By Gary Saul Morson
(Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press, 512 pages, $38)
Four Bolsheviks have gone on a picnic, and as they enjoy an open-air repast amidst the beauty and grandeur of the Russian countryside, their conversation begins to turn upon philosophical subjects. The age-old question arises: “What is the best thing in the world?”
The first Bolshevik answers “books.”
The second answers “a woman, your woman.”
The third answers “cognac.”
The fourth, made of sterner stuff, it seems, answers “revenge against one’s enemies,” adding that his “greatest pleasure is to choose one’s victim, prepare one’s plan minutely, slake an implacable vengeance, and then go to bed. There’s nothing sweeter in the world.”
Lev Kamenev was the bookish Bolshevik. He would be executed by firing squad on August 25, 1936, at the height of the Great Purge. Karl Radek was the romantic Bolshevik. He would be found guilty of treason during a 1937 show trial, sent to a labor camp in the Urals, and murdered two years later on the orders of the NKVD. Alexei Rykov was the bibulous Bolshevik. He would be put to death on March 15, 1938. The fourth Bolshevik, who dreamed not of earthly delights but of bloodshed and retribution, was Joseph Stalin. He would die full of years, in his own bed, having ruled an empire of two hundred million souls for 34 years, killing tens of millions along the way, and all without ever slaking his inveterate thirst for vengeance.
This anecdote, possibly apocryphal, was recorded by Lev Kamenev, who dated the event back to the early 1920s. Regardless of its veracity, the story of the sinister Soviet fête champêtre is a revealing one. It demonstrates how learning and love of the good life are all well and good, but are at distinct disadvantage when confronted with single-minded authoritarianism. And it is here we encounter the central paradox of the Russian World, with its poetry and pogroms, ballets and bloodbaths, genius and genocide, sophistication and savagery. How fitting it is that a short stroll through downtown Moscow will take you from the Starosadskiy Pereulok, where stands a monument commemorating the persecuted poet Osip Mandelstam, to Lubyanka Square, where the infamous statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, architect of the Red Terror, still looms large. The resulting cognitive dissonance, like high-level infrasound, is almost physically palpable, and about as nauseating.
*****
If we wish to make any sense out of the present-day Russian World, we are obliged to venture back into the past, to that critical period during the 19th century, when Russian civilization was at its apex, but the ominous specter of revolution began to haunt an increasingly decadent empire. One possible guide on this journey is Gary Saul Morson, whose Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2023) explores that very era. Morson, who befriended Bill Clinton while studying at Oxford — later admitting that “a great deal of my pitiful income from those years [as a doctoral student] went to Clinton’s campaign for attorney general of Arkansas” — would go on to become a prominent Slavist and literary critic, teaching an Introduction to Russian Literature course at Northwestern University that regularly attracts some 500 students. In recent years, he, alongside Morton Shapiro, has written a critique of political, economic, social and religious dogmatism, Minds Wide Shut: How the New Fundamentalisms Divide Us (2021), while contributing to right-of-center publications including First Things, Commentary, and the New Criterion.
His latest opus, Wonder Confronts Certainty, is not so much a literary self-help book like Alain de Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life, as the name might imply, but rather a chronicle of the debate between realist writers and idealist revolutionaries over the future of Russia, and of humanity as a whole. Morson calls it a “dialogue of the dead,” one that extends over the centuries and pits two main categories of disputants — realists and members of the progressive intelligentsia — against each other. Here, as in Minds Wide Shut, Morson pushes back against those inflexible ideologues whose certainty all too often proves unfounded. Morson’s literary hero, Anton Chekhov, in a diary entry from 1897, posited that “between ‘there is a God’ and ‘there is no God’ lies a whole vast tract, which the really wise man crosses with great effort. A Russian knows one or other of these two extremes, and the middle tract between them does not interest him; and therefore he usually knows nothing, or very little.” The realist writers of the Russian Golden Age, unlike their zealous counterparts to the reactionary right and revolutionary left, tended to occupy this more nuanced middle tract, and Morson is understandably drawn to them like a moth to a candle.
