All-time Greats
By the novel of ideas I mean realist fiction, focused on the complexities of human psychology and the social conditions peculiar to a specific time and place, that tests theories by examining the sources of…
Tag: Gary Saul Morson
Warning
Some thinkers have sadly concluded that the enchantment Nadezhda Mandelstam recognized in the word revolution, “to which whole nations have succumbed,” continues to bewitch intellectuals. In his argument with dissident scientist Andrei Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn accused…
Today’s One-Liner (#301)
Tolstoy and other classic writers deemed it their duty to curse prison, but Solzhenitsyn, who served time in conditions those writers could not have begun to imagine, can “say without hesitation: ‘Bless you, prison, for…
Microscopic Goodness
Grushenka recounts a Russian folktale about a wicked woman who dies and is condemned to the burning lake. Pitying her, her guardian angel recalls that the woman did one good deed in her life: she…
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…
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…