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Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter Hardcover – May 16, 2023

by Gary Saul Morson (Author)
4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 31 ratings
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A noted literary scholar traverses the Russian canon, exploring how realists, idealists, and revolutionaries debated good and evil, moral responsibility, and freedom.

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. 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 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.

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  1. Print length
    512 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press
  4. Publication date
    May 16, 2023
  5. Dimensions
    6.12 x 1.55 x 9.25 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    0674971809
  7. ISBN-13
    978-0674971806
  8. See all details
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From the Publisher

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Editorial Reviews

Review

“[A] masterly panorama of classic Russian literature and its hinterland of ideas…With light-footed erudition, Morson passes nimbly among a crowd of guests at this lavish banquet of ideas. Readers familiar with his book’s corpus of fictional classics may find fresh illumination, for instance, in the liberal thinker Semyon Frank; the storyteller Vsevolod Garshin, whom Morson considers ‘underrated’; or the heartrending Soviet memoirists Nadezhda Mandelstam and Evgeniya Ginzburg…Against the iron grip of ideology and destiny, his authors illustrate how freedom works―with all its chaotic consequences.”―Boyd Tonkin, 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

“Morson’s special gift is to present Russian literature as an endlessly renewable source of revelation.”―Bob Blaisdell, Los Angeles Review of Books

“For Morson, to read Russian literature is to live between wonder and certainty―to sit somewhere between an attitude of humble awe and unyielding dogmatism before the world. This oscillation between wonder and certainty not only shaped Russian intellectual, literary, and political debates for the past two centuries but also asks us in the West who we are in our own tradition―whether we are open to wonderment and surprise or smugly satisfied with our knowledge.”―Lee Trepanier, Public Discourse

“Wonder Confronts Certainty is Gary Saul Morson's magnum opus. Presenting a rich density of detail cast over a wide net of philosophical subjects, the book sets out to investigate the two main strands of Russian culture, the political and the literary, and how they have played against each other over the past century and a half in Russian life.”―Joseph Epstein, Washington Free Beacon

“Wonder Confronts Certainty is a magnificent book, equally valuable as a work of scholarship and a meditation on the timeless urgency of reading.”―Richard Hughes Gibson, Hedgehog Review

“This volume is vintage Morson. It addresses serious subjects with the gravity they deserve, conveying the sense of wonder one experiences when reading great fiction…A richly detailed book, filled with insights into the Russian literary tradition.”―Vladimir Golstein, Claremont Review of Books

“For Morson (and for this author), the Russian writers matter because we are all meant to be free souls, yet we all reside in a world where society can oppress our freedom with sentimental and ideological illusions…In the vast ‘dialogues of the dead’ that Morson relays for his readers, Russian literature―in spite of the barrage of lies around us―has the power to awaken our souls to truth again and again.”―Jessica Hooten Wilson, Current

“Will likely be [Morson’s] magnum opus…He is at the height of his powers in Wonder Confronts Certainty.”―Micah Mattix, Washington Examiner

“Enlists Russian literary titans from Tolstoy to Vasily Grossman to stage an enthralling dialogue between humanistic hope and doubt, and the murderous self-righteousness of the Russian ‘revolutionist’ tradition. Under Morson’s eyes, classic works illuminate still-burning questions of idealism, ideology and violence: criticism at its urgent, heartfelt best.”―The Spectator

“This highly readable and engaging book is a literary history like no other, taking Russian novels, stories, and plays as the great explorations of the human condition they are. Both a brief for literature itself and a window into the “Russian soul,” much of it is strikingly relevant for the questions of today.”―Hussein Aboubakr, Mosaic

“How shall we live together in full accountability for one another’s life and hope? Morson is right to make us think through the ways in which these issues have been meditated on (and lived out) in the rich, conflicted, extreme, fertile soil of modern Russian civilization. Any possible political renewal in our present wilderness must be nourished by that landscape.”―Rowan Williams, First Things

“Morson brilliantly deals with the critical questions raised by Russian fiction while at the same time offering a riveting history of an empire both before and after the 1917 revolution.”―Air Mail

“Morson’s encyclopedic knowledge of Russian literature is remarkable, and his analysis masterful and profound…This [book] attests to the enduring relevance of the Russian literary greats.”―Publishers Weekly

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

About the Author

Gary Saul Morson is a prizewinning literary critic and the author of “Anna Karenina” in Our Time, Narrative and Freedom, and, most recently, Minds Wide Shut, cowritten with Morton Schapiro. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Morson has written for the New York Review of Books, American Scholar, New Criterion, and Wall Street Journal. He is Lawrence B. Dumas Professor of the Arts and Humanities at Northwestern University, where for three decades he has taught an iconic course on Tolstoy and Dostoevsky that is frequently the university’s most popular class.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press (May 16, 2023)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 512 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0674971809
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0674971806
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.47 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.12 x 1.55 x 9.25 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 31 ratings

