Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter

Review\n“A compelling and necessary book. Drawing on a vast fund of knowledge of Russian history and literature and a fine understanding of Russian fiction, Morson joins together two large subjects: a riveting―and scary―account of the Russian cult of murder from nineteenth-century terrorism to its continuation in Soviet state terror, and its humanistic antidote in the great Russian novelists.”―Robert Alter, author of The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary\n“A profound, passionate, and wholly original celebration of Russian realism as both literary school and way of life. Invoking bitter historical precedent, Morson shows us that reality itself―the sensual, moral experience of living and loving actual humans―requires an able defender in the face of alluring theoretical abstractions, perfect futures, and idealized visions of humanity. And who better to defend the prosaic elements of lived experience than those writers whose unprecedented achievements depended on their ability to describe it so well?”―Yuri Corrigan, author of Dostoevsky and the Riddle of the Self\n“Wanderer, Idealist, Revolutionary: in his latest guide, Gary Saul Morson plots these three personality types through two centuries of Russian literature. This is not a neutral book. Among its several purposes is to prod readers into realizing that the passion to possess a definitive ideology―urgent, materialist, maximalist―can be as dangerous an appetite as the drive to possess physical bodies.”―Caryl Emerson, author of The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin\n“An impeccable contribution to literary criticism, social philosophy, and philosophical anthropology. Against debilitating nihilism and secular and religious fundamentalism, it affirms dialogue, conversation, and the ‘polyphonic’ expression of rich and diverse personal points of view. Morson embodies the best insights of the Russian literary tradition he sets out to illuminate.”―Daniel J. Mahoney, author of The Statesman as Thinker: Portraits of Greatness, Courage, and Moderation\n“Morson has been writing superb books about Russian fiction for over forty years, but Wonder Confronts Certainty is his most profound and capacious, taking on new concerns and periods in the ongoing engagement of the Russian novel with ideas, extreme conditions, and ultimate questions. With illumination from intellectual history, comparative literary history, and moral philosophy, it incisively captures what makes Russian literature both Russian and timeless, of its time and open-ended.”―William Mills Todd III, author of Fiction and Society in the Age of Pushkin\nA noted literary scholar traverses the Russian canon, exploring how realists, idealists, and revolutionaries debated good and evil, moral responsibility, and freedom.\nSince 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.\nMorson 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. The debate concerned what Russians called “the accursed questions”: If there is no God, are good and evil merely human constructs? Should we look for life’s essence in ordinary or extreme conditions? Are individual minds best understood in terms of an overarching theory or, as Tolstoy thought, by tracing the “tiny alternations of consciousness”? Exploring apologia for bloodshed, Morson adapts Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the non-alibi―the idea that one c