viscera Posted:

Three years from now, you have to have completed a dissertation in a foreign language. bumuming English is your primary language, which would you prefer to spend three years studying, German or Russian? Your dissertation is for a graduate degree in literature, so going with German means studying Kafka, Mann, Goethe, and Brecht, among others. Russian would mean studying Nabokov, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Tolstoy…you get the idea. If you have no idea who any of those people are, just give me (hypothetical) advice on which language you’d rather learn.

Goethe is very outdated as much as Dostoevsky. Chekhov is very funny and ironic, I’d say he was a /b/tard if /b/ would exist in that century. Kafka is a bad reading, srsly — as much as Koelho, Bach, Murakami and other pseudo-philosophic literature for 40-yrs virgin girls. Mann is really good, but you don’t need to “study” it — just read it in English. Tolstoy is a 700-page ethics-filled Bible if you take just the War and Peace. Nabokov is a good 1-time reading, pretty sad, unless you’re a pervert or obsessed with OMG MOAAAR LOLIS. Funny thing, Nabokov is pushing his identity so hard into the novel, that it feel like threesome all the time.

Bottomline: I’d say Russian clbumic lit is a bit more interesting than German, but I’d rather study modern literature instead.