Why read plays? (P.2): Plays vs novels

I know, I wrote that the last blog post was my response once and for all to the mantra “Plays are meant to be seen, not read.” But I want to write about a different aspect: Why read plays? What do plays offer that novels do not? 

(Ibsen staring into your soul). 

Considering the popularity of novels, I think we can all name the advantages of novels. Some might argue that novels dig deeper into characters’ minds and have more psychological depth, but I don’t agree—look at Shakespeare—Hamlet and Macbeth and Brutus and many other characters question themselves, struggle with themselves, and people have analysed them for 400 years. But scope is one advantage: a play cannot have hundreds of characters and a wide range of experiences like War and Peace. Length and span are another: The Winter’s Tale might be an exception in making a jump of 16 years, but it doesn’t cover 16 years; War and Peace spans from 1805 to 1813, then jumps to 1820.

However, plays have their own strengths—I’m not even talking about plays as performance, but as text. Plays show a clash of perspectives. I won’t talk again about the range of views in Shakespeare—I think I’ve been annoying enough about this subject—you all know what I would say. Instead, look at Ibsen. In The Wild Duck, he shows the contrast between a character who thinks human beings need delusion and can’t cope with much of the truth, and a character who tears down a marriage to set it on a new foundation of truth and destroys everything. In An Enemy of the People, he depicts a man of integrity, a man of courage standing up for the truth, but at the same time also lets us see the concerns of the townspeople, and makes us feel uneasy about the heroic man. In Rosmersholm, he depicts three different people—or four if you count Mrs Helseth—grappling with a suicide and questioning, blaming themselves. What actually happened? Who is to blame? 

Occasionally you find a novel with the same quality. Tolstoy for instance enters different characters’ minds and depicts their different—clashing—perspectives. William Faulkner has multiple characters narrating the story, in The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying. But even when a novelist switches between different perspectives, there is narration—there is someone shaping how you see characters and events—you are always aware of the authorial presence. The closest a novel gets to a play in this aspect is the epistolary form: in Dangerous Liaisons, the finest epistolary novel I’ve read, you see the different perspectives, you see the manipulators set out their plan and see them at work, you read between the lines and imagine the effect on the receiver of each letter. 

Normally, a novel focuses on a single point of view, or has an omniscient or objective point of view. In the former case—when the story is narrated by the protagonist (such as Jane Eyre) or an observer/ another character (such as Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby), or it has a third-person narrator but mainly focuses on a single perspective (such as Jane Austen’s novels)—we see everything through that one perspective. With the third-person narrator who focuses on one character’s point of view, we can see the author: Jane Austen’s use of free indirect discourse for instance creates a double perspective, a dual voice—the narrator’s voice blending in with the character’s voice. But even when a novel has a first-person narrator, you can see the author somewhere between the lines: even though Lolita is seen through the eyes of Humbert Humbert, we can see—even without the framing device—that Nabokov is not Humbert Humbert. 

In the latter case, when the story has an omniscient or objective point of view, there is a narrator guiding the reader, which you don’t get in plays. Take Rosmersholm, for instance. What goes on in Rebecca’s mind when she cries out in joy and then rejects Rosmer’s proposal? And because there is no narrator and we are restricted to what the characters say, Ibsen gets us to see the situation in a certain way in the first two acts then turns everything upside down in Act 3. Even then, we only have fragments and there are things we would never know. What actually happened? What’s the truth about the relationship between Rosmer and Beata? What was on Beata’s mind when she decided to kill herself? 

Himadri (Argumentative Old Git) says: 

“I think Ibsen makes use of the fact that there *is* no narrator - no-one to interpret things, even by implication.

[…] This communicates a sense of mystery - not in the sense that the narrator isn’t giving us answers, but in the sense that there is no answer to give that may be articulated.

I don’t know to what extent this is possible in a novel.

A sense of the mystery of our human lives, of its inscrutability, is difficult to convey in a novel, where you’re aware of the authorial presence, even if the authors do their best to keep themselves in the background.”

Even in An Enemy of the People, a play that seems more straightforward than other Ibsen plays, there is a sense of mystery: what happens in Dr Stockman’s mind between Act 3 and Act 4 that he, when he has the chance to speak to people in town, decides not to speak about his findings about the baths but, instead, to have a rant about “the common man”? And more importantly, as Himadri has put it, why is the truth about the endangerment to public health so important to Dr Stockman, considering his contempt for the public? 

That sense of mystery is one of the fascinating things about Shakespeare. Why does Hamlet not act? What goes on in his mind when he tells Ophelia “Get thee to a nunnery”? Why does Iago hate Othello so much that he sets out to destroy him? Does he actually suspect Othello of having slept with his wife? What does Viola see in Orsino? Where does Leontes’s jealousy come from? 

Let’s have a discussion. 

The appeal of Chekhov

Nabokov says in Strong Opinions: 

“The word “genius” is passed around rather generously, isn’t it? At least in English, because its Russian counterpart, geniy, is a term brimming with a sort of throaty awe and is used only in the case of a very small number of writers, Shakespeare, Milton, Pushkin, Tolstoy. To such deeply beloved authors as Turgenev and Chekhov Russians assign the thinner term, talánt, talent, not genius. […] Genius still means to me, in my Russian fastidiousness and pride of phrase, a unique, dazzling gift, the genius of James Joyce, not the talent of Henry James.” 

And yet: 

“Mr. Karlinsky has put his finger on a mysterious sensory cell. He is right, I do love Chekhov dearly. I fail, however, to rationalize my feeling for him: I can easily do so in regard to the greater artist, Tolstoy, with the flash of this or that unforgettable passage (“…  how sweetly she said: ‘and even very much’ ”—Vronsky recalling Kitty’s reply to some trivial question that we shall never know), but when I imagine Chekhov with the same detachment all I can make out is a medley of dreadful prosaisms, ready-made epithets, repetitions, doctors, unconvincing vamps, and so forth; yet it is his works which I would take on a trip to another planet.”

Nabokov makes a similar point in Lectures on Russian Literature: 

“Russian critics have noted that Chekhov’s style, his choice of words and so on, did not reveal any of those special artistic preoccupations that obsessed, for instance, Gogol or Flaubert or Henry James. […] Thus Chekhov is a good example to give when one tries to explain that a writer may be a perfect artist without being exceptionally vivid in his verbal technique or exceptionally preoccupied with the way his sentences curve. […] The magical part of it is that in spite of his tolerating flaws which a bright beginner would have avoided, in spite of his being quite satisfied with the man-in-the street among words, the word-in-the-street, so to say, Chekhov managed to convey an impression of artistic beauty far surpassing that of many writers who thought they knew what rich beautiful prose was.”

Unlike Nabokov, I do think Chekhov has genius—like Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Gogol—whereas Turgenev has talent. But I too find it difficult to talk about Chekhov’s greatness, to rationalise my love for his writings.

