Quote (Svartermetalisk @ Sep 1 2015 12:16pm)
The same way you can't read Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy once and truly understand everything, it's literally not possible. I guess if you read Dostoyvesky for plot audiobooks is fine but you should treat him the same way you treat the philosophers.
Litterature that's suitable for academic discussion 100+ years after initial release you are not going to fully comprehend with one superficial read and thus they aren't suitable for audiobooks.
I haven't given audiobooks a chance because I don't read genrefictiion but if I ever feel like reading Stephen King I might give it a shot but for Tolstoy or similar, no never.
Dostoevsky didn't write pedantically though, or at least English translations of dostoevsky are not written pedantically. You can understand exactly what Dostoevsky is saying in any given paragraph by reading that paragraph once. I'd agree that you miss a lot of nuance and foreshadowing the first time you read an entire book by dostoevsky though, but the same is true for any decent writer.
You can't compare, for example,
"The great thing however is, in the show of the temporal and the transient to recognize the substance which is immanent and the eternal which is present. For the work of Reason (which is synonymous with the Idea) when considered in its own actuality, is to simultaneously enter external existence and emerge with an infinite wealth of forms, phenomena and phases — a multiplicity that envelops its essential rational kernel with a motley outer rind with which our ordinary consciousness is earliest at home. It is this rind that the Concept must penetrate before Reason can find its own inward pulse and feel it still beating even in the outward phases. But this infinite variety of circumstances which is formed in this element of externality by the light of the rational essence shining in it — all this infinite material, with its regulatory laws — is not the object of philosophy....To comprehend what is, is the task of philosophy: and what is is Reason." -Hegel
with
"It wasn't the New World that mattered … Columbus died almost without seeing it; and not really knowing what he had discovered. It's life that matters, nothing but life — the process of discovering, the everlasting and perpetual process, not the discovery itself, at all. But what's the use of talking! I suspect that all I'm saying now is so like the usual commonplaces that I shall certainly be taken for a lower-form schoolboy sending in his essay on "sunrise", or they'll say perhaps that I had something to say, but that I did not know how to "explain" it. But I'll add, that there is something at the bottom of every new human thought, every thought of genius, or even every earnest thought that springs up in any brain, which can never be communicated to others, even if one were to write volumes about it and were explaining one's idea for thirty-five years; there's something left which cannot be induced to emerge from your brain, and remains with you forever; and with it you will die, without communicating to anyone perhaps the most important of your ideas. But if I too have failed to convey all that has been tormenting me for the last six months, it will, anyway, be understood that I have paid very dearly for attaining my present "last conviction." This is what I felt necessary, for certain objects of my own, to put forward in my "Explanation". However, I will continue." -Dostoevsky
Be honest, did you have to read the quote by Hegel twice to understand what he meant? Did you have to read Dostoevsky's twice to understand? I've read and listened to just about every major story Dostoevsky ever wrote, and I don't think there's a single example of him writing something that is not very easily understood.
So, while Dostoevsky is equally philosophical, his work is not purely philosophical and is infinitely easier to understand at first glance.