Wonder Confronts Certainty:
Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter

by Gary Saul Morson
Belknap, 2023, 492 pages
reviewed by T. Nelson

hese days we have top scientists at ivy-league universities credibly accused of falsifying data. We have “atomic scientists” moving the hands on their fake Doomsday Clock forward and backward depending on how their candidate is doing in the polls. And we have people raving about how Stanley Cups miraculously keep their drinks cold for hours, not realizing that they're just pink Thermos bottles, which stopped being cool in 1937.

To top it off, the best book of 2023 is this piece of academic literary criticism that is not only jargon-free, but intelligent and insightful. What is the world coming to?

The title, Wonder Confronts Certainty, comes from Rufus Mathewson, who compared pre-Soviet Russian novels and their understanding of the mystery of the soul with novels like Chernyshevsky's What Is To Be Done, a masterpiece of badly written pseudo-certainty and a favorite of Lenin. Morson's idea is that literature not only expresses important truths inaccessible by other means, but can even change history.

He writes: “Like Jews, Russians are people of the book—or rather, books.” It is said that after Stalin's death, burglars would break into apartments to steal not TVs and cash, but books—something almost unimaginable here in America.

He quotes Mikhail Gershenzon as saying the greatest Russian writers were “defined by the extent to which they hated the intelligentsia.” The intelligentsia were the ones who first succumbed to the fad of revolutionary and pro-terrorist fervor, and it was they who later became the weakest and most perfidious in the Gulags when their usefulness ran out. Morson says “Russia was the first country where ‘terrorist’ became an honorable if dangerous profession, commanding especially great prestige among the young.” He cites historian Anna Geifman as saying that by 1907, nearly 4500 state officials had been killed or injured by terrorists. Between 1908 and 1910, there were 19,957 terrorist attacks—so many that the press stopped reporting them.

Among the intelligentsia, antisemitism and extreme puritanism took hold. Paying a compliment to a woman was forbidden: one character in a novel by the terrorist Stepniak (Sergei Krav­chin­sky) says “No self-respecting man . . . would permit himself such a vulgarity, nor would any girl of their set listen without offense.” Many influential liberals shared the same “ethos of intolerance.”

It was not the political class but novelists like Chekhov, Tolstoy, and especially Dostoevsky, Morson says, who warned that all this intolerance would lead to catastrophe. He summarizes the ethos of intolerance by describing a character in Chekhov's story “On the Road”: “The experience of repeated discon­firm­ation,” says Morson, “never teaches him caution or skepticism. Always as certain of his present philosophy as he was of the ones preceding it, he retains an absolute intolerance of anyone who thinks differently.”

Dostoevsky took seriously what the intelligentsia said they would do: “He understood that in the absence of sufficient resistance there was no limit to how far things would go.”

Dostoevsky and Dostoevsky, alone, foresaw in detail what we have come to call totalitarianism. He detected in intelligentsia ideology a systematization of victimhood psychology, which licenses unlimited harm and provides a perfect alibi for those who inflict it.

Dostoevsky asked: “If civilization is guided by a law of progress, why are people more loathsomely bloodthirsty than before?” His character Porfiry Petrovich in Crime and Punishment warns Raskolnikov, who spends his days inventing post-hoc justifications for the murders he committed, “If you'd invented another theory you might have done something a thousand times more hideous.”

The idea is not that Dostoevsky stood athwart the intelligentsia yelling “Stop,” but that his understanding of human nature could have helped his countrymen to understand where they were headed. As in Ivan Turgenev's novel Smoke, Morson says that “social dynamics [by which he means social castigation for expressing outgroup views] do not just forestall the expression of skeptical opinion, they preclude the formation of such opinions in the first place.” This leaves only simplistic, unfalsifiable ideas that are so useful to those who crave power.

In the end the real explanation comes from Solzhenitsyn, who wrote that the reason Lenin, Hitler, and Stalin murdered millions instead only a handful was that they possessed an ideology. Morson summarizes Solzhenitsyn's definition of ideology as

an all-encompassing system defining good and evil and removing responsibility for an individual's actions. And that makes all the difference, because real evildoers do not resemble literary villains who rejoice in doing evil. No, they imagine they are doing good.

That said, this book is no Black Book Of Communism. It is not even political. Morson says the depiction of humanity's struggle to find meaning in life through suffering (which Russians by nature expect and even welcome) provides profound and unmatched insights. Russian literature tells us, he says, “The meaning of life can be revealed only to those who suffer.” Indeed, Solzhenitsyn himself credited his imprisonment in the Gulags for teaching him “how a human being becomes evil and how a human becomes good.”