When I read Alice Munro for the first time last year—a darling of Book Twitter, until the recent explosion—I enjoyed the stories a lot, but I remember thinking she’s very good but not Chekhov good. Alice Munro is also a subtle writer, writing about the lives of ordinary people and the little moments that are full of meaning. In a way, she should perhaps appeal more to me, writing about women, and she’s contemporary—TSK on Twitter said “being closer to us in time, her stories are fresher and more alive”—and yet I have never felt a connection with Alice Munro the way I feel about Chekhov (and now I clearly won’t). 

But it’s not just Alice Munro. I just love Chekhov more than any other short story writers; and in literature in general, I feel closer to Chekhov than anyone else, even Shakespeare and Tolstoy. 

Why? 

Part of it must be the authorial persona. Some writers—like Chekhov, Cervantes—have a more lovable persona than others—like Tolstoy, George Eliot. Tolstoy the artist may be able to depict a wide range of perspectives and inhabit the mind of more or less any character* but you can tell—you can feel on the page—that Tolstoy the man is judgemental. Same with George Eliot. 

It’s not that Chekhov doesn’t judge or doesn’t condemn. That is something people like to repeat when they talk about Chekhov, but all you have to do is to read “Ward No.6” or “In the Ravine” and you can see that isn’t true—Chekhov’s moral sense is clear, as he writes about people’s egotism, callousness, and cruelty to each other. But he is compassionate and humane. He makes us feel understood. He provides solace in moments of despair. 

He conveys, better than anyone, those brief moments of sadness that we sometimes feel. Take, for example, this passage from “The Beauties”: 

“I felt this beauty rather strangely. It was not desire, nor ecstacy, nor enjoyment that Masha excited in me, but a painful though pleasant sadness. It was a sadness vague and undefined as a dream. For some reason I felt sorry for myself, for my grandfather and for the Armenian, even for the girl herself, and I had a feeling as though we all four had lost something important and essential to life which we should never find again. My grandfather, too, grew melancholy; he talked no more about manure or about oats, but sat silent, looking pensively at Masha.” 

Later, in the same story: 

“On the platform between our carriage and the next the guard was standing with his elbows on the railing, looking in the direction of the beautiful girl, and his battered, wrinkled, unpleasantly beefy face, exhausted by sleepless nights and the jolting of the train, wore a look of tenderness and of the deepest sadness, as though in that girl he saw happiness, his own youth, soberness, purity, wife, children; as though he were repenting and feeling in his whole being that that girl was not his, and that for him, with his premature old age, his uncouthness, and his beefy face, the ordinary happiness of a man and a passenger was as far away as heaven....” 

(translated by Constance Garnett) 

I’m not a guard with a “battered, wrinkled, unpleasantly beefy face”, but I recognise that melancholy feeling.

This is why, when I feel down, I turn to Chekhov. 

Chekhov appeals to me also because he’s a humanist, and humane. Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky constantly write about God and constantly wrestle with their faith; Chekhov doesn’t pretend to know the answers to any of those big questions, but he’s capable of depicting goodness without faith, and conveying—in life as well as in writings—a sense of purpose without religion. He also rejects ideology, and rejects extremes. 

If anyone asks who my literary heroes are, my immediate answer would be Chekhov. I might perhaps also mention Vasily Grossman or Primo Levi—it might be a bit too early to say—but my one literary hero would be Chekhov. 

What about you? Why do you like Chekhov? 

*: except Hélène. 

Light in Chekhov

As a little break from Cervantes’s Exemplary Novels, I’ve been reading Chekhov (who can be a better companion when one’s got the morbs?). 

One thing struck me: 

“The shades of evening were already lying on the station garden, on the platform, and on the fields; the station screened off the sunset, but on the topmost clouds of smoke from the engine, which were tinged with rosy light, one could see the sun had not yet quite vanished.”

This is from “The Beauties” in Volume 9 (Constance Garnett). Note the light. 

Now look at this passage in “Panic Fears”:

“The forest road was covered with pools from a recent shower of rain, and the earth squelched under one’s feet. The crimson glow of sunset flooded the whole forest, coloring the white stems of the birches and the young leaves.” 

I like that.

“There was a pale light from the afterglow of sunset; a streak of light cut its way through a narrow, uncouth-looking cloud, which seemed sometimes like a boat and sometimes like a man wrapped in a quilt....

I had driven a mile and a half, or two miles, when against the pale background of the evening glow there came into sight one after another some graceful tall poplars; a river glimmered beyond them, and a gorgeous picture suddenly, as though by magic, lay stretched before me.” 

Just a few strokes—Chekhov doesn’t spend pages describing nature as Proust does. 

“The moon and two white fluffy clouds beside it hung just over the station, motionless as though glued to the spot, and looked as though waiting for something. A faint transparent light came from them and touched the white earth softly, as though afraid of wounding her modesty, and lighted up everything—the snowdrifts, the embankment.... It was still.”

That comes from “Champagne”. Same story:

“A poplar covered with hoar frost looked in the bluish darkness like a giant wrapt in a shroud. It looked at me sullenly and dejectedly, as though like me it realized its loneliness. I stood a long while looking at it.”

Tom of Wuthering Expectations would talk about the sentient trees, a motif he has noticed recurring in many of Chekhov’s stories, but I want to draw your attention to “the bluish darkness”. 

These stories are all in Volume 9. Let me grab Volume 7 and look at “The Steppe”, perhaps Chekhov’s most famous description of the Ukrainian landscape: 

“On the right there were the dark hills which seemed to be screening something unseen and terrible; on the left the whole sky about the horizon was covered with a crimson glow, and it was hard to tell whether there was a fire somewhere, or whether it was the moon about to rise. As by day the distance could be seen, but its tender lilac tint had gone, quenched by the evening darkness, in which the whole steppe was hidden like Moisey Moisevitch’s children under the quilt.” 

Chekhov’s eyes are particularly sensitive to colours: “crimson glow”, “tender lilac tint”. 

These descriptions of the light—the tint of the light—struck me because you don’t find such descriptions in Cervantes. 

Nabokov writes in Lectures on Don Quixote: 

“If we follow the evolution of literary forms and devices from the remotest antiquity to our times we notice that the art of dialogue was developed and perfected much earlier than the art of describing, or better say expressing, nature. By 1600 the dialogue with great writers in all countries is excellent—natural, supple, colorful, alive. But the verbal rendering of landscapes will have to wait until, roughly speaking, the beginning of the nineteenth century to reach the same level as the dialogue had reached 200 years before; and it is only in the second part of the nineteenth century that descriptive passages referring to outside nature were integrated, were merged with the story, ceased to stick out in separate paragraphs, and became organic parts of the whole composition.” 

I wonder why that is—is it the transition from plays to novels? 

