain this. Years were added for his attempted break outs. The justice system really was that ridiculous back then.

>who shouldn’t have fucked outside of marriage
Oh, you’re one of those types. You’re exactly the kind of person Les Mis critiques.

War & Peace > Ivan Ilyich > Anna Karenina

Great thread OP

Where does Tolstoy preach in the Death of Ivan Ilyich? His only message is to live a meaningful life rather than to waste it on trivial shit.

no more than the average Yea Forums poster

he was saying that the realism and nuance suffer in the service of the main message.

u first

>but it's not even on the same planet as the Divine Comedy.

I wish I loved Dante, but I honestly find him quite boring.

I really can’t understand why people praise the Divine Comedy so much. I read it all and for me is quite a cold and sterile work, lacking in humanity. Is fun how a book that deals with the soul while on tis lowest and highest points should in the end offer no significant or memorable character at all, but mostly symbols and ideas disguised as humans. Dante, Virgil, Beatrice: they are all walking-dead as characters, basically vehicles to move the plot further or explain this or that aspect of the world of the comedy. There are 2 or 3 striking figures in Hell, but we have only glimpses of them, not enough to really feel the presence of an human being.

It’s impressive how Dante managed to structure all that story using verse, and how natural and seemingly-inexorable is his use of rhyme, and also his creativity in imagining whole realms of new geography and culture (his 3 mains worlds), but it’s all so cold, so tedious. If the work was in prose, with the same material, but using synonyms in the place of the rhymes it would be almost unreadable. There’s also the constant preaching of Dante’s own vision as the supreme truth of the Universe, and feature that was doomed not to age well, since he was very much a man of his own time and culture.

I think what I really feel that Dante lacks is not only humanity, but verbal and poetic inventiveness. He mostly uses literal language, but versified and with rhyme, with here and there a simile to help us see better what he wants to describe. He doesn’t create palpable and real human beings like Homer, Tolstoy, Chekhov and Proust do, and neither does he use a wonderfully metaphorical and uncontrollable language like Shakespeare.

I use Dante to learn concision, rhyme and how to write similes, but that’s it. I don’t feel pleasure reading him.

I would put War and Peace above the Divine Comedy every day. To be frank, War and Peace is like the homeric poems, but even better.