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Hey, I'm sorry it took me so long to reply. I wrote a reply but brave refreshed and I lost it all, and since then I have been off for work. Anyway I basically got what you meant by directionally correct completely backwards. And the things I will consume were plumbing the depths, not my whole diet. But you are definitely right about how easy it can be to get lost in content, nigh valueless super-stimuli relying on a plausibly obfuscated absence of originality, where even the twists are expected - audio-visual codeine and tums. Which is why I always appreciate it when you link Russian (or mostly Russian) authors, you are my only exposure to them. I haven't found The River Sparkles, but I did find a copy of The Murmuring Forest and Other Stories at the Esk library (!), so I am reading that now.
Thanks!
The River Sparkles was just a random obscure little thing I've been listening to at the moment. You can read Nabokov or something, thankfully he wrote directly in English. My favorite work of his is probably Invitation to a Beheading, though I've started Ada recently and it's already competitive. Kuprin is great too... Of course there are tons of increadible non-Russian authors.
It takes effort (and, in my case, took years – Russians tend to develop allergy when we have Dostoyevsky etc. forced down our throats by midwitted teachers with poor understanding of the source material in school) to start appreciating «old» literature, but what's remarkable is that the impression of it being slow-paced and non-stimulating is false. Those authors were highly intelligent and it's actually very dense in information and psychological detail, just not in poorly thought-out narrative events.
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