For various reasons, I have always objected to the idea that literature progressed over time, but Nabokov seems to be right when he makes a similar point about colours in Lectures on Russian Literature: 

“The difference between human vision and the image perceived by the faceted eye of an insect may be compared with the difference between a half-tone block made with the very finest screen and the corresponding picture as represented by the very coarse screening used in common newspaper pictorial reproduction. The same comparison holds good between the way Gogol saw things and the way average readers and average writers see things. Before his and Pushkin’s advent Russian literature was purblind. What form it perceived was an outline directed by reason: it did not see color for itself but merely used the hackneyed combinations of blind noun and dog-like adjective that Europe had inherited from the ancients. The sky was blue, the dawn red, the foliage green, the eyes of beauty black, the clouds grey, and so on. It was Gogol (and after him Lermontov and Tolstoy) who first saw yellow and violet at all. That the sky could be pale green at sunrise, or the snow a rich blue on a cloudless day, would have sounded like heretical nonsense to your so-called “classical” writer, accustomed as he was to the rigid conventional color-schemes of the Eighteenth Century French school of literature. Thus the development of the art of description throughout the centuries may be profitably treated in terms of vision, the faceted eye becoming a unified and prodigiously complex organ and the dead dim “accepted colors” (in the sense of “idees recues”) yielding gradually their subtle shades and allowing new wonders of application. I doubt whether any writer, and certainly not in Russia, had ever noticed before, to give the most striking instance, the moving pattern of light and shade on the ground under trees or the tricks of color played by sunlight with leaves.” 

Let’s see how this is going to affect my reading—and noticing—when I return to Cervantes. 

Nabokov on the 7 Don Quixotes

Is Don Quixote my new obsession? Well, as you can see… 

After Fighting Windmills: Encounter with Don Quixote, a very good book by Manuel Durán and Fay R. Rogg about the context and influence of Cervantes’s novel, I’ve been reading Vladimir Nabokov’s Lectures on Don Quixote. I’m glad to have picked it up despite my misgivings, because Nabokov, as always, has lots of interesting things to say.

As I’m too busy with work and busy feeling down to write about every single interesting observation in these lectures, we have to make do with a few remarks: Nabokov’s blind spot is that he doesn’t get Cervantes’s sense of humour—it’s not his kind of funny—so he sees the book as crude, cruel, and not humane (did he read a bad translation?* I wonder). He has some other complaints—Nabokov’s gonna Nabokov—but his main problem is that he doesn’t get Cervantes’s comedy and doesn’t particularly like Sancho Panza (like Tolstoy complains about Shakespeare’s jokes and puns). But Nabokov is a great writer and an interesting critic, so these lectures offer many great insights about the book. I also think that a few reviews I read or quotes I came across misrepresented Nabokov’s views, because he does speak of Cervantes’s genius, and loves the character of Don Quixote. 

What I’m saying is, you should read Nabokov’s lectures. 

Anyway, here’s an interesting observation from him:

“From the very first, in the original itself, the figure of Don Quixote undergoes a shadowy multiplication. (1) There is the initial Señor Quijana, a humdrum country gentleman; (2) there is the final Quijano the Good, a kind of synthesis that takes into account the antithetic Don Quixote and the thetic country gentleman; (3) there is the presupposed “original,” “historical” Don Quixote whom Cervantes slyly places somewhere behind the book in order to give it a “true story” flavor; (4) there is the Don Quixote of the imagined Arabic chronicler, Cid Hamete Benengeli, who perhaps, it is amusingly assumed, underplays the valor of the Spanish knight; (5) there is the Don Quixote of the second part, the Knight of the Lions, in juxtaposition to the first part Knight of the Mournful Countenance; (6) there is Carrasco’s Don Quixote; (7) there is the coarse Don Quixote of the Avellaneda spurious continuation lurking in the background of the genuine second part. So we have at least seven colors of the Don Quixote specter in one book, merging and splitting and merging again.” 

This is in the lecture “Victories and Defeats”. Even if we drop Carrasco’s Don Quixote (because he, disguised as the Knight of the Mirrors, makes up a story before fighting Don Quixote), there are 6 Don Quixotes. 

Nabokov continues: 

“And beyond the horizon of the book there is the army of Don Quixotes engendered in the cesspools or hothouses of dishonest or conscientious translations. No wonder the good knight thrived and bred through the world, and at last was equally at home everywhere: as a carnival figure at a festival in Bolivia and as the abstract symbol of noble but spineless political aspirations in old Russia.”

This is when I interrupt the quote to smugly say that I’ve just got from the library a copy of Turgenev’s book Hamlet and Don Quixote. 

Back to Nabokov:

“We are confronted by an interesting phenomenon: a literary hero losing gradually contact with the book that bore him; leaving his fatherland, leaving his creator’s desk and roaming space after roaming Spain. In result, Don Quixote is greater today than he was in Cervantes’s womb.” 

Womb? 

The Brits are masters of such characters, characters bigger than the books they’re (originally) in: besides a bunch of Shakespeare characters (Hamlet, Othello, Shylock, etc), we also have Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, Frankenstein, Mr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Ebenezer Scrooge, Peter Pan, Robinson Crusoe, Alice, and so on and so forth. The Spaniards have Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. I can’t think of any such characters from the Russians. If any of Pushkin’s characters loom larger than their own books, they’re confined in the Russian language. Not even Raskolnikov exists outside Crime and Punishment. Perhaps Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man is such a character? I’m not sure. Hold on, the answer is Lolita. 

What was I saying? 

Oh yes, Nabokov. He then says: 

“He has ridden for three hundred and fifty years through the jungles and tundras of human thought—and he has gained in vitality and stature. We do not laugh at him any longer. His blazon is pity, his banner is beauty. He stands for everything that is gentle, forlorn, pure, unselfish, and gallant. The parody has become a paragon.”

We still laugh, but Don Quixote does stand for all these things Nabokov says. He is both absurd and noble, both ridiculous and sublime. That is the genius of Cervantes. 

These lectures make me love Don Quixote even more. 

*: I checked. It was Samuel Putnam's translation that Nabokov used for the lectures.

Chekhov’s “The Huntsman”

In Lectures on Russian Literature, Nabokov writes: 

“Russian critics have noted that Chekhov's style, his choice of words and so on, did not reveal any of those special artistic preoccupations that obsessed, for instance, Gogol or Flaubert or Henry James. […] He was not a verbal inventor in the sense that Gogol was; his literary style goes to parties clad in its everyday suit. Thus Chekhov is a good example to give when one tries to explain that a writer may be a perfect artist without being exceptionally vivid in his verbal technique or exceptionally preoccupied with the way his sentences curve. […] The magical part of it is that in spite of his tolerating flaws which a bright beginner would have avoided, in spite of his being quite satisfied with the man-in-the-street among words, the word-in-the-street, so to say, Chekhov managed to convey an impression of artistic beauty far surpassing that of many writers who thought they knew what rich beautiful prose was. He did it by keeping all his words in the same dim light and of the same exact tint of gray, a tint between the color of an old fence and that of a low cloud. The variety of his moods, the flicker of his charming wit, the deeply artistic economy of characterization, the vivid detail, and the fade-out of human life—all the peculiar Chekhovian features—are enhanced by being suffused and surrounded by a faintly iridescent verbal haziness.”

I have just finished Volume 6 of Constance Garnett’s Chekhov, and indeed there’s something magical about his stories.  

For example, “The Huntsman” is a very simple short story—basically a sketch of a meeting between a huntsman and a woman—on the surface, there doesn’t seem to be anything special or remarkable about it. But it is wonderful, and I’m trying to figure out why. 

