when you're so not mad you out page count the equivalent of a capitalism car manual, incoherent drivel from the least annoying ancap, and a series literally known for extremely meticulous and plentiful worldbuilding, for the equivalent of a shower argument against people who dislike you on twitter. holy shit. i'd feel bad if she deserved pity :what-the-hell:
Honestly, State and Revolution is incredibly dense itself despite being about 100 pages for similar reasons
conversely, I was surprised by how light it seemed once I realized Lenin was dunking and I just lacked context on the people involved. I stopped looking people up and just started to enjoy the rant on it's own terms. it's more intimidating when you think every word is layered in meaning and you need to decipher it all - mostly though, Lenin isn't Joyce and just lays it out straight, modulo the translation issue (old books that were translated into the language as it was spoken/written 100 years ago force some mental overhead in translating the language to something more familiar -- a lot of theory would be 100% more accessible if it were just re-translated and the language modernized).
Maybe that's the issue; I keep trying to understand the passages themselves with the relevant context, maybe I should just be reading less of the subtext on it and not trying to understand the context completely
there's probably some value to that but like... everyone he mentions is long, long dead. most of them have their most significant historical mention in Lenin's citation. but I'm also coming at this from the perspective that Lenin's methods are more important than his specific results; I want to understand his analytical tools so I can employ them in the present to extant circumstances. whether he was ultimately right or wrong/fair or unfair in his analysis and interpretations of others is much less helpful than working out what he's choosing to focus on and how he combines ideas. YMMV
That's very helpful, actually. Will try re-reading it with that in mind; I think my issue was hyper-focusing on the minutiae, but thinking over how the text was structured, it makes more sense to approach it as more of a framework than a reference guide to every thought