Posted on 12/22/2024 9:28:11 AM PST by CondoleezzaProtege
Being popular on TikTok can make just about anything fly off the shelves, from beauty products to cucumbers…Books are no exception – authors such as Colleen Hoover and Sarah J Maas have what is known as “BookTok” to thank for their stratospheric success. Now joining their ranks, in a twist nobody saw coming, is Fyodor Dostoevsky.
In 2024, the Penguin Classics little black book edition of Dostoevsky’s White Nights was the fourth most sold work of literature in translation in the UK. “We have a member of staff who has worked here for 25 years and he said we’d sell the odd one,” Amy Wright, a bookseller at Pritchards in Liverpool told me, “but the last two years there’s definitely been an upsurge.”
The celebrated 19th-century Russian writer’s novella has become “a phenomenon”, says Francis Cleverdon, general manager of Hatchards Picadilly bookshop in London. “We’ve sold 190 copies of the little paperback in the last year.”
Since about December of last year, White Nights has been all over BookTok and its Instagram parallel, Bookstagram. Searching for the 1848 tale on these platforms will result in page after page of reviews, quotes, and moody shots of the book next to cups of coffee. There are White Nights Spotify playlists full of Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich. Social media users from all over the world have rhapsodised about the beautiful love story it tells, and bewailed getting their hearts smashed into pieces by it. “Everyone wants to fall head over heels in love. Then they read Dostoevsky’s White Nights,” read one viral tweet.
So why has a previously little known Russian novella from more than 150 years ago suddenly caught the attention of readers in such a big way?
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
Next thing you know the works of Anton Chekov will start flying off the shelves, too!
“The celebrated 19th-century Russian writer...”
Give the Zeepers a chance and they’ll be burning his books.
Meet Anton Chekov prank on the public.
https://improveverywhere.com/2004/02/29/anton-chekov/
Glad to see a resurgence in this man’s work. The Brothers Kamarozov is the greatest novel ever written.
The article goes on to explain its popularity among today’s young.
“ There’s one prosaic but important reason: it’s just over 80 pages long. ”
“ It’s a story about someone who feels things very keenly, and lives in his own head. “It begins to seem to me at such times that I am incapable of beginning a life in real life, because it has seemed to me that I have lost all touch, all instinct for the actual, the real,” the narrator laments.
Perhaps it should come as no surprise that a story about someone who has built an elaborate life of fantasy should become popular on social media, where users intentionally romanticise their lives. The tendency to think of oneself as the protagonist of a fictionalised version of life has been termed “main character syndrome”
Well at least they are reading something
But the reason this book has resonated with so many new readers this year also has to do with the the story itself. A nameless young man meets a woman called Nastenka by chance one night on the streets of St Petersburg. He is lonely to the point of pain, and she is experiencing her own agony of waiting to hear from her one true love, who has returned from Moscow but has not contacted her as he promised he would. The narrator meets Nastenka on two more nights, and he believes he has fallen deeply in love with her, despite her protestations that he should see her as a friend. When Nastenka starts to think her lover has abandoned her, she and the narrator get carried away imagining the life the two of them might have together instead. The following day, Nastenka’s lover returns, and she abandons the narrator.
That is the first part of the movie, Casablanca. We know how that ends.
He was a damned ax murderer for crying out loud - how the hell is he the protagonist?
.....and it’s short enough for those who won’t read whole books!
Let’s see the Gen Z’s tackle “The Brothers Karamazov” and prove me wrong!
Notes from Underground was a pretty strange story too. The protagonist reminded me of George Castansza (had he lived in 1840s Czarist Russia).
I’m mostly illiterate but I never heard of him till Andrew Klavan quoted in one of his podcasted cultural narratives. I was inspired to buy the book, but for me it was mostly indecipherable cosmic crypto soviet dystopianism. Guess i’ll go get the idiots guide.
The greatest chapter in it, in my opinion, is Caana at Galilee. That's one of the most beautiful things ever written. In a way, life changing:
Love the earth! Water it with tears of joy! Love everything and everyone! Forgive everything. Forgive the hawks for killing rabbits, the sharks for killing seals, bacteria for killing people. Forgive everyone for everything. Forgive disease. Forgive war. Forgive yourself. Forgive God. If you can do that, you can feel overwhelming Divine Love and know that all is well.
What a gorgeous chapter!
IIRC, it doesn’t end happily.
But if you give something a unique and enigmatic cover, people will buy it.
For example, “The Catcher in the Rye.”
Funny...I referenced The Brothers Karamazov in Today’s J-Thread.
What a coinkidink! :-)
https://freerepublic.com/focus/religion/4285881/posts?page=7
Prince Mishkin, thanks you.
lol
Пожалуйста!
My Pleasure, Prince.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.