!bookworms thoughts?
Here is Vladimir Nabokov's on why Dostoyevsky was a writer
https://old.reddit.com/r/literature/comments/17n8lrt/why_did_nabakov_dislike_dostoyevsky_so_much/
https://www.nytimes.com/1981/08/23/magazine/nabokov-on-dostoyevsky.html
One of the key facts about Nabokov is that he was a cranky old man his whole life.
Lmao
Hemingway talks about Dostoyevsky's unique style quite a lot in A Moveable Feast.
One famous quote is: “I've been wondering about Dostoyevsky. How can a man write so badly, so unbelievably badly, and yet make you feel so deeply.”
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Nabokov was a big prose guy, and style is one of Dostoevsky's weaker areas, to put it nicely.
Also nabokov was always kind of cranky. He didn't like a lot of authors, some of whom were arguably or clearly great, or even greater than him. Aside from dosto, he hated, with direct quotes:
Faulkner ("To consider them masterpieces is an absurd delusion")
Eliot ("Not quite first-rate.")
Pound (" A total fake. A venerable fraud.)
Plato (" Not particularly fond of him.")
Tagore ("A formidable mediocrity.")
Mann ("Second-rate, ephemeral, puffed-up.")
Gorky ("A formidable mediocrity.")
Celine ("Second-rate. A tense-looking but really very loose type of writing.")
Wilde ("Rank moralist and didacticist")
So yeah, bit of a contrarian lol
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