“There was stillness all round, not a sound... everything living was hiding away from the heat.

“Yegor Vlassitch!” the huntsman suddenly heard a soft voice.

He started and, looking round, scowled. Beside him, as though she had sprung out of the earth, stood a pale-faced woman of thirty with a sickle in her hand. She was trying to look into his face, and was smiling diffidently.

“Oh, it is you, Pelagea!” said the huntsman, stopping and deliberately uncocking the gun. “H’m!... How have you come here?”

“The women from our village are working here, so I have come with them.... As a labourer, Yegor Vlassitch.”

“Oh...” growled Yegor Vlassitch, and slowly walked on.

Pelagea followed him. They walked in silence for twenty paces.

“I have not seen you for a long time, Yegor Vlassitch...” said Pelagea looking tenderly at the huntsman’s moving shoulders.” 

(translated by Constance Garnett) 

I suppose the story works so well because Chekhov withholds information and sets up some expectations, getting us to make assumptions about the two characters and form our thoughts about them, then slowly reveals the nature of their relationship and forces us to go back and see everything in a different light. And it is poignant. Chekhov presents the characters as they are, withholding judgement, and writes with compassion for both the huntsman and Pelagea. 

I also love Chekhov’s subtlety. 

“A silence followed. Three wild ducks flew over the clearing. Yegor followed them with his eyes till, transformed into three scarcely visible dots, they sank down far beyond the forest.

“How do you live?” he asked, moving his eyes from the ducks to Pelagea.”

That’s a nice touch. One thing I love about Chekhov and also Tolstoy is such subtle details—they capture the way a character’s thoughts wander, the way someone gets distracted by something then gets pulled back into the moment—that’s what we do, and that’s why the stories of Chekhov and Tolstoy feel so natural and seem so artless.

It is no wonder that Dmitry Grigorovich was so impressed with “The Huntsman” that he told Chekhov to move away from comic sketches and focus on more serious writings. It was, from what I understand, a turning point for Chekhov. 

What turns me on

That got your attention, didn’t it? This blog post is, unfortunately, not about sex, but about what I look for when reading, what I value and consider important in literature. 

If you’ve been reading my blog, you’ve probably noticed that I’m interested in details. Not themes, not big ideas, not messages, but details. Some readers only care about the story, some are more interested in structure and the overall shape of a literary work, I myself pay attention to details: descriptions, images, metaphors, motifs, some subtle gestures or moments of things left unsaid—like the glances in Persuasion, light in The House of Mirth, things left unsaid in The Age of Innocence, the asparagus in In Search of Lost Time: Swann’s Way, or the ship motif in Bleak House. I don’t like novels of ideas, moralism, preaching, and spoon-feeding, and don’t particularly like intrusive narrators. All that is the influence of Nabokov. 

But am I an aesthete? Not really, no. Between Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, I prefer Tolstoy (and see myself as a Tolstoy person), but between Tolstoy and Flaubert, or Tolstoy and Proust, or Tolstoy and Nabokov, I’d still pick Tolstoy. I do care about the writing and dislike bland prose (such as Stoner or Sally Rooney), and do love the prose of Melville or Proust or Edith Wharton or R. L. Stevenson, but to me style isn’t everything. I don’t enjoy style and language and wordplay just for the sake of style and language and wordplay; I don’t love metaphors just for the sake of metaphors; to some readers, style alone brings pleasure, style is all, but I’m more interested in what it conveys. 

I’m interested in characters, and the author’s vision. I don’t mean that I identify with characters—characters don’t have to be relatable or likable or strong or sympathetic—but over time, the books that have stayed with me and meant the most to me are the ones with complex, memorable characters. Characters are the reason, over a year later, Hong lou meng has come to mean more to me than The Tale of Genji. 

Generally speaking, my preference is for multifaceted, psychologically complex characters, characters who are full of contradictions, characters who feel like flesh and blood. That’s why my favourite novelist is Tolstoy, as he can inhabit his characters’ minds and depict the minute changes in their consciousness better than anyone else.

But I do love Dickens’s characters. Many readers complain that Dickens only creates caricatures, two-dimensional characters, but first of all, Dickens does create well-rounded characters (such as Esther Summerson, Lady Dedlock, and Sir Leicester in Bleak House), and more importantly, his two-dimensional characters are brilliant creations with a vivid existence within the world of his books. It is not a failure, but a different approach to characters. The Dickensian caricatures are too striking, too vivid, too individualised to be mere types—Harold Skimpole, for example, is not a type, the way that Monsieur Grandet in Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet is a type (a miser). 

Questions about identity don’t interest me. I don’t read in order to find myself in books (don’t I have enough of myself in my non-reading time?), and don’t need characters to be the same sex, race, nationality, or whatever in order to relate to them. Nor do I necessarily relate to characters who supposedly belong to the same group—this shouldn’t have to be said, but we’re living in a backward age. I’m also not a fan of the Strong Female Character trope, which is tedious and has been done to death.

Rather than identify with characters, I identify with the authors (or try to). The author’s vision is important. I don’t like Elfriede Jelinek or Joyce Carol Oates, for example, for the same reason I don’t like Lars von Trier in cinema: I don’t share their dark, hopelessly bleak view of life and human nature. I don’t get along with Balzac, or at least the author of Eugénie Grandet, because he is cynical and to me, a cynical view of humanity is not a deep view of humanity. I love writers who say yes to life, to borrow Joseph Epstein’s phrase; writers who give me glimpses of beauty when I don’t find it in life. I love writers who see people as complex individuals, not just types or members of a group or products of their environment. 

It’s because of vision (not just style) that I think more highly of, and feel closer to, Jane Austen than George Eliot. I can see that many readers see George Eliot as deeper, larger, and more intellectual, but to me, George Eliot is moralistic and her ethics are built around the central idea of sympathy, whereas Jane Austen’s ethics are more sophisticated—she deals with different moral values and principles, as well as different shades and degrees of the same values, and focuses on introspection, self-understanding, and balance. George Eliot’s greatness is easier to see, Jane Austen is more subtle. 

It’s because of vision that I now prefer Shakespeare to Tolstoy, even though in many ways I have been shaped by Tolstoy. If I have to name Tolstoy’s main fault, it wouldn’t be didacticism, because he’s not as didactic or preachy as people often claim; and it wouldn’t be misogyny, because the artist in him always triumphs over the sexist, and I think Tolstoy is the greatest at writing female characters. Tolstoy’s main problem (which is not in Shakespeare) is his complex and troubled relationship with sex, his unhealthy view of sex, which occasionally gets in the way and interferes with his writing, and in this case, I don’t think the artist in him triumphs.

Having said that, I place Shakespeare and Tolstoy at the top, above everyone else. You may disagree—different readers may value different things in literature. I personally place Shakespeare and Tolstoy at the top because of their depth and breadth, because of their deep understanding of human behaviour and the wide range of characters that they depict, because of their ability to see and understand and depict very different points of view, because of their compassion. That is the quality I value most highly.  

