Chris,
We must disagree and I mostly agree with Nabokov on this point. A dozen years ago I wouldn't have. I was being ironic when I used the word "objective" of course.
Both Tolstoy and Joyce could write well and elegantly. Dostoevsky wrote with hammer and fist. The American equivalent would be Dreiser but Dreiser had none of the religious obsessions and psychological deformities of Dostoevsky. For me what is attractive about Dostoevsky is the fact that he himself is a case study, and that he couldn't keep his psychological deformities out of the construction of his art. I don't object to the psychological deformities I just object to the fact that they take over the construction of his novels as if he could not control himself.
But here is my point. I have learned through paying attention to Nabokov to hate Dostoevsky and to regard him something like a religiously obsessed equivalent of the Marquis de Sade. I might be wrong in this reaction or I might be right. But there is no certain way for you or me to provide conditions by which we can both agree on this. I look at Dostoevsky's novels now and I say an inelegant bag of stuff, with little play or artistic symmetries -- interesting psychology; bad art. Most likely all of the aspects of Dostoevsky that I see as an indication of "bad" art, you see as an indication of "good" art. I can understand that. Dostoevsky was certainly "authentic" in Heidegger's terms, and "strong" in Nietzsche's terms but for me these are aspects that are mostly anterior to the art of making a novel.
And this is where I think Michael goes wrong. I can put down a set of more or less strictly/loosely agreed upon world-views that has allowed the physical sciences to create a criteria-set of community judgment to allow for criticism, falsifiability, testing, repeatability in building scientific explanations and theoretical models that are constantly revived and contested. There is no such criteria that we can agree upon in art. I agree with you that Dostoevsky is powerfully interesting, but for me this is mostly for clinical and biographical reasons. Also for me the criteria of a well formed and well written novel is primary and that is something that Dostoevsky lacks for me.
I will guess that you will first have to convince me that your criteria for judging a novel is good or better or coextensive to my criteria for judging a novel, _and_ that my visceral reaction to Dostoevsky should somehow be adjusted to and integrated with that new criteria.
Jerry Monaco -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20061003/ea92ed55/attachment.htm>