Dostoevsky, too, believed in the value of suffering and its corollary that happiness could be a curse. Morson contrasts this with the American view that one should pursue happiness. (It's true. That's why in America one side riots all the time and the other side stocks up on beans and rice: because we're all so deliriously happy.)

Morson follows up on his idea in chapters titled “What time isn't it?” and “What don't we appreciate?” In describing Andrei's alternating hope and despair in his death scene in War and Peace—the “greatest” in literature, taking over 200 pages —those Rooskies are tough—Morson says Tolstoy found life's meaning in prosaic circum­stances: “It is the details that comprise life; that is where God is.” He writes:

The greatest Russian writers do not tell us what life's meaning is, but they show us what the discovery of it looks and feels like. That is because meaning is not a proposition that we could learn, as we master the binomial theorem. If there were such a proposition, we would all already know it. . . . Meaning cannot be learned by scientific demonstration or mathematical proof. Strictly speaking, one does not know it, one senses it; that is why it isn't proved, but rather convinces.

When the character Levin in Anna Karenina has a similar epiphany, he finds he cannot even express it in arguments. It cannot be communicated, even in a novel, only experienced. Only by probing honestly and deeply into the human condition, says Morson, can answers be found.

On the last page, Morson tells the story of Sofya Levinton's last moments in Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate. Sofya's thoughts in her last moment of life, as she enters a Nazi gas chamber, are heartrending, yet unshareable, maybe even meaningless to someone else. No soul can ever share its meaning, and its irreplaceable truth is soon lost for ever.

Literature may or may not be able to change history, but it can change people, and it can change how they see their fellow humans. I disagree with some critics who say that Morson is exhibiting an “anti-­cert­ainty certainty.” I'm not even sure what that phrase means. The real value of great literature is that it can show us that meaning resides in other people's souls, even if it can't be seen.

jan 24, 2024

War and Peace

by Leo Tolstoy
Transl. by Louise and Aylmer Maude, 2299 pages
reviewed by T. Nelson

ar is fought differently now than it was in the Napoleonic Wars, which Tolstoy calls the War of 1812. Today, the first rule of combat, at least in our country, is “No Snogging!”

Tolstoy's view on war was that, contrary to what historians and generals like to think, strategies and personalities do not decide a war. Tolstoy echoed Spinoza's view that people don't really act rationally: they act without knowing why, and afterwards rationalize their actions to convince themselves that they had been acting rationally and admirably. He writes: “Every act of theirs, which appears to them an act of their own will, is in a historical sense involuntary and is . . . predestined from eternity.” “Man lives consciously for himself but is an unconscious instrument.” The war didn't start because of Napoleon, and Napoleon wasn't defeated because his “genius” suddenly failed him. Wars start and end because the flow of history creates them: “Napoleon's personal activity . . . merely coincided with the laws that guided the event.”

According to Tolstoy, the Russian generals proposed strategies not because they thought they would achieve victory, but to improve their reputation and status and weaken the reputation of their real enemies—the other generals on their own side—so they could say the battle would have been won if only their plan had been followed.

Of the 1805 battle of Austerlitz, Tolstoy wrote:

Just as in a clock, the result of the complicated motion of innumerable wheels and pulleys is merely a slow and regular movement of the hands which show the time, so the result of all the complicated human activities of 160,000 Russians and French—all their passions, desires, remorse, humiliations, sufferings, outbursts of pride, fear, and enthusiasm—was only the loss of the battle of Austerlitz, the so-called battle of the three Emperors—that is to say, a slow movement of the hand on the dial of human history.

That said, this magnificent novel is not really about war or peace, but about life and death. War is a collection of individual sufferings, errors, snafus, and tragedies on a civilization-wide scale. There's no moral justice or reason for them: one selfish and conceited character prances about on his horse in the middle of a battlefield, cannonballs whizzing past him, and all that happens is that the soldiers politely ask him to get out of the way. Another, beloved by his troops, is cautious and solicitous of others, yet just before he's called in he's hit by an artillery shell. Another young character, anxious to prove his bravery, charges toward the enemy on his first day and is immediately shot dead. This complicated story, given in perhaps more detail than we really need, is marked by the author's amazing skill at observation, his profound insight into human nature, and his deeply religious outlook on death. The main character, Prince Andrew (aka André or Andrei), discovers the majesty of the universe when he's lying on the battlefield gazing up at the ‘lofty infinite’ sky after being shot, and again when he gets blown up and dies in agony in front of his girlfriend Natasha.

