The great Russians and the great questions

The great Russians and the great questions
Opinion by Micah Mattix


Gary Saul Morson is one of a handful of distinguished literary critics who was born around World War II and who resisted the siren call of postmodern literary theory that did so much damage to the study of English in the late 20th and early 21st century. (Paul A. Cantor, who died last year, is another.) He is currently the Lawrence B. Dumas Professor of the Arts and Humanities at Northwestern University, where he has taught since 1986. A prolific critic whose essays appear regularly in The New Criterion, The New York Review of Books, and Commentary, Morson has focused throughout his career on the function of narrative in Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and how these novelists offer an alternative account of history, of human choice, in their work.
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Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter; by Gary Saul Morson; Belknap Press; 492 pp., $37.95.
Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter; by Gary Saul Morson; Belknap Press; 492 pp., $37.95.
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His latest book, Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter, will likely be his magnum opus. Morson compares two groups of Russian writers and thinkers and their differing accounts of time and agency. On the one hand, we have the Russian intelligentsia whose handbook was Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s novel What Is to Be Done? These were not people who approached the world with genuine curiosity but radical journalists who were utterly convinced that Russia’s problems could be solved by a complete reordering of society. (The word “intelligentsia,” Morson explains, originated in Russia and was used to refer almost exclusively to ideologues who advocated “some form of socialism or anarchism” and “materialism and atheism.”)


These radicals borrowed the ideas of Darwin and Marx and passed them through what Joseph Franks has called “the Russian prism,” in which, Morson writes, “the borrowed idea would be extended from one domain to all; next, it would be rendered as abstract as possible; then it would be taken to the most extreme conclusion imaginable.” At last, “it would underwrite radical action, like terrorism.”

Morson traces how utilitarianism led to a full-throated recommendation of revolution and terror in the works of Mikhail Bakunin, Boris Savinkov, Alexander Blok, and others, not just as a necessary evil but almost as a way of life. In his posthumous God and the State, Bakunin argues that rebellion is “the essence of humanness” and that in persuading Adam and Eve to defy God, “Satan made them truly human.”

Over time, Marx’s theory of capital and historical materialism became accepted as the single truth by which all other accounts of reality were judged. In his Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1909), Lenin argued that to determine if something were true or not, one simply had to look at it “through the eyes of ‘party-mindedness’ (partiinost).” “One need not know physics or chemistry,” Morson writes, “to recognize a false physical or chemical proposition. Instead, one could examine its consequences for the Party program. ... If the proposition in question ran counter to the Party program, it was wrong.” Both Chernyshevsky and Lenin extracted “unchallengeable conclusions from a priori principles.” If your experience of the world did not square with Marxist principles, your experience was wrong.

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This unquestioning devotion to a single theory of the world made committing the most horrific acts a moral imperative. When peasants in Penza objected to having their grain seized without payment, Lenin instructed the Bolsheviks to: “1) Hang (and I mean hang so that the people can see) not less than 100 known kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers, 2) Publish their names, 3) Take all their grain away from them, 4) Identify hostages. ... Do this so that for hundreds of miles around the people can see, tremble, know, and cry. ... Cable that you have received this and carried [it] out.”

To hesitate or doubt was a great evil. The terrorist Vera Figner wrote in her memoirs that she lost respect for her father “when he replied to a serious question, ‘I do not know.’ This answer filled her with ‘burning shame.’ Admirable people know. ... Reasonable people do not differ.” What Figner herself knew with absolute confidence was that the “greatest good for the greatest number of men ... should be the aim of every person.” To kill for a greater good became, for her, not only justifiable but “compulsory.”


“Why did utilitarianism entail liberalism in England while in Russia it became synonymous with revolutionary terrorism?” Morson asks. There’s no clear answer, though it may be because in England, it was just one of many competing truths, whereas it entered an intellectual vacuum in Russia. It is also a character of Russians, Morson argues, “to take ideas to extremes.”

But this wasn’t the case for all Russians. Against “certainists” like Chernyshevsky and, later, Lenin, we have novelists like Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Turgenev. While great works of art are often understood to develop out of great societies, the masterpieces of Russian literature were born out of the turmoil of the late 19th century.

These novelists ridiculed “utilitarian reasoning,” testified to the inescapable subjectiveness and complexity of human experience, and the limits of progress. Uncompromising utilitarian ethics is shown to be absurd in characters like Bazarov in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons and Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. In Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Levin learns that the meaning of life cannot be reduced to a formula. It is found in a mysterious encounter with the world around him. Wisdom is acquired through suffering, not an imposition of the will. “Faith — or not faith — I don’t know what it is — has come ... through suffering,” Levin remarks at the close of the novel. “Levin’s reference to learning ‘through suffering,’” Morson notes, “expresses a key idea in Russian literature: the meaning of life can be revealed only to those who suffer. The happy can doze, the miserable must reflect. ‘Suffering lays bare the real nature of things,’ Evgeniya Ginzburg observed. ‘It is the price to be paid for a deeper ... understanding of life.’”


It is impossible to summarize Morson’s many glosses on the great works of Russian literature during this period, but he is at the height of his powers in Wonder Confronts Certainty. What becomes clear in the volume is that the question that the Russian people faced during this time is the same one that the West now seems to be facing today: “Life or theory? For Chernyshevsky and the intelligentsia, theory provided the proper blueprint for life.”

For the great Russian novelists, and those who valued wonder over certainty, “life must take the place of theory.”