As the matter of fact, I think not only Dostoyevsky, but most of the other big classics of pre-20th century wouldn’t be recognized.
First of all, popular genres now are; fantasy, young adult, post-apocalypses, thriller, biography and others, have nothing to do with most of the classics written. “Don Quixote” for example, doesn’t fall in neither of those genres and obviously wouldn’t get as much recognition if he had been published now, simply because only small fraction of people read this genre today.
Secondly, it feels (and maybe I’m wrong) that people now, prefer more fast-paced and filled with action books. I very often hear and read complains how certain books like “Crime and Punishment” or “Anna Karenina” are plain boring, and there is nothing going in them. As I see it, their is a tendency to value real physical dilemmas more then psychological ones.
And lastly, taking the risk to sound like an old man, it seems that less teenagers and adults become interested in reading classics. If so many people are already refuse to read some big classic, there wouldn’t be a chance for it if it was published today.
As I conclude my sad observation, I want to point out that it is only my opinion and I would be more than happy if anyone could prove me wrong.
by Competitive-Lack-660
12 Comments
I’m not sure what your point is, that tastes change?
I think it’s very difficult to say for a number of reasons, but I’ll point to one “obvious” reason: the fact that at the time they were far more original stories.
So, yeah, if they were written today they wouldn’t be appreciated in the same way but largely because they wouldn’t be these epic, (somewhat) original stories versus when they were written many, many years ago.
A bunch of Dostoevsky’s works heavily involve brothels and prostitutes, which probably wouldn’t be received the same today.
Dunno. Infinite Jest (1996) and The Pale King (2011) by DFW seemed to do fine. A bigger issue is that good writers increasingly write for stage or screen instead of books.
I couldn’t disagree more.
As a counterexample, take Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver. It’s based on a 19th century classic (David Copperfield) and follows the same plot beat for beat, with the same characters recast in modern day Appalachia. It won the 2023 Pulitzer and other awards, sold well, and is widely loved.
Of course, if Crime and Punishment were written today, elements of the plot would have to be updated (the Marmeladov plotline could not happen in that way today), and Dostoevsky would no doubt have incorporated some of the fictional techniques that have been developed since. But there’s a reason why people still enjoy Crime and Punishment, and a similar book absolutely could do well.
It’s easy to get trapped in a genre and think that everything is fantasy or YA. But literary fiction exists, and many very good writers are trying to produce today’s version of Anna Karenina or Crime and Punishment with varying success.
It’s called “literary fiction”
Google it
You’re welcome
A dirty secret about the publishing industry is that people buy what the companies tell you to buy. They select the best sellers and put a large marketing budget behind it. There are some rare exceptions of a book getting popular on its own merit, but generally the bestsellers you see were predetermined to be so. So if the publishing company decided Crime and Punishment was going to be the big summer read, then it would have been.
Duh, the problem is the so-called “classics” don’t have enough explosions, monster trucks, and sexy vampires /s
Well yes, because talent was generally curated and silo’d in very very few publishing houses at the time. I mean self publications like Amazon? Forget it. Minority voices? Absolutely forget it.
But because things were so arduously curated you would generally only get exceptional stuff, that was born out of the need to compete with other outlets, remember a lot of these types of texts were first published in a series in a newspaper.
Plus you also have a lot of recency bias, and because of saturation, it will take a lot longer for the real cream to rise to the top, as opposed to the most publicized.
Same deal with music really. Mozart only really took off after he died.
Then you have to think about where books land in the tapestry of entertainment we have today that people back in Victorian times didn’t have.
And you also have to appreciate language is a fluctuating construct, Dickens, Tolstoy etc wouldn’t be writing in the same prose as they did back then. And their cultural language is completely different from our own.
One could say “Yeah it’s dumbed down” but really if the meaning is succinctly conveyed and truthful it doesn’t really matter.
So I think Crime and Punishment would be popular, it would just be drastically different in it’s prose.
