Wonder Confronts Certainty

An Air Mail Editors Pick A Spectator Book of the Year [A] masterly panorama of classic Russian literature and its hinterland of ideas.Wall Street Journal Wise and authoritativeAs 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 Bakhtins concept of the non-alibithe idea that one cannot escape or displace responsibility for ones 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 worlds elusive complexitya thought-provoking journey into inescapable questions.