Wonder Confronts Certainty
Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter
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- $21.99
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
An Air Mail Editor’s Pick
A Spectator Book of the Year
“[A] masterly panorama of classic Russian literature and its hinterland of ideas.”—Wall Street Journal
“Wise and authoritative…As the best Russian literature teaches, the emancipation of the human will from all limits and restraints is the path of individual and collective perdition. We should all be grateful to Gary Saul Morson for drawing out that indispensable insight with such lucidity, erudition, and grace.” —Daniel J. Mahoney, New Criterion
“Wonder Confronts Certainty is Gary Saul Morson’s magnum opus.” —Joseph Epstein, Washington Free Beacon
Since the age of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov, Russian literature has posed questions about good and evil, moral responsibility, and human freedom with a clarity and intensity found nowhere else. In this wide-ranging meditation, Gary Saul Morson delineates intellectual debates that have coursed through two centuries of Russian writing, as the greatest thinkers of the empire and then the Soviet Union enchanted readers with their idealism, philosophical insight, and revolutionary fervor.
Morson describes the Russian literary tradition as an argument between a radical intelligentsia that uncompromisingly followed ideology down the paths of revolution and violence, and writers who probed ever more deeply into the human condition. Exploring apologia for bloodshed, Morson adapts Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the non-alibi—the idea that one cannot escape or displace responsibility for one’s actions. And, throughout, Morson isolates a characteristic theme of Russian culture: how the aspiration to relieve profound suffering can lead to either heartfelt empathy or bloodthirsty tyranny.
What emerges is a contest between unyielding dogmatism and open-minded dialogue, between heady certainty and a humble sense of wonder at the world’s elusive complexity—a thought-provoking journey into inescapable questions.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This rigorous study by Morson (Minds Wide Shut), a literature professor at Northwestern University, surveys how Russian authors have wrestled with life's biggest questions. "Literature is for the nation what memory is to the individual person," he contends, tracing the development of Russian thought from the mid-19th-century novels of Tolstoy and Turgenev to the oral histories created by Svetlana Alexievich. Exploring how authors have tackled questions of ethics, Morson suggests that Dostoyevsky's critical depiction of revolutionary violence in The Possessed shows how claims that the "ends justify the means" can lead to moral atrocities. Morson also examines what authors have said about the meaning of life. Vasily Grossman's 1959 WWII novel Life and Fate, Morson posits, finds purpose in the unique circumstances of an individual's life, while Alexievich's 2015 Nobel Prize speech identified "suffering as the highest form of information" about the "mystery of life." Morson's encyclopedic knowledge of Russian literature is remarkable, and his analysis masterful and profound. However, readers without a background in the Russian canon might be disoriented by the author's quick moves from Bolshevik history to Mikhail Zoshchenko's stories to novelist Mikhail Bulgakov's critique of modernism in the space of a paragraph. Still, this attests to the enduring relevance of the Russian literary greats.