Literature lovers and book bloggers, join in the discussion! Perhaps write your own blog posts (and share the links below). What do you look for when you read? What is important? What do you most value? 

Rereading Anna Karenina: Part 8 and the ending

1/ Nabokov’s lecture on Anna Karenina (from Lectures on Russian Literature) is a great companion to Tolstoy’s novel.

One of his most interesting points in the lecture is time: it’s not mentioned anywhere in the novel but Nabokov calculates that the action of Anna Karenina starts at 8am on Friday, February 11th (old calendar) in 1872 and Anna commits suicide on a Sunday evening in May 1876. 

He explains: 

“Oblonski reads in his morning paper about Count Beust, Austrian Ambassador to London, traveling through Wiesbaden on his way back to England. […] This would be just before the thanksgiving service for the recovery of the Prince of Wales, which took place Tuesday, February 15/27, 1872; and the only possible Friday is Friday 11/23 of February, 1872.”

The year of Anna’s suicide is easier to deduce because in the following chapter after her death, Tolstoy mentions the Serbian- Turkish wars, which started in June 1876.

Nabokov provides a more detailed timeline of Anna and Vronsky:

“The political events on the eve of the Turkish War, as alluded to in the last part of the novel, set its end at July 1876. Vronski becomes Anna's lover in December 1872. The steeplechase episode occurs in August 1873. Vronski and Anna spend the summer and winter of 1874 in Italy, and the summer of 1875 on Vronski's estate; then, in November, they go to Moscow, where Anna commits suicide on a Sunday evening in May 1876.”

Another interesting thing Nabokov points out is the time difference between the Anna strand and the Levin strand: even though Tolstoy moves harmoniously between the 2 strands of story and creates the illusion of parallels, in some parts there’s a gap of about a year or more than a year—Anna’s story moves faster than Levin’s, as Anna and Vronsky gallop to their destruction whereas the journey of Levin and Kitty is more open-ended.

2/ After Anna’s death at the end of Part 7, Tolstoy begins Part 8 by writing about Sergey Ivanovich Koznyshev (Levin’s half-brother, the Turgenev character). It works perfectly: generally in the novel, Tolstoy follows a strand of story and builds it up, and when it gets to the peak, he switches to the other strand till it gets to the peak, and switches again (the same rule for telling parallel stories in cinema). After the emotionally draining chapters that lead up to Anna’s suicide, he has to switch to something still, quiet, and that is Sergey Ivanovich’s story. By writing that Sergey Ivanovich, after the failure of his book, gets interested in the Serbian wars and is now on the way to see Levin, Tolstoy can let him, and thus the reader, meet Vronsky at the train station.

In Anna Karenina (and other works), Tolstoy has 2 main ways of moving between strands or groups of characters: either the narrator makes a jump (when the story gets to the peak), or a character moves from one place to another and the narrative then follows another character who appears in the same scene. There’s lots of travelling, and everything feels natural and harmonious.

At the train station, before seeing Vronsky, Sergey Ivanovich meets Oblonsky. As usual, he’s jolly and cheerful—nothing can hurt him deeply, nothing can sadden him for long, even his sister’s recent terrible death.    

“‘You don’t say!’ he exclaimed when the Princess told him that Vronsky was going on this train. For a brief moment Stepan Arkadyich’s face expressed sadness, but a minute later, when, with a slight spring in his step and smoothing his whiskers, he went into the room where Vronsky was, he had already completely forgotten his desperate sobbing over his sister’s dead body, and saw in Vronsky only a hero and an old friend.” (P.8, ch.2) 

Later: 

“‘There he is!’ said the Princess, indicating Vronsky in a long overcoat and a black, wide-brimmed hat, walking along with his mother on his arm. Oblonsky was walking beside him, talking avidly about something.

Frowning, Vronsky was looking straight in front of him, as if not hearing what Stepan Arkadyich was saying.” (ibid.) 

Looking at (Stepan Arkadyich) Oblonsky, I can’t help thinking of this Hamlet soliloquy:

“O that this too too sullied flesh would melt,

Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew,

Or that the Everlasting had not fixed 

His canon 'gainst self-slaughter. O God, God,

How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable

Seem to me all the uses of this world!

Fie on't! ah, fie, ‘tis an unweeded garden

That grows to seed. Things rank and gross in nature

Possess it merely. That it should come to this:

But two months dead, nah, not so much, not two…” 

(Hamlet, Act 1 scene 2)

What’s a life worth if it’s forgotten so soon after death?

Vronsky however is nothing like Oblonsky. Nor is he like Emma Bovary’s lovers, Rodolphe and Léon. Again, placing Madame Bovary next to Anna Karenina, one can’t help seeing a smallness to Emma’s character—she is hollow and her affairs all seem so futile and stupid. Anna and Vronsky do love each other, even if their love is in some way destructive. His mother, Countess Vronskaya, doesn’t get it but he feels deeply. The Vronsky that loves Anna, I can’t help thinking, is different from the Vronsky that plays with Kitty’s feeling at the beginning of the book—his love for Anna ennobles him.

It’s a heart-rending scene, all the more because of the casual way Countess Vronskaya dismisses it and the way almost everyone, including Oblonsky, seems to just move on with their lives. 

3/ The great thing about Tolstoy’s characters is that his characters, like real people and better than any other writer’s characters, are complex and full of self-contradictions. But at the same time they’re still recognisably themselves and can’t help being themselves: Oblonsky for example is a man of pleasure and cannot feel anything very deeply; Levin always tries to be better, etc. Their essences, to use James Wood’s word, are always the same. 

Tolstoy often uses leitmotif, which makes it easier for readers to remember his vast range of characters, such as Oblonsky’s beaming smile, Kitty’s innocent eyes and radiant smile, Karenin’s shrill voice and the way he cracks his fingers, Anna’s round arms and shoulders, Veslovsky’s fat legs, etc. 

Vronsky’s leitmotif is his strong, even teeth and the last time we see him, he’s having a toothache.

4/ Anna dies, but the novel doesn’t end. There is another tragedy and that is Dolly’s tragedy of being married to a man like Oblonsky—she is not any less of a tragic figure than Anna has been. 

“Two weeks earlier a penitent letter from Stepan Arkadyich had arrived for Dolly. He begged her to save his honour by selling her estate to pay his debts. Dolly was in despair, she hated her husband, despised him, pitied him, made up her mind to obtain a divorce and refuse him, but she ended up agreeing to sell part of her estate.” (P.8, ch.7)

In the novel, the Anna strand and the Levin strand act as counterpoint to each other, and it may be argued that through the two couples, Tolstoy contrasts two kinds of love—passionate love (like between Anna and Vronsky) and a more prosaic love, based on compatibility, trust, and understanding (like between Kitty and Levin)—but the characters are not complete opposites. In fact, I would say that all four characters have something in common: they are all truthful, and all feel deeply. Part of Anna’s tragedy is that she feels tormented and cannot live in deceit like many others do in high society. Vronsky himself also wants truth and clarity. More importantly, for all of their faults, they both have depth of feeling. 

