Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="Ah_Tibor" data-source="post: 1548670" data-attributes="member: 20190">You can be a bug man, a great sinner, or you can repent. There&#039;s a lot of joy and optimism in Dostoevsky&#039;s work that can only be understood through Christianity. So bug men are probably the result of bad childhood conditions, but where do you go from there?I think Westerners often only read Russian novels through crappy translations, don&#039;t finish them, and don&#039;t understand Orthodoxy (or pre-Revolutionary Russia) or the Orthodox mindset, so they only see suffering where there is redemption (the deeper the grief, the closer is God). I&#039;ve been watching a lot of &quot;Peanuts&quot; shorts and they make jokes about the incomprehensible nature of Tolstoy, or Snoopy&#039;s (Dogtoevsky) writing being criticized as trite because of his lack of suffering, etc., which I think was mid-century America&#039;s difficulty with Russian lit (why do we need to suffer to live? Can&#039;t we live our lives in peace?). His writer&#039;s diary could have easily been written today (he was considered a right-wing reactionary back then, too)-- but then, maybe 150 years is not a long time at all.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Ah_Tibor, post: 1548670, member: 20190"] You can be a bug man, a great sinner, or you can repent. There's a lot of joy and optimism in Dostoevsky's work that can only be understood through Christianity. So bug men are probably the result of bad childhood conditions, but where do you go from there? I think Westerners often only read Russian novels through crappy translations, don't finish them, and don't understand Orthodoxy (or pre-Revolutionary Russia) or the Orthodox mindset, so they only see suffering where there is redemption (the deeper the grief, the closer is God). I've been watching a lot of "Peanuts" shorts and they make jokes about the incomprehensible nature of Tolstoy, or Snoopy's (Dogtoevsky) writing being criticized as trite because of his lack of suffering, etc., which I think was mid-century America's difficulty with Russian lit (why do we need to suffer to live? Can't we live our lives in peace?). His writer's diary could have easily been written today (he was considered a right-wing reactionary back then, too)-- but then, maybe 150 years is not a long time at all. [/QUOTE]

Verification