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 something really worth knowing. Anna Karenina explores the nature of love with supreme moral and psychological profundity, and who is not vitally concerned with love? Students’ economics classes reinforce the idea they constantly hear, that people do, and always should, pursue their own pleasure and that life is about worldly success. And so Tolstoy shocks them. When students read The Death of Ivan Ilych, they encounter a character who could not have been more successful or enjoyed life more, but who now, as he is struck with illness and is slowly dying, realizes that he has never really lived. Having always adjusted his opinions to what proper people think, he does not know what he really believes. And having played each social and professional role perfectly, he now recognizes to his horror that these roles will continue but his “I” will not. My students realize: they must not live that way!
–Gary Saul Morson, Putin’s Russia vs. Pushkin’s Russia