Oblonsky, in contrast, doesn’t. He cannot feel anything deeply. He cannot feel bad for long, and has no guilty conscience about cheating on his wife and neglecting his children. And he lives for only himself, and his own pleasures. 

5/ Unlike some readers, I find Levin’s conversion in the final part of the novel fascinating. It’s partly because Levin’s thoughts act as a counterpoint to Anna’s thoughts before her suicide (though some of his thoughts actually echo hers), and partly because his existential crisis, especially when he watches the peasants and thinks that they all are going to die and be buried, makes me think of Hamlet’s Yorick speech. I don’t think the chapters are didactic because Levin still has a questioning attitude, as he does for the entire novel. He still has some questions and is by no means certain about anything. 

See Levin, when he thinks he has found the meaning of life: 

“He now perceived his brother and his wife and the unknown visitor in a different way than before. It seemed to him that his relations with everyone would be altered.” (P.8, ch.14) 

The feeling doesn’t last long. Soon after, a coachman gets on his nerves. 

“This sort of interference riled him just as much as it always did, and it was with sadness that he immediately recognized how mistaken he had been in presuming that his spiritual state of mind could instantly change him when he came back into contact with reality.” (ibid.) 

And later: 

“He recalled that he had already managed to lose his temper with Ivan, treat his brother coldly, and talk in an offhand manner to Katavasov.

‘Was that really just an ephemeral state of mind which will vanish without trace?’ he thought.” (ibid.)

It reminds me of Kitty’s time in Germany—inspired by Varenka, she wants to change, to make sacrifices and live a simpler life, but cannot change herself. Levin cannot change himself either. As we see in his conversation with the over-intellectual and idealistic Koznyshev and some others, Levin remains the same.

And yet something is different. To steal Himadri’s line, “the possibility of a new approach to life has dawned on him: and on this note – a note not by any means of certainty – the novel ends.” (full post) 

6/ The final chapters of Anna Karenina are also fascinating because there are 3 main things happening: Levin’s conversion, the debate about the Serbian-Turkish wars, and Levin’s married life.

The debate is interesting because, as I’ve written before, Tolstoy depicts different perspectives and different voices, and we can see the difference between Levin and his idealistic half-brother Sergey Ivanovich Koznyshev. This is a character I didn’t remember after my last read, but I think now I’m going to remember him—it’s not hard to guess what his politics would be if he were alive today.

But the best part of the last chapters is the way Tolstoy writes about Levin’s married life, especially that scene of Kitty giving a bath to their baby Mitya. 

“The point was that Mitya had clearly and unmistakably begun to recognize his own family that day.

As soon as Levin had come up to the bath an experiment was carried out in front of him, and the experiment was a complete success. The cook, who had been specially summoned for this, replaced Kitty and bent over the baby. He frowned and started shaking his head. Then when Kitty bent over him, his face lit up with a smile, and he pushed his little hands into the sponge and burbled with his lips, making such a happy and strange sound that not just Kitty and the nanny but also Levin were lost in unexpected admiration.” (P.8, ch.18) 

This is magnificent. Levin has begun to love his baby. 

(These passages come from Rosamund Bartlett’s translation). 

After nearly 5 weeks, I have now finished rereading Anna Karenina. It is perhaps the greatest novel of all time. Nothing else like this (except War and Peace).

I love it even more than I thought. What a wonderful novel.

10 favourite novels and some other lists about books

- 10 favourite novels (updated): 
The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu 
Anna Karenina by Lev Tolstoy
War and Peace by Lev Tolstoy
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton 
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert 
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison 

- 3 favourite writers: 
Jane Austen 
Murasaki Shikibu 
Lev Tolstoy 

- 10 novels I feel worst for not having read:  
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky 
Don Quixote by Miguel De Cervantes
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe 
Bleak House by Charles Dickens
Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman 
The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass
Hunger by Knut Hamsun 
To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf 
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo 
The works of Emile Zola 

- 10 novels I very much want to read though won't read any time soon: 
Ulysses by James Joyce
In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust 
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov 
Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin
Eugenie Grandet by Honore de Balzac 
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco 
Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray 
Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk 
The Red and the Black by Stendhal  

Compare to my lists from 4 years ago.

Update on 27/12/2020: Less than half a year later, my top 10 favourite novels have been updated. 

Some wonderful passages in Mansfield Park

Mansfield Park is, to me, Jane Austen’s best written book. In the last 2 blog posts about the book, I was writing about the characters and their relationships. They are probably meaningless to those who haven’t read the novel, and those who don’t find anything good in it. 
Here I’m going to pick out some of my favourite passages from Mansfield Park, the ones that give me a tingle in the spine: 
1/ Everyone knows the opening line of Pride and Prejudice: 

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” 

The 1st page of Mansfield Park has a line that is almost as good: 

“But there certainly are not so many men of large fortune in the world as there are pretty women to deserve them.” (Ch.1) 

2/ Fanny gets enraptured: 

“… Fanny agreed to it, and had the pleasure of seeing him continue at the window with her, in spite of the expected glee; and of having his eyes soon turned, like hers, towards the scene without, where all that was solemn, and soothing, and lovely, appeared in the brilliancy of an unclouded night, and the contrast of the deep shade of the woods. Fanny spoke her feelings. “Here's harmony!” said she; “here's repose! Here's what may leave all painting and all music behind, and what poetry only can attempt to describe! Here's what may tranquillise every care, and lift the heart to rapture! When I look out on such a night as this, I feel as if there could be neither wickedness nor sorrow in the world; and there certainly would be less of both if the sublimity of Nature were more attended to, and people were carried more out of themselves by contemplating such a scene.”” (Ch.11) 

Hers is a Romantic soul. How some readers may find her boring, I don’t understand. 
Later there’s another description of the sky—except that now it’s day, not night: 

“The day was uncommonly lovely. It was really March; but it was April in its mild air, brisk soft wind, and bright sun, occasionally clouded for a minute; and everything looked so beautiful under the influence of such a sky, the effects of the shadows pursuing each other on the ships at Spithead and the island beyond, with the ever-varying hues of the sea, now at high water, dancing in its glee and dashing against the ramparts with so fine a sound, produced altogether such a combination of charms for Fanny, as made her gradually almost careless of the circumstances under which she felt them.” (Ch.42) 

Elizabeth Bennet and Emma Woodhouse are mostly interested in people; Fanny Price is interested in nature, and the mind, so we get such wonderful passages. 

3/ Now look at these lines, after the ball: 

“Shortly afterward, Sir Thomas was again interfering a little with her inclination, by advising her to go immediately to bed. “Advise” was his word, but it was the advice of absolute power, and she had only to rise, and, with Mr. Crawford's very cordial adieus, pass quietly away; stopping at the entrance-door, like the Lady of Branxholm Hall, “one moment and no more,” to view the happy scene, and take a last look at the five or six determined couple who were still hard at work; and then, creeping slowly up the principal staircase, pursued by the ceaseless country-dance, feverish with hopes and fears, soup and negus, sore-footed and fatigued, restless and agitated, yet feeling, in spite of everything, that a ball was indeed delightful.” (Ch.28)

That’s just… so good. “Determined”, “hard at work”—Jane Austen’s hilarious. Then she’s serious again, look at the next bit—in just a few words, she describes everything Fanny feels as she leaves her first ball. 

