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"Only through the act of imagining..." Be careful with the only. I've read and enjoyed plenty of books while neglecting sympathy for the characters and their e
by philippoi 9y ago
"Only through the act of imagining..."
Be careful with the only. I've read and enjoyed plenty of books while neglecting sympathy for the characters and their experience; looking at the interplay of ideas and theories, for example.
Sometimes I think it's been due to my lack of context. For instance, I love the little Dostoyevsky I've read, but I'm always perplexed by the social world of his characters. Maybe they're high bourgeois and clashing with the strain on that order in the Russia of his day. Still, I thoroughly enjoy the other elements of his writing that come to life. I was surprised to find the most thrilling so far was the first half of Notes From Underground. It reads like sci-fi to me: all of the talk about everything being calculated and determined in advance.
- madaxe_again 9y agoThen you haven't read enough Dostoevsky :) I think he's one of the most empathetically evocative authors there was - by the end of crime and punishment if you can't identify with Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, you've assuredly missed a beat. That said, context is all - and it's helpful to also read his contemporaries, understand Russian history of the time on a broader scale (this too one can acquire from books), and then follow through on the trajectory of thought and feeling with the likes of Solzhenitsyn and Bulgakov, before landing at the post-glasnost world with Pelevin and Kurkov.