When we read this today, it's impossible to avoid thinking how the descendants of these Russians and of a culture that once produced such brilliant literature are now happily slaughtering their own brothers.

feb 24 2024

The Brothers Karamazov

by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Project Gutenberg, 1026 pages. Transl. by Constance Garnett
reviewed by T. Nelson

he PDF version of this book makes it ideal for reading outdoors in the winter, where one can vicariously experience the book (set in fictional Skotoprigonyevsk, said to be based on Staraya, Novgorod, in western Russia) in a typical snowy setting.

Unlike Leo Tolstoy, Dostoevsky [also spelled Dostoyevsky] was not a member of the nobility. His characters, like the author, were highly religious and always in need of money. The author's specialty was psychological insight into humans and epilepsy, from which he suffered. Having once been sentenced to death and sent to Siberia, he could also write from experience about prison.

Warning: spoilers below

The three brothers are Alexei Fyodorovitch [aka Alyosha], a monk, Ivan Fyodorovitch, an intellectual, and Dmitri Fyodorovitch [aka Misha], a half-brother.

Ivan writes a ‘poem’ called The Grand Inquisitor, in which God comes to Earth and is promptly thrown in the slammer by a cardinal known as the Inquisitor, who threatens to burn God at the stake because, as he puts it, “man prefers peace, and even death, to freedom of choice in the knowledge of good and evil.” The Inquisitor expresses his argument in terms of the devil's Temptation of Jesus:

“Nothing has ever been more insupportable for a man and a human society than freedom. . . . Remember the first question; its meaning, in other words, was this: . . . Turn [these stones] into bread, and mankind will run after Thee like a flock of sheep. ”

. . .

I tell Thee that man is tormented by no greater anxiety than to find some one quickly to whom he can hand over that gift of freedom with which the ill-fated creature is born.

By ‘someone’ Ivan means the Inquisition, but he may as well be saying the State. The poem goes on for 34 pages—in a Russian novel it takes fifty pages for someone to say “Good morning”, especially if they start talking about their soul. Dostoevsky seems to have meant Ivan's poem as a solely religious argument, but it is also a political one. Alyosha understands none of it and cannot think of a good answer.

When Alyosha's mentor Father Zossima dies, Alyosha has a religious experience, after which he gets politely kicked out of the hermitage and told to “sojourn in the world” before he can return. Conflict arises from a love triangle between Dmitri, Grushenka [aka Agrafena Alexandrovna], an insecure and manipulative woman, and Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov [the father, a nasty buffoon]. Consumed with jealousy and apparently broke, Dmitri frantically tries to get money from his father, gets arrested on suspicion of murder, moronically incriminates himself, and ends up in prison.

But it is not just a whodunit. It will surprise no one that it was not Dmitri who did it but the butler, Smerdyakov, who was born after his mother Lizaveta was raped by Fyodor and was raised by the other servant Grigory, whose own baby died of thrush. So in fact, when Grigory yells “Parricide!” he's technically right, but he means Dmitri. The story goes on like this for over a thousand pages, full of complex details, forcing the reader to construct a huge genealogical chart in order to keep track of who all these people are and who is related to whom.

The book is a cross between a compli­cated soap opera, a theological dissertation, and a study of human nature: the characters are deceitful, foolish, corrupt, easily deceived, greedy, wasteful, manipulative, badly educated, superstitious, cruel, violent, and hateful. The women deliber­ate­ly entangle the men with false promises to strengthen their own self-esteem. After Dmitri somehow manages to get entangled in two different love triangles at once, he sums up their nature by saying “Then she cried, but now ‘the dagger in the heart’! That's how women are.” At his trial they prove him right.

The only likeable characters are the children, like Lise, a teenager, who is crippled but is madly in love with Alyosha, but is slowly driven insane by her emotions, by her crazy mother, and (it seems to me) by her craving for a father figure. She uses reverse-psychology trying to get Alyosha to reciprocate, but he is too dense to see it and his response is as weak and passive as his answer to the religious challenge posed by Ivan.

Another kid is the precocious 13-year-old boy Smurov, who avoids being an annoying know-it-all by exhibiting an impossibly profound self-awareness. Smurov gets stabbed by Ilusha, a fellow student from a poor family. When Smurov discovers that Ilusha is dying, he forgives him and in a touching act of human forgiveness gives him his dog.

In the beginning of the story, Ivan had written another essay containing the famous line “If there is no God and no immortality, then everything is lawful.”* It was just intellectual buffoonery on Ivan's part and not intended seriously, but the killer Smerdyakov throws it back at Ivan, accusing him of being the real murderer. Ivan is consumed by guilt and is forced to come to terms with the fact that an idea can be more deadly than a firearm. For some unexplained reason he then becomes ill, which causes him to hallucinate conversations with the devil, whom he recognizes as an incarnation of his own inner moral conflict—one that is to cost his brother dearly.