I think this problem might just be survivorship bias. The popular, low-brow fiction from the 19th century just doesn’t have the same longevity as works like *Crime & Punishment*, so we just don’t talk about it now. Because of that, it’s easy to assume that the conditions of days gone by were just ripe for producing incredible, impressive works of art, but people have always liked sensationalism and relatively easy, fast-paced stories.
Not all classics were instantaneous hits, either. Moby Dick, for example, received hostile reviews from American critics upon release and was out of print entirely by the end of Herman Melville’s life. Time needs to pass for things to become “classics”, so we won’t really know what the classics of today will be until 30, 40, 50 years from now.
Dostoyevsky would’ve read it to check for typos.
Let’s break this down a bit.
>As the matter of fact, I think not only Dostoyevsky, but most of the other big classics of pre-20th century wouldn’t be recognized.
Of course they wouldn’t be recognized. Recognition of greatness is something that takes time. A ‘classic’ isn’t something that just pops off the printer and hits high sales, and even a lot of what we normally would consider part of the ‘Great Works of Literature.’ had more than their fair share of criticism on release. Next to no novel ever published was considered a pinnacle of literature shortly after being published, or least not with any seriousness that wasn’t a sale pitch part of a publisher’s ad campaign.
Time is also a pretty good filter. ‘People wrote better back then!’ is bullshit if you consider the hundreds of thousands of novels that have been written, read, and absolutely forgotten, and often (though not always) with good reason.
>popular genres now are; fantasy, young adult, post-apocalypses, thriller, biography and others, have nothing to do with most of the classics written.
First, most of that list are considered subgenres. Second, most novels fall under several different genres. Don Quixote for example is considered both satire and fantasy, pretty easy to categorize that one. Romance novels have dominated sales since we started tracking sales, and still do today. ‘But everyone is reading YA today!’ No they’re not. They’re still reading mostly romance schlock and by the truckload. They’re not talking about them, mostly because there is little to say. Most sales charting puts classics within their own category, rather than include classical literature in another genre, so it’s not that they don’t fit into the general broad genres, it’s that we don’t usually do it with classics. For the why, you’ll need to talk to publishing companies to get a definitive answer.
>Secondly, it feels (and maybe I’m wrong) that people now, prefer more fast-paced and filled with action books. I very often hear and read complains how certain books like “Crime and Punishment” or “Anna Karenina” are plain boring, and there is nothing going in them. As I see it, their is a tendency to value real physical dilemmas more then psychological ones.
You are wrong, but also right. People today prefer page turners, if we go by just general popularity of sales figures, but surprise, people of yesteryear did too though. No one has ever accused Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Bronte, or Fitzgerald of writing page turners. They wrote terrific tales woven with masterful skill, but exciting? Not really. But the exciting page turners, or even just genre trope novels, usually don’t stand the test of time. Plenty of books were written, read, and forgotten and during their short life they probably outside something that today we lump in some top 100 list. It’s all too easy to look at classical literature and think that everything written at that time period was on par. It wasn’t. Bawdy tales, bad satire, and the literary equivalent of a fart joke were often the contemporaries.
>And lastly, taking the risk to sound like an old man, it seems that less teenagers and adults become interested in reading classics. If so many people are already refuse to read some big classic, there wouldn’t be a chance for it if it was published today.
Today, not that many people are reading Dostoevsky. Twenty years ago, not that many people were reading Dostoevsky. Fifty years ago, not that many people were reading Dostoevsky. No one was really reading Shakespear for like 150 years. In other words, there might very well be a terrific author that everyone is going to be talking about in 2255 who published this year, and both you and I might not even know about it at all. Even worse, we both might even read it and think ‘Well this book is pretty meh.’ and forget about it entirely. None of this is because of any great change in society, or because of ‘Kids today/people today/society today followed by whatever problematic fault is perceived to only exist now but actually has been around since we were huddled in caves.’