Wonder Confronts Certainty : : Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter / / Gary Saul Morson.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter EBOOK PACKAGE COMPLETE 2023 English
• VerfasserIn: Morson, Gary Saul,
• Place / Publishing House: Cambridge, MA : : Harvard University Press, , [2023]; ©2023
• Year of Publication: 2023
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (464 p.)

A noted literary scholar traverses the Russian canon, exploring how realists, idealists, and revolutionaries debated good and evil, moral responsibility, and freedom.Since the age of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov, Russian literature has posed questions about good and evil, moral responsibility, and human freedom with a clarity and intensity found nowhere else. In this wide-ranging meditation, Gary Saul Morson delineates intellectual debates that have coursed through two centuries of Russian writing, as the greatest thinkers of the empire and then the Soviet Union enchanted readers with their idealism, philosophical insight, and revolutionary fervor.Morson describes the Russian literary tradition as an argument between a radical intelligentsia that uncompromisingly followed ideology down the paths of revolution and violence, and writers who probed ever more deeply into the human condition. The debate concerned what Russians called “the accursed questions”: If there is no God, are good and evil merely human constructs? Should we look for life’s essence in ordinary or extreme conditions? Are individual minds best understood in terms of an overarching theory or, as Tolstoy thought, by tracing the “tiny alternations of consciousness”? Exploring apologia for bloodshed, Morson adapts Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the non-alibi—the idea that one cannot escape or displace responsibility for one’s actions. And, throughout, Morson isolates a characteristic theme of Russian culture: how the aspiration to relieve profound suffering can lead to either heartfelt empathy or bloodthirsty tyranny.What emerges is a contest between unyielding dogmatism and open-minded dialogue, between heady certainty and a humble sense of wonder at the world’s elusive complexity—a thought-provoking journey into inescapable questions.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Note to the Reader -- Introduction: Great Conversations and Accursed Questions -- Part One: The disputants -- 1 Russian Literature -- 2 The Intelligentsia -- Part Two: Three types of thinker -- 3 The Wanderer: Pilgrim of Ideas -- 4 The Idealist: Incorrigible and Disappointed -- 5 The Revolutionist: Pure Violence -- Part Three: Timeless questions -- 6 What Can’t Theory Account For? Theoretism and Its Discontents -- 7 What Is Not to Be Done? Ethics and Materialism -- 8 Who Is Not to Blame? The Search for an Alibi -- 9 What Time Isn’t It? Possibilities and Actualities -- 10 What Don’t We Appreciate? Prosaics Hidden in Plain View -- 11 What Doesn’t It All Mean? The Trouble with Happiness -- Conclusion: Into the World Symposium -- Abbreviations -- Notes -- Acknowledgments -- Index