4/ The next day: 

“After seeing William to the last moment, Fanny walked back to the breakfast-room with a very saddened heart to grieve over the melancholy change; and there her uncle kindly left her to cry in peace, conceiving, perhaps, that the deserted chair of each young man might exercise her tender enthusiasm, and that the remaining cold pork bones and mustard in William's plate might but divide her feelings with the broken egg-shells in Mr. Crawford's. She sat and cried con amore as her uncle intended, but it was con amore fraternal and no other.” (Ch.29) 

That is brilliant. By describing the remains on the plates, Jane Austen evokes image of the 2 men, William (Fanny’s brother) and Henry Crawford, and, changing points of view, contrasts Sir Thomas’s assumption with Fanny’s true feeling. 
Tom at Wuthering Expectations wrote about this excerpt a while back. 

5/ The Portsmouth chapters are among the finest in all of Jane Austen. I have always thought that Fanny’s feeling in Portsmouth is like the feeling of an immigrant returning home to a developing country, after years in a rich developed country—she doesn’t feel belong, can’t help seeing its problems, and realises that her home is no longer there. 

“Whatever was wanted was hallooed for, and the servants hallooed out their excuses from the kitchen. The doors were in constant banging, the stairs were never at rest, nothing was done without a clatter, nobody sat still, and nobody could command attention when they spoke.” (Ch.39)  

Noise, chaos, disorder. I love the word “halloo” she uses. 

“Their general fare bore a very different character; and could he have suspected how many privations, besides that of exercise, she endured in her father's house, he would have wondered that her looks were not much more affected than he found them. She was so little equal to Rebecca's puddings and Rebecca's hashes, brought to table, as they all were, with such accompaniments of half-cleaned plates, and not half-cleaned knives and forks, that she was very often constrained to defer her heartiest meal till she could send her brothers in the evening for biscuits and buns.” (Ch.42) 

Rebecca is the servant in the Price family. 
Better: 

“The sun was yet an hour and half above the horizon. She felt that she had, indeed, been three months there; and the sun's rays falling strongly into the parlour, instead of cheering, made her still more melancholy, for sunshine appeared to her a totally different thing in a town and in the country. Here, its power was only a glare: a stifling, sickly glare, serving but to bring forward stains and dirt that might otherwise have slept. There was neither health nor gaiety in sunshine in a town. She sat in a blaze of oppressive heat, in a cloud of moving dust, and her eyes could only wander from the walls, marked by her father's head, to the table cut and notched by her brothers, where stood the tea-board never thoroughly cleaned, the cups and saucers wiped in streaks, the milk a mixture of motes floating in thin blue, and the bread and butter growing every minute more greasy than even Rebecca's hands had first produced it.” (Ch.46) 

What a painting that is.  
I don’t include the great passages about people and character, because good lines can be found on every page—Jane Austen’s style is polished, precise; she writes enough, and yet says so much in just a few words. Such passages can also be found in the other works. But one such as above, I don’t think you can find in her other novels. 
I do wonder what Nabokov would have thought about Emma, he didn’t like Pride and Prejudice. But I’m glad that Edmund Wilson told him to read Mansfield Park—it is more visual, packed with stuff, and also full of feeling. 
It is boring that people (often self-proclaimed Janeites) keep asking “Which Jane Austen heroine are you/ do you identify with?”. I don’t identify with character; I identify with the author and try to see what they’re doing. The Jane Austen I like the most is the Jane Austen of Mansfield Park—deeper, more serious, more complex, more visual, and full of feeling.  

2010- 2019 in books [updated]

Soon we will enter the 2020s, so let’s talk about our reading over the past decade, shall we?  
1/ I came to Norway in 2009—before this, I only read literature in Vietnamese. Slowly I started to switch, and now read almost exclusively in English. 

2/ My years in Norway, 2009-2016, especially after I entered University of Oslo in 2012, will without doubt be seen as my formative years in reading.
(I will, forever, be grateful to HumSam-bibliotek of University of Oslo, and Deichmanske bibliotek—Oslo public library). 

3/ My favourite writers are: Lev Tolstoy, Jane Austen, Vladimir Nabokov, Herman Melville, and Gustave Flaubert. 
I also like: the Bronte sisters, especially Emily Bronte, Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Nikolai Gogol, Anton Chekhov, Robert Louis Stevenson, Lewis Carroll, Toni Morrison, William Faulkner, P. G. Wodehouse… 
George Eliot is a great writer I have immense respect for but don’t love. Henry James is another I struggled quite a lot with, but I’m warming to his works. 

4/ I started to have a love for literature in the English language at the IB (International Baccalaureate). 
However, most of my favourite writers from this period I’m now indifferent to: F. Scott Fitzgerald, J. D. Salinger, Milan Kundera, Franz Kafka, George Orwell, Isabel Allende…  

5/ I discovered Nabokov and Tolstoy in 2012, Jane Austen in 2013, and Melville in 2016 (before coming to the UK). 

6/ I love British literature and Russian literature. 
The most important reading challenge I did on this blog was Russian Literature Challenge in 2014. Here’s the wrap-up: 
https://thelittlewhiteattic.blogspot.com/2015/01/russian-literature-challenge-2014-wrap.html

7/ Here are some top 10 lists about books, from 2016: 
https://thelittlewhiteattic.blogspot.com/2016/08/some-top-10-lists-about-books.html
The list of favourite books is now different (what do you expect? It’s been 3 years!), but the other lists remain more or less the same. 

8/ My new list of 10 favourite novels: 
Anna Karenina by Lev Tolstoy
War and Peace by Lev Tolstoy
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte 
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert 
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier 
Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens 
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner 

9/ My favourite Jane Austen novel is her least popular and most misunderstood work, Mansfield Park: 
https://thelittlewhiteattic.blogspot.com/2014/12/reading-misreading-mansfield-park.html
This is a book about which I often fight with people. The blog post above is a collection of my writings and arguments about Mansfield Park, from 2014 and before. 
I wrote a bit about Mansfield Park on Jane Austen’s 244th birthday: 
https://thelittlewhiteattic.blogspot.com/2019/12/jane-austens-birthday-16121775-16122019.html 

10/ Another novel about which I also often fight with people is Lolita. Here are my final arguments when I reread the book in 2017: 
https://thelittlewhiteattic.blogspot.com/2017/05/lolita-chapter-29.html
https://thelittlewhiteattic.blogspot.com/2017/05/lolitas-tears.html
I also wrote about motifs in Lolita that I didn’t notice earlier, such as: 
Dogs: https://thelittlewhiteattic.blogspot.com/2017/05/the-dogs-in-lolita.html 
Birds and butterflies: https://thelittlewhiteattic.blogspot.com/2017/05/butterflies-and-birds-in-lolita.html
In 2019, I read The Enchanter, which is known as the proto-Lolita, and compared the 2 here: 
https://thelittlewhiteattic.blogspot.com/2019/04/from-enchanter-to-lolita.html 
Also, if anyone accuses Nabokov of plagiarising Henz von Lichberg’s short story, here’s my response:  
https://thelittlewhiteattic.blogspot.com/2017/05/the-other-lolita.html 