One of Morson’s significant contributions here is to highlight the extent to which many of the horrors of the 20th century were predicted, with almost preternatural far-sightedness, by writers like Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ivan Turgenev, and Anton Chekhov. Readers may recall how Anna Karenina begins with Stepan Arkadyevich Oblonsky seeking solace from his domestic troubles in the still-damp pages of the morning newspaper. “In our opinion,” he reads in his copy of a leading liberal journal, “the danger lies not in any imaginary revolutionary hydra but in hidebound tradition, which impedes progress.” Morson’s protagonists argued otherwise, even if they were not themselves always bound to tradition themselves. The revolutionary hydra was, for those realist writers, far from imaginary, and presented a mounting danger to Russian and European civilization. As a rule they despised, or at least looked askance at, the so-called intelligentsia, characterized by Dostoevsky as “the legions of dullards, of half-animate abortions, conceited, half-educated coxcombs, who attach themselves to the idea most in fashion only to vulgarize it and who caricature every cause they serve, however sincerely”— a biting critique that can still be applied to the self-styled intellectuals of our day. Chekhov, for his part, warned that if ever the “wood lice and mollusks we call the intelligentsia” took power, such “toads and crocodiles will rule in ways not known even at the time of the inquisition in Spain.” Their concerns would be more than vindicated in the decades to come.
Russia’s Golden Age writers, with their profound understanding of the human condition, understood why, as Morson puts it, “despite its appeal, extreme idealistic thinking can be so dangerous,” for “if some [purported] evil persists despite our efforts — as it always does — one may resort to unlimited violence against anyone seen as sustaining it.” Lenin, Stalin, and their acolytes adhered to a philosophy of unlimited violence. They were precisely the moral monsters Dostoevsky rebuked in Crime and Punishment, wherein the detective Porfiry Petrovich wryly tells Raskolnikov that “it’s as well that you only killed the old woman. If you’d invented another theory you might have done something a thousand times more serious.” The revolutionaries who invented Marxism–Leninism had, in fact, done something not thousands but millions of times more serious and deadly, at least when measured in terms of death tolls. Their theories were predicated on atheism and materialism, drained of any notion of eternal morality, and erected on an ethical framework ostensibly based, in Lenin’s words, on “conscious mass struggle against the exploiters.” Lenin boasted of pursuing “the cleansing of Russia’s soil of harmful insects, of scoundrels, fleas bedbugs — the rich, and so on” without conscience, but really he and his fellow extremists were motivated purely by a lust for power and vengeance. The stark warnings issued by Dostoevsky, Chekhov, and others went unheeded, and Russians — though not just Russians — would pay a terrible price.
The philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin once suggested that, in light of the events of the 20th century, one must conclude that the ancient playwrights Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were “naïve, quite naïve,” for they “hadn’t come into contact with the abyss, weren’t really familiar with actual terror, didn’t know it yet. Indeed, they couldn’t have known it yet. They were, despite their incredible power and stature, children.” Classical tragedians could not have envisioned a genocide, a gulag, a terror famine, or the other forms of mass violence that defined the age of murderous ideologies. Morson’s realists were among the first to perceive the danger posed by the not-at-all-imaginary revolutionary hydra that brought these catastrophes into being. “One lesson of the Russian experience,” Morson writes, “is that no consequences will extinguish the youthful appeal of the thrilling, dangerous, and addictive violence of the devoted revolutionist. Another is that the danger of revolutionism is not confined to the destruction it immediately causes. It may lead to ever more horror exceedingly anything presently imaginable.” It is apparent, from a quick glance at the headlines, that these lessons must be re-learned with each coming generation. Wonder Confronts Certainty constitutes as good an aide-memoire as any in this regard.
*****
Evidently the product of a lifetime of scholarship, Morson’s weighty tome has much to tell us about the literary paragone debate between realism and radicalism, but the unfortunate result of framing Russian history in this unequivocal fashion is that it is reduced, at times, to the level of a morality play. In order to draw a dividing line between the golden era of humanism and the squalid era of state-sponsored sadism, Morson feels obliged to sanitize pre-revolutionary Russian history. At a time when many university departments and Slavic, East European, and Eurasian studies specialists are in the process of de-centering Russia from their curricula and adding voices from the “post-Soviet” “periphery” — a development accelerated by Russia’s onslaught against Ukraine — Morson’s book can at times feel like a throwback, an artifact, preserved like a fly in the amber of the 20th century, with its Cold War–era ideological concerns.
Morson is a zealous advocate on behalf of his literary idols. This we can readily forgive. And he is a member of the school of thought that separates the artist from his art, which can be refreshing in our day and age. Yet there are times when the philosopher cannot be completely separated from his philosophy. When considering the educational teachings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, it is not irrelevant that the five children born of his liaison with Marie-Thérèse Levasseur were all deposited in a foundling hospital, where they all likely perished. When analyzing the economic philosophy of Karl Marx, one must take into account his daddy issues and money issues, his antisemitism, his cruel mistreatment of his family, and his sexual exploitation of his servant maid. There may be those who still appreciate Eric Gill’s sculptures and typefaces, but his espousal of a supposedly Christian distributist anarchism can hardly be divorced from his shocking sexual abuse of his sisters, his teenaged daughters — and his dog.
