Russia, that half-barbarous country, whose leaders, be they czars or commissars, Rasputins or Putins, have always treated their own people as if they were a conquered nation, this same Russia, in the course of little more than a century brought forth the greatest body of literature the world has ever known. That is a large but, I believe, not risky generalization. Think only of the dazzling cavalcade of Russian writers: Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Goncharov, Leskov, Chekhov, and then, later, Isaac Babel, Boris Pasternak, Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, Vasily Grossman, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
None of these writers could have been anything but Russian. As no Russian could have written Pride and Prejudice or David Copperfield, no Englishman could possibly have written Anna Karenina nor Frenchman The Brothers Karamazov. Virginia Woolf thought that spirituality and its effects were at the heart of Russian literature. Russian writers, she believed, produced the effect they do "not because they acquiesce or tolerate indiscriminately or despair, but because they believe so passionately in the existence of the soul." In a review of Tolstoy's The Cossacks and Other Tales, she remarked on "the profound psychology and superb sincerity of the Russian writers."
For all the coarseness, even brutality of Russian life generally—before 1861, when they were freed, serfs made up roughly 70 percent of the population of Russia—Russian literature attained a subtlety and depth available in no other. How to explain this? In Wonder Confronts Certainty, Gary Saul Morson writes that "no country has ever valued literature more than Russia." Literature for the Russian, he holds, functioned as the conscience of the country and was viewed as the very soul of life. Even the deeply philistine Communists sensed the importance of literature. "Poetry is respected in this country," Osip Mandelstam said, "people are killed for it." As was Mandelstam himself, who was imprisoned for his poetry and died there in 1938 at the age of 47.
Gary Saul Morson is in the by now impressive tradition of anglophone writers on Russian literature. The tradition prominently includes Isaiah Berlin, Joseph Frank, Aileen Kelly, and Orlando Figes. Morson has taught for many years at Northwestern University, where I also taught, and where we first became friends. His are easily the most well attended of undergraduate courses in the humanities at Northwestern, a tribune both to his skill as a teacher and to the richness of his subject. As he notes in Wonder Confronts Certainty, "from the time of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Herzen, and Chekhov, Russians argued about the ultimate questions. Once defined, those questions persisted, provoking responses again and again. The earlier statements retained the power to speak as if their authors were still present, and when later thinkers found earlier views mistaken, they contested them as they might have done in a face-to-face confrontation."
Wonder Confronts Certainty is Gary Saul Morson's magnum opus. Presenting a rich density of detail cast over a wide net of philosophical subjects, the book sets out to investigate the two main strands of Russian culture, the political and the literary, and how they have played against each other over the past century and a half in Russian life. Despite the appearance of Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich, the history of Russia sometimes appears to have offered two occupational possibilities, and two only, novelist or revolutionary. Gary Saul Morson is interested in the confrontation between between the two, or how, in the phrase of Rufus Mathewson, for many years professor of Russian at Columbia University, "wonder [literature] confronts certainty [politics]."
Perhaps the most direct confrontation of the literary with the political came in Dostoyevsky's 1872 novel The Possessed (sometimes published under the title The Devils). "What I am writing now is a tendentious thing," Dostoyevsky wrote to a friend when he first set to work on the novel. "I feel like saying everything as passionately as possible. (Let the nihilists and the Westerners scream that I am reactionary!) To hell with them. I shall say everything to the last word."
What Dostoyevsky demonstrates in the novel, a work that predicts the advent of totalitarianism, is how the idealism of the novel's revolutionist characters turns to murder. Dostoyevsky exposes the combined naïveté and cruelty of the revolutionaries who wish to destroy the church and take over the country no matter the cost in innocent lives. Or, as Gary Saul Morson puts it, "Revolutionary killers, in other words, act out the implications of the idealists' utopian dreams." The enemy is abstraction, putting theory over reality, ends over means. Morson quotes the great Russian publicist Alexander Herzen, who warned: "Love, friendship, tribal loyalty, and finally even love of freedom have served as inexhaustible sources of moral oppression and servitude."
