What exactly is a "failed philosopher" anyway? I could apply that label to any writer whose philosophical "baggage" I don't find very congenial. Camus, for example.
The problem with Anna Karenina is that it's dated. There are Annas and Vronskys everywhere you look now. And anyway Tolstoy isn't above creating characters that essentially mouth his own views. I think among writers Shakespeare is the only "chameleon" I've come across. You can't pin down what he really might have believed.
You too have it backwards. That's exactly what I come away with from Anna Karenina, and also what his acolytes came away with. Constantine Levin is a tiresome cardboard cutout for Tolstoy's ideal agrarian aristocrat. Have you not heard of the Tolstoyan movement? Dostoyevsky doesn't have a comparable movement because, unlike Tolstoy, he wasn't an ideologue. And since you've brought up AK and The Idiot, compare Kitty Shcherbatsky with Natasha Filipovna and tell me which is a lifelike portrait. Do the same for Rogozhin and Vronsky. Who is more vivid? Dostoyevsky created characters obsessed with ideas but usually not his own ideas. Dostoyevsky's novels are renowned for the independence of his characters' voices and the indeterminacy of their motivations from an authorial perspective. I refer you to critics Philip Rhav, Leonid Grossman, and especially Mikhail Bakhtin on these points.
Not speaking for Gallus but when I used the term I simply meant it in regards to a novelist that seems more (or at least equally) interested in philosophical ideas rather than characters and narrative. I wasn't using it as a negative judgment on a novelist whose philosophy I disagree with.
If there are Annas and Vronskys "everywhere you look" that would seem to make it less dated than more. Either way, I'm not particularly concerned about novels dating: that's inevitable given that societies/cultures and the novels written in and about them inevitably change.
Yes, that's the point, and he's as likely to spend as much time on the ideas as anything else. It's tiring, and frequently reads more like philosophy than fiction. There's more to character (not to mention narrative) than what ideas they're obsessed with.
He doesn't spend time on the ideas, the characters do. There's a difference. Some people don't like characters obsessed with ideas. Yes, they can be annoying and dangerous, like Stavrogin and Verkhovensky in Devils. But all of them have much more to their character than the ideas they espouse or struggle with.
There's a difference, sure, but not for the purpose of my criticism. Dosto writes characters obsessed with ideas because he's obsessed with ideas. I don't mind characters obsessed with ideas, but an author doesn't need to spend a philosophy book's worth of pages discussing them. A character who only ever has ideas on their mind is a shallow character indeed, and take that from someone who frequently reads philosophy and thinks about ideas!
I don't know. It wasn't my phrase.
Err, Vronsky obviously? Rogozhin is a crazed murderer who I will grant is compelling in what he represents as an antithesis to Myshkin's saintly renunciation of passion, but not really a three dimensional character like Vronsky is from the very opening pages.
I don't think Tchaikovsky was second rate but I don't think it is inconsistent to think so.
He was the greatest ballet composer, of course, and composed one of the handful of great 19th century violin concertos.
It's a highly subjective phrase. When you call a composer, or work, "First Rate", it means you think everyone thinks it's great, even 'major'.
As "incidental music depicting a battle", I don't see how it doesn't achieve its purpose, objectively.
they were all written to achieve different artistic goals, it's still subjective.
www.talkclassical.com
I went to pull up the 4th mvt. of Tchaikovsky's 6th Symphony on Youtube, and was struck by the wide breadth of lengths.
Cutting the movie to fit the music? Not quite right, IMO, for either. Not to mention that it's the wrong battle.As "incidental music depicting a battle", I don't see how it doesn't achieve its purpose, objectively.
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Yes, Beethoven himself considered it a "potboiler", but that's probably more because composers starting with Beethoven around his time started to have the notion that a true artist shouldn't strive for mass popularity.
they were all written to achieve different artistic goals, it's still subjective.
What is "Profundity"?--Revisited!
But nobody's asking about them, but about the ones that do. Those who know anything about the ninth at all and who find it a curate's egg are a distinct minority. The question concerned the majority. "Stravinsky was never moved by the choral finale to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, which he...
