Start Where We Are
Why exactly is sudden transformation according to a model impossible? The same question can be asked about individuals: why can’t someone just become what she admires? Disgusted with her life, Tolstoy’s Kitty, as we have…
Tag: Gary Saul Morson
Why Read the Russians (And Why I Have Classes on Them)
Reading Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, my students experience literature as never before. No more symbol hunting, artful theorizing, or smug political judgment: the Russians address the questions that really matter in a way that teaches readers…
One Kind Gesture
I am grateful to Gary Saul Morson, for his book that has engaged me over the last year, Wisdom Confronts Certainty, as well as many of his articles and essays. Thanks to Morson’s insights here…
Of Course, A Russian Would Say This
A book is a square chunk of hot, smoking conscience–and nothing else!–Boris Pasternak, quoted in Gary Saul Morson, Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter
Fading, Vanishing
All the greatest and most important problems of life are fundamentally insoluble… They can never be solved, but only outgrown. This “outgrowing” proved on further investigation to require a new level of consciousness. Some higher…
On “Useful Idiots”
The last half of 2023 I have shared several posts based on the riveting book by Gary Saul Morson, Wisdom Confronts Certainty. Recently, I noticed he and his colleague Morton Schapiro used their knowledge on…
Dostoevsky Saw It Coming
What would be “a thousand times more serious” is revolutionary killing such as Dostoevsky was to predict in The Possessed. This book, alone among nineteenth-century works, foresaw what we have come to call totalitarianism, not…
Who Remained Decent?
So let us ask: who behaved better under pressure, imprisoned Bolsheviks or religious believers? Materialists or those who acknowledged absolute standards of good and evil? Who acted nobly and who behaved like a scoundrel? To…
Sanctity of Life
[Vladimir] Lenin repeatedly expressed utter contempt for the “moral minimum” idea, and his reasoning became the Soviet position on ethics, taught to generations of schoolchildren. To prefer “the smallest number of victims,” “a minimum of…
Elimination
“Total destruction… the orchard, apiary, destruction of hives, bees buzzing despairingly, the men blow up hives with gunpowder… attack the hives, a wild orgy…I feel sick about it all,” [Isaac Babel] wrote in the diary, and one Red…