Not P but DFW on Dostoevsky

[Martin Dietze]

Fun fact: when I first read Dostoyevsky's "Demons" I was struck by its
absurdity and felt myself reminded of Pynchon's novels, in particular GR.

Shortly after that I took my first trip to Ukraine and had a long
conversation with a relative who was about 15 years older than me and like
me loved literature. I told him about my observations, and he replied:
"You're wrong. There's a fundamental difference between Dostoyevsky and
Pynchon. In Dostoyevsky's novels it's not at all fiction. The absurdity you
find in there is not stilistic, neither humor. He simply described the
world around him."

Of course that guy (my relative? Dostoyevsky? both?) must have been a
russophobe 😉

Cheers,

Martin


On Thu, 30 Mar 2023 at 14:50, Ian Livingston <igrlivingston at gmail.com>
wrote:

> "He ascended into Heaven and sitteth upon the right hand of God."
> Remembering, of course, that the left hand was used for cleaning oneself
> after defecation.
>
> On Thu, Mar 30, 2023 at 5:43 AM Mike Jing <gravitys.rainbow.cn at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > The following excerpt is from David Foster Wallace's Joseph Frank's
> > Dostoevsky:
> >
> > Even if we suppose he was divine — did he know? Did he know he could have
> > broken the cross with just a word? Did he know in advance that death
> would
> > just be temporary (because I bet I could climb up there, too, if I knew
> > that an eternity of right-hand bliss lay on the other side of six hours
> of
> > pain)?
> >
> > Here he is talking about Jesus Christ. What does the word "right-hand"
> mean
> > in "right-hand bliss"?
> > --
> > Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
> >
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>


-- 
Dr. Martin Dietze
[https://www.martins-braindumps.de/]

1. Vorsitzender - Deutsch-Ukrainischer Kulturverein e.V.
Голова - Німецько-Українське Товариство Культури
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Redakteur / Редактор - Karpaty Lviv Nachrichten
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