11/ On my blog, the label “writers and readers” is devoted to discussing the art of reading, good readers vs bad readers. 
Some important posts are: 
https://thelittlewhiteattic.blogspot.com/2013/08/3-wrong-attitudes-in-reading-novels.html
https://thelittlewhiteattic.blogspot.com/2014/02/poshlost-according-to-nabokov.html 
https://thelittlewhiteattic.blogspot.com/2014/05/philistines-and-philistinism-vladimir.html
https://thelittlewhiteattic.blogspot.com/2019/08/on-idea-of-relevance-and-relatableness.html 
Nabokov, as you can see, has huge influence on my thinking and reading. 
Also, this is a post about top 10 “Are we reading the same book?” moments: 
https://thelittlewhiteattic.blogspot.com/2015/08/top-10-are-we-reading-same-book-moments.html 

12/ I have written a few times about feminist literary criticism, especially The Madwoman in the Attic:
https://thelittlewhiteattic.blogspot.com/2015/03/the-madwoman-in-attic-george-eliot.html
https://thelittlewhiteattic.blogspot.com/2015/06/the-madwoman-in-attic-on-middlemarch.html

13/ 1 of my best series on my blog is about George Eliot’s Middlemarch: 
https://thelittlewhiteattic.blogspot.com/2015/06/characters-in-middlemarch-and.html
https://thelittlewhiteattic.blogspot.com/2015/06/get-out-of-way-will-you-or-george-eliot.html
https://thelittlewhiteattic.blogspot.com/2015/06/lydgate-sexist.html
https://thelittlewhiteattic.blogspot.com/2015/06/middlemarch-paintings-and-miniatures.html
https://thelittlewhiteattic.blogspot.com/2015/06/middlemarch-taking-wife.html
https://thelittlewhiteattic.blogspot.com/2015/06/chapter-42-and-casaubon-or-how-i-learn.html
https://thelittlewhiteattic.blogspot.com/2015/06/experience-and-growth-dorothea-brooke.html
https://thelittlewhiteattic.blogspot.com/2015/06/the-2nd-plot-of-middlemarch-and.html
https://thelittlewhiteattic.blogspot.com/2015/06/george-eliots-moral-lessons-in.html 
https://thelittlewhiteattic.blogspot.com/2015/06/middlemarch-each-unhappy-family-is.html 
https://thelittlewhiteattic.blogspot.com/2015/06/on-fred-vincy.html
https://thelittlewhiteattic.blogspot.com/2015/06/last-thoughts-on-middlemarch-tingle.html 

14/ Another good series is about Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady:
https://thelittlewhiteattic.blogspot.com/2015/09/experience-and-reading-p2-readers-in.html
https://thelittlewhiteattic.blogspot.com/2015/10/the-portrait-of-lady-signs.html
https://thelittlewhiteattic.blogspot.com/2015/10/the-portrait-of-lady-time.html
https://thelittlewhiteattic.blogspot.com/2015/10/the-portrait-of-lady-characters-and.html
https://thelittlewhiteattic.blogspot.com/2015/10/the-portrait-of-lady-more-on-time-and.html
https://thelittlewhiteattic.blogspot.com/2015/10/metaphors-in-portrait-of-lady.html
https://thelittlewhiteattic.blogspot.com/2015/10/silence-in-portrait-of-lady.html
https://thelittlewhiteattic.blogspot.com/2015/11/the-greatness-of-portrait-of-lady.html 

15/ Here’s my series about Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit, from earlier this year: 
https://thelittlewhiteattic.blogspot.com/2019/07/starting-little-dorrit.html
https://thelittlewhiteattic.blogspot.com/2019/07/the-houses-in-little-dorrit.html
https://thelittlewhiteattic.blogspot.com/2019/07/repetition-in-little-dorrit.html
https://thelittlewhiteattic.blogspot.com/2019/07/the-story-strands-in-little-dorrit.html
https://thelittlewhiteattic.blogspot.com/2019/07/on-character-of-little-dorrit.html
https://thelittlewhiteattic.blogspot.com/2019/07/little-dorrit-rivals.html
https://thelittlewhiteattic.blogspot.com/2019/07/the-themes-in-little-dorrit.html
https://thelittlewhiteattic.blogspot.com/2019/07/on-amy-dorrit-or-how-dickens-improves.html
https://thelittlewhiteattic.blogspot.com/2019/08/little-dorrit-some-random-observations.html
https://thelittlewhiteattic.blogspot.com/2019/08/on-finishing-little-dorrit.html 

16/ I think my recent series about Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca is not bad. 
However, I’ve noticed that I’ve not written any good series of blog posts at all about Tolstoy or Jane Austen or Melville. 

17/ Here I explain why I don’t use the star rating system: 
https://thelittlewhiteattic.blogspot.com/2019/04/why-i-dont-use-star-rating.html 

18/ To lots of people, 2010- 2019 is just another decade, but to me, it has been an important decade: I read a lot more than before, switched to reading in English, discovered Russian literature, discovered writers who shaped my taste and thinking and who would most likely remain in my personal canon, learnt to read a literary work, learnt to analyse and write about it, shaped my views and aesthetics in literature, got a degree in language and literature, created a blog that focused mostly on literature, and got blogger friends. 
Here’s to another good decade in reading!


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Update: 
In the earlier version of this post, I didn’t link to any of my writings about Moby Dick, because at the time of reading and writing about the book, I was in awe and had nothing intelligent to say. The posts were more like notes for myself than finished and polished blog posts to share with the world. However, it’s not really fair to go on and on about Lolita and Mansfield Park but not say a word about Moby Dick, a book of genius, a book that I’m sure will always remain in my top 3 (together with Anna Karenina and War and Peace). 
Here’s a blog post in which I stated why Moby Dick is a book about everything: 
https://thelittlewhiteattic.blogspot.com/2016/04/moby-dick-is-book-about-everything.html
Some of my posts were about the whale chapters:
https://thelittlewhiteattic.blogspot.com/2016/03/moby-dick-chapter-32-cetology.html
https://thelittlewhiteattic.blogspot.com/2016/03/the-whales-skin.html
https://thelittlewhiteattic.blogspot.com/2016/04/the-whales-eyes-structure-of-moby-dick.html
https://thelittlewhiteattic.blogspot.com/2016/04/the-noble-sperm-whale.html
My view regarding Moby Dick is an “extreme” view: the book is perfect as it is and does not “need an editor”; it is several books in one, it is about everything, and therefore it is the way it should be; readers should not skip the whale chapters and should not read for only the story, but should read Moby Dick with the right mindset, i.e. with curiosity and a sense of wonder; an abridged War and Peace might still be War and Peace, but an abridged Moby Dick is not Moby Dick.
When will I again experience the aesthetic bliss of reading something incredible like Anna Karenina or Moby Dick?