A fobbish figure, one Karamazinov, the rough equivalent of the soft liberal of our day, appears briefly in The Possessed to give a hopeless speech. Caricatured and lampooned, he is clearly based on Ivan Turgenev, whom Dostoyevsky detested for his unwillingness to denounce the intelligentsia, that body of critical intellectuals from which the revolutionaries of the time were drawn. In Fathers and Sons, his novel of 1862, Turgenev created in his character Bazarov the model Russian radical of the time. Bazarov is a nihilist, who believed in nothing, but, one might say, believed in it with all his heart. The best case for Turgenev is put forth by Isaiah Berlin, who in some ways Berlin's own intellectual position vis-à-vis radicalism resembled, when he wrote: Turgenev "tried to stand aside and see the scene objectively. He did not always succeed. But because he was an acute and responsive observer, self-critical and self-effacing both as a man and as a writer, and, above all, because he was not anxious to bind his vision upon the reader, to preach, to convert, he proved a better prophet than the two self-centered, angry literary giants [Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, of course] with whom he is usually compared, and discerned the birth of social issues which have grown world-wide since his day."
If Dostoyevsky loathed Turgenev for his ambivalent portrait of the radical Bazarov, Tolstoy, who had strong views of his own about the dangerous short-sightedness of the revolutionaries, found him personally more congenial. But, then, Turgenev and Tolstoy were of the same land-owning social class.
Wonder Confronts Certainty presents a rogue's galley of Russian revolutionaries. Included among them are Chernyshevsky, Bakunin, Nechaev—all of whom share the same birth and death dates, 1814-1876—and many others. The most monstrous of them all was Vladimir Lenin, who placed no value whatsoever on human life. Stalin had a strong taste for vengeance, but for Lenin hatred was coldly impersonal. Morson writes: "Memoirists who knew Lenin personally stressed the role of sheer hatred in shaping his choice of violence not whenever necessary but whenever possible." When it was reported to Lenin that they were killing the workers in Germany, he replied: "Good. Worse is better." As Morson notes: "Lenin and Trotsky, who regarded themselves as uncompromising materialists, sneered at the whole idea of 'the sanctity of human life.'"
What could mere literature, in particular the genre of the novel, do to oppose the juggernaut of Russian revolutionary thought? How, exactly, does wonder (literature) confront certainty (politics)? The brilliance of Morson's book is in his setting out how the novel at its best works, what it does, and why it is crucially important. Early in the book he quotes the Russian formalist critic Victor Shklovsky noting that "art exists to make us pay attention to experience." Morson takes up the novel of ideas, by which he means "realist fiction, focused on the complexities of human psychology and social conditions peculiar to a specific time and place, that tests theories by examining the sources of their appeal and the consequences of accepting them." The Russians argued, he notes, "about the ultimate questions," and did so nowhere more pertinently than in their best novels.
Only the novel takes up the question of what is human nature, the role of fate in human destiny, the truth content of theories. In the confrontation between wonder and certainty, or between literature and ideology, Gary Saul Morson writes, "the great Russian fiction writers subjected the theoretist mindset to intense and revealing criticism," adding that "in novels, wisdom born of experience outstrips theory born of ratiocination." He notes that "ideologies seduce with clarity; novels teach complexity." For the revolutionary intelligentsia, "theory provided the proper blueprint for life. For Dostoevsky and the realist novel, life must take the place of theory." Tolstoy and Chekhov felt much the same.
Because of the novelist's ability to live inside his characters, tracing emotions even hidden to them, showing the truth of experience in a way neither history nor social science nor biography can hope to do, the novel, as Gary Saul Morson writes, "can do what no philosophical treatise ever could." No one, as he notes, "ever described the tiny alterations of consciousness better than Tolstoy. … No one understood empathy better than Chekhov." Perhaps this is why some of the greatest modern thinkers—among them, Michael Oakeshott, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Clifford Geertz, Edward Shils—have been devoted readers of fiction. According to his biographer Ray Monk, Wittgenstein read The Brothers Karamazov so often "he knew passages of it by heart. … Tolstoy apparently mattered even more to him, having saved him from suicide ('kept me alive')."
Early in the pages of Wonder Confronts Certainty, Morson quotes Yuri Slezkine, a professor of Russian studies at Berkeley, on the role that Russian literature played in bringing down the Soviet Union: "The Bolsheviks did not realize that by having their children read Tolstoy … they were digging the grave of their revolution." Morson is appropriately dubious about this. Yet in the midst of the monstrously murderous Communist regime—a regime said to have slaughtered at least 100 million of its own people—what solace the novels and stories of their country's great writers must have brought to those Russians able to read them and thereby recognize the possibility, however distant, of a more various, real, and richer life.
Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter
by Gary Saul Morson
Belknap Press, 512 pp., $37.95
Joseph Epstein's most recent book is The Novel, Who Needs It? (Encounter Books).