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

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. (May)