Talk:Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin

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[edit] Declining reputation

What exactly do you mean by his reputation being in decline? I remember being made to read him in school, so his official reputation can't be all that much in decline (unless it went into decline about 6 years or so ago). Marm 10:57, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

I bet you "were made" to read "Молодая гвардия" and "Повесть о настоящем человеке" too. School programs have little bearing to the writers' literary merits or influence. I believe his reputation is declined in the West more than in Russia, where we are used to admire the same stale stuff from century to century. Read Dmitry Mirsky's or Nabokov's ruthless appraisals of Saltykov's rather flat and certainly outdated facetiousness. --Ghirla ^-трёп- 11:06, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

Fair enough, but if we are to base wikipedia on Nabokov's opinion, then surely we must also say something about Dostoevsky being a hack, for instance. I guess it's a moot point considering the phrase isn't in the article now, but I think "reputation" being the intangible that it is, things like that are probably statements of opinion best left off? I mean, unless you're talking about someone painfully obvious like Demyan Bedny. Don't mean to tell you how to do your job, though, just thinking. Marm 11:35, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

Well... Sometimes it's easy to tell that an artist's reputation is in permanent decline. Just look at what happened to the once popular Eugene Sue, Charles Paul de Kock or E. Phillips Oppenheim after their deaths. Other times it can be trickier. What at one time appeared to be a permanent decline eventually turned out to be a bump in the road in William Shakespeare's (late 17th century) and J.S. Bach's (early 19th century) cases. Then we have artists who are still well regarded, but not for the reasons that their contemporaries would have thought likely. E. Nesbit is still in print, but only as a children's writer; H.G. Wells is remembered as a science fiction writer; William Morris is mostly thought of as a fantasy writer who paved the way for Lord Dunsany and J.R.R. Tolkien, etc.

But back to Saltykov-Shchedrin. Nabokov's one time friend and prominent critic Gleb Struve called Saltykov "the great satirist" in Russian Stories (Courier Dover Publications, ISBN 0486262448, p.x) -- although apparently not great enough to include his work in the anthology. More recently, James Wood of The New York Review of Books called The Golovlyov Family [http:/www.nybooks.com/shop/product-file/10/theg10/introduction.pdf extraordinary] while Julian W. Connolly referred to Saltykov as "a marginal genius of Russian prose" in The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov (Cambridge University Press, 2005, ISBN 0521829577, p.59)

On balance, it might be best to create a "Criticism and interpretations" section and let these (and other) quotes speak for themselves :) Ahasuerus 15:34, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

I think claims like "reputation in decline" are subjective enough not to be included into Wiki articles. Cyberodin