Stick with the Gospel
Ivan has maintained that people bear no responsibility for their wishes— “who has not the right to wish?”—a position that directly contradicts the Sermon on the Mount, which deems not just bad actions but also…
Tag: Gary Saul Morson
Be Wary
Once indiscriminate violence becomes welcome, is there any limit to that harm? Chekhov suggests: perhaps the greatest brutality comes from humane, well-educated idealists. –Gary Saul Morson, Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions And Why Their…
Bearing Fruit
Russian literature might almost be described as the literature of conversion. (We noted some famous instances in Chapter 3.) Time and again, suffering leads to awareness of Truth or apprehension of God. Tolstoy’s autobiographical Confession recounts…
Something I Came across in “First Things”
Alyosha Karamazov suffers tormenting doubt because the miracle he expected does not occur. But when he finds himself engaged in active love in consoling Grushenka, he discovers a faith that is compatible with uncertainty. That…
Russian Reflections on Kindness
1. When nineteenth-century novelists exposed the hypocrisy of cruel people pretending to be kind, observed Nadezhda Mandelstam, they testified to the unquestioned acceptance of kindness as a virtue. As La Rochefoucauld observed, hypocrisy is the…
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…
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…