Who is responsible for the tragedy: Ivan, whose reckless ideas inspired a homicide; Alyosha, whose weakness and passivity fail to help anyone; or Dmitri, who is destroyed by his own base instincts? The answer is: none of the above. Assigning blame is not the point in this novel; what the author is saying is that we are all flawed, and our flaws come together in wonderful ways to create a total stinking mess.

* Usually translated as “If there is no God, everything is permitted”

jan 27 2024. updated jan 29 2024

The Possessed, or The Devils

by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Project Gutenberg, 317 pages. Transl. by Constance Garnett
reviewed by T. Nelson

he first hundred pages of this famous novel consist of people nattering about ordinary events. It seems innocuous, yet there is something disturbing about it. It seems they hate each other and know too much about each other's intimate personal lives. Then, for no apparent reason, one guy punches another guy in the mouth and we learn the reason.

They are all spies!

Well, not really spies, but communist revolutionaries. Their plan, as defined by their leader, Pyotr Stepan­ovitch Verho­vensky, is to turn the classes against each other and create social chaos, then promise to restore order if given power. Pyotr Stepanovitch manipulates the provincial governor with a combination of flattery and lies, makes veiled threats against his co-con­spir­a­tors, and hires the ex-convict Fedka to commit crimes.

The general tone of this book is one of brutal sarcasm. The politicians are vain, incompetent, and henpecked. The conspirators are are either morons, drunkards, or mentally unstable. One is suicidal, and Pyotr Stepanovitch cynically uses his suicide for political gain.

The plot

To ensure the loyalty of the group, Pyotr Stepanovitch falsely accuses one of the group of being a traitor to the cause. Making everyone in the group complicit in murder, he thinks, will prevent them from ratting each other out. So they brutally murder Ivan Shatov, a former member of the group, just as his wife gives birth to a baby. Both the wife and baby then become acutely ill and die. The conspirators' arson attack, in which they burn down one section of the town, also ends badly. The wife and girlfriend of the senior member of the group, Nikolay Vysevolodovitch Stavrogin, the only one with a modicum of honor, are both murdered. He holds himself responsible and eventually commits suicide.

To Dostoevsky's countrymen, not yet having experienced Stalinism, all this must have been shocking, almost as if Tay-Tay turned out to be a KGB assassin (which, I hasten to add, to the best of my knowledge she is not). Dostoevsky uses bitter sarcasm about how these fanatical ideologues tried to act like normal humans. At one point they even have a ball, billed as a “literary quadrille,” which turns utterly and hilariously shambolic. It turns out that communist fanatics are not very good at ballroom dancing.

The best thing that can be said for their staff meeting, where a vote as to whether they were in fact having a meeting or not ends in utter confusion, is that nobody gets killed. After someone separates the two shriek­ing students from each other's throats, Comrade Shigalov starts talking about his ten-volume proposal for world organization in which he predicts that nine-tenths of the world's population must be reduced to slaves:

“I am perplexed by my own data and my conclusion is a direct contradiction of the original idea with which I start. Starting from unlimited freedom, I arrive at unlimited despotism. I will add, however, that there can be no solution of the social problem but mine. . . . I am reduced to despair.”

The committee then takes a vote as to whether Shigalov is on the brink of despair or not. Unlike our modern-day anarchists, the conspirators don't get tacit support from the government; after Shatov's cruel murder, one talks, and the rest are rounded up. Pyotr's father, an academic fool named Stepan Trofimo­vitch Verho­vensky (the main character in the story, who pretends to be erudite but actually is intellectually bankrupt), dies after idiotically trying to walk across Russia.

The main idea here, as in Karamazov, is that only human interactions are important. By denying this, political ideologues are nothing more than murderers and cutthroats. In the scene where the fool Stepan Trofimo­vitch insincerely tells a priest “If there is a God, then I am immortal,” the author is not really saying that people should be more religious. He is saying that in a time of fake religiosity and intellectual posturing, political ideology takes its place, and this is what it looks like.

Brain fever

In many of his works Dostoevsky refers to “brain fever”, a disease that causes people to hallucinate, speak hysterical nonsense, and then collapse into unconsciousness. This isn't a recognized clinical entity these days. Most likely, Dostoevsky is referring to what we now call delirium, which is a common symptom of pneumonia, acute alcohol withdrawal, sepsis, or a CNS infection such as brain abscess, meningitis, or sup­pur­ative enceph­alitis. Today, delirium often has an iatrogenic cause: it is often caused by sedatives and analgesics and up to 80% of patients on ventilators will develop delirium.

feb 02 2024. updated feb 13 2024