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4.7 out of 5 stars
4.7 out of 5
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Top reviews from the United States

Howard W. Barnes
5.0 out of 5 stars Exceptional reading experience
Reviewed in the United States on February 21, 2024
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An extraordinary book, well worth reading and keeping for second and additional experiences. Amidst a great stand of trees, Gary Saul Morson helped me see the forest in Russian literature. Although a lay person in the humanities, I have enjoyed, indeed loved, nineteenth century, Soviet, and current Russian literature. I have read Anna Karenina five times, War and Peace four times, as well as Turgenev, Oblomov, Chekhov Gogol and Lermontov. Current favorites include Grossman, Pasternak, Sholokhov, Solzhenitsyn, Shishkin, Stepanova, Bulgakov and Ulitskaya.  All have allowed me glimpses of the currents and countercurrents in Russian literature, but without Morson’s perspective I failed to recognize the significance of various points of view in Russian thought. In my opinion classic and modern Russian literature is eye-opening for one attempting to understand Russian current political, social, economic and religious efforts (and I might add other expansionist regimes, namely China and Iran) to regain power and prominence once enjoyed. Indeed, as William Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
Professor Morson is also a philosopher who draws upon literature to reveal conflicting historic forces in personal, societal, and international relations, but leaving it to the reader to consider solutions. In the words of Isaiah, “Come now, and let us reason together.
3 people found this helpful
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Kevin Nielsen
5.0 out of 5 stars Fantastic book!
Reviewed in the United States on March 31, 2024
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I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book, extremely thought provoking. I can’t wait to reread certain Russian classics while discovering new ones. I highly recommend this book.
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Mark
5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful Book
Reviewed in the United States on May 30, 2023
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This is a tremendous good book. Having loved "Anna Karenina in our Time" I was eager to get it.

I'm three-quarters finished, and see no reviews yet, so I'll leave a few words and edit them later. Morson's knowledge of Russian literature and Russian history is so comprehensive and considered, this book is a pleasure and a revelation on every page. Morson contextualizes his comments about the passages he quotes, so if you have never read a Russian novel or story, you can get a great introduction right here. If you have read some of the novels or stories, you will learn a ton you didn't know.

The premise of the whole work counterposes the ideological, utopian thinking of the Russian "intelligentsia" with the dialogical thinking of the great Russian realist writers: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekov etc. Why is this such a great juxtaposition? The utopian thinking of the "intelligentsia" led to the Russian Revolution and greatest slaughter of innocents in world history. And the Russian realist writers are acknowledged by many critics to be the pinnacle of realist writing in any language, and as such, a great source of wisdom about human life, and particularly prescient about totalitarian thinking.

Morson follows this argument in detail through brilliant chapters about revolutionary terrorism, how evil is most often a sin of omission, and how real goodness is about attending to the daily comforts of the people we love—what Morson calls the "prosaic" life. Wonderful book.
35 people found this helpful
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Miffed
5.0 out of 5 stars A fascinating read
Reviewed in the United States on September 19, 2023
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I knew almost nothing about Russian literature when I bought this book. The only reason that I purchased it was because of the author’s appearance on a podcast with Al Mohler called Thinking in Public. The book sounded intriguing and it was. It has that special quality where you aren’t ready for it to end even after almost 400 pages. Fortunately Gary Morson has several more books that sound equally fascinating. In addition the notes take you to a vast array of sources that will provide fodder for several years of mental grazing. I have already picked up a collection of Chekhov short stories as part of my initial foray into the primary sources. If you have even the remotest interest in Russia or its literature by all means take the plunge!
13 people found this helpful
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Kay Smith
5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing Book
Reviewed in the United States on June 26, 2023
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This book was amazing in so many ways. It clearly delineates the difference between the dangerous thinking of the utopians and the profound questioning of the great writers. The first way of thinking leads to the totalitarian horrors of the Soviets and Nazis while the second leads to a deep empathy for each individual.
I recently read Prosaics by Professor Morson and Poland to read his other books. I consider him to be an important thinker who adds a lot to literary theory.
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Eve Waites
5.0 out of 5 stars WONDERFUL
Reviewed in the United States on September 9, 2023
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It is unlikely we will see many more books of this quality published throughout the remainder of this decade.
3 people found this helpful
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David S. Arnold
3.0 out of 5 stars bestirring
Reviewed in the United States on August 1, 2023
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As compelling as Narrative and Freedom, with more ethical applications from Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Pushkin’s characters for us readers inhabiting our late and anxious (and open ended) times furthering our dialogues with others. A bit of light added to the amplification of one’s soul, I dare say, as one reflects the belief in what novels can offer.
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