Russian history, literary, philosophical, or political, has never been a straightforward matter of black and white. It is true that, during the devastating famine of 1891 to 1892, Leo Tolstoy helped to organize charitable relief, while Lenin argued that “psychologically, this talk of feeding the starving is nothing but an expression of the saccharine sweet sentimentality so characteristic of our intelligentsia.” The comparison is instructive, and certainly redounds to Tolstoy’s credit, but the reader can be left with a facile portrayal of the writer-philosopher. Entirely unaddressed is Tolstoy’s systematic sexual predation upon his serfs and his callous abandonment of the resulting illegitimate offspring. Tolstoy even challenged Turgenev to a duel after the former criticized the latter for supporting his own illegitimate daughter. And while writers can, and frequently do, fail to live up to their own ideals, in Tolstoy’s case we must also consider those ideals.
In his novels, Tolstoy may have given voice to traditionalists like Sergei Ivanovich Koznyshev, who in Anna Karenina rightly asserts that “only those nations have a future, only those peoples can be called historical that have an instinct for what is important and significant in their institutions and treasure them.” In his essay “On Anarchy,” written in 1900, however, Tolstoy himself would declare that anarchists like Peter Kropotkin and Pierre Joseph Proudhon “are right in everything; in the negation of the existing order, and in the assertion that, without Authority, there could not be worse violence than that of Authority under existing conditions.” As a pacifist he argued against violent revolution, naturally, but he nevertheless circulated anarchist tracts, and even went so far as to correct the proofs of Kropotkin’s contraband “Words of a Rebel.” Paul Johnson, in his trenchant essay collection Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky (1988), was willing to venture where Morson dare not tread, concluding his searing indictment of the supreme egotist Tolstoy, “God’s elder brother,” in the following fashion:
Tolstoy’s case is another example of what happens when an intellectual pursues abstract ideas at the expense of people. The historian is tempted to see it as prolegomenon, on a small, personal scale, of the infinitely greater catastrophe which was soon to engulf Russia as a whole. Tolstoy destroyed his family, and killed himself, by trying to bring about the total moral transformation he felt imperative. But he also yearned for and predicted — and by his writings greatly encouraged — a millenarian transformation of Russia herself, not by gradual and painstaking reforms of the kind he despised, but it one volcanic convulsion. It finally came in 1917, as a result of events he could not foresee and in ways he would have shuddered to contemplate. It made nonsense of all he wrote about the regeneration of society. The Holy Russia he loved was destroyed, seemingly fore ever. By a hateful irony, the principal victims of the New Jerusalem thus brought about were his beloved peasants, twenty million of whom were led to mass slaughter on the sacrificial altar of ideas.
There are any number of Tolstoys: Tolstoy the brilliant novelist, Tolstoy the educational reformer, Tolstoy the sexual monster, Tolstoy the insufferable autodidact, Tolstoy the failed prophet. Most of these Tolstoys are conspicuous by their absence in Wonder Confronts Certainty.
Morson’s morality play is perhaps at its least convincing when it comes to the (unfortunately ever-timely) issue of antisemitism, another example of the author’s unwillingness to allow anything damning into evidence when it comes to his beloved writers. In a somewhat abbreviated treatment of Russian antisemitism during this time period, Morson begins by drawing a curious distinction between the pogroms of the early 20th century, which were “inspired, or at least tacitly condoned, by the government,” and the “anti-Jewish riots of the early 1880s,” which “emerged spontaneously.” Why Morson should feel the need to exonerate the deeply antisemitic czar Alexander III (r. 1881–1894) is unclear. It was under Alexander III, after all, that the discriminatory May Laws of 1882 were passed with the goal, according to the imperial minister Konstantin Pobedonostsev, of ensuring that “one third [of Russian Jews] will die out, one third will leave the country and one third will be completely dissolved in the surrounding population.” Morson instead maintains that “it was not the government but the revolutionaries who cheered the pogroms as an upsurge of popular violence that might be turned against the authorities,” disingenuously citing only a Ukrainian language manifesto and a smattering of missives issued by the revolutionary People’s Will organization, thereby leaving the reader with a highly misleading impression of the insidious nature of Russian antisemitism.
It is at this point that one might expect at least some mention of the casual antisemitism that suffuses the writings of, for example, Ivan Turgenev, with his contemptuous references to “Jewish expressions” appearing on characters’ faces, or basically the entirety of his tasteless short story “Zhyd” (a contemptuous Russian term for a Jew). A far more vitriolic variant of Russian antisemitism can be found in Dostoevsky’s novels, notebook entries, correspondence, contributions to periodicals, and his Diary of a Writer, though never in Wonder Confronts Certainty. All throughout his life, he obsessively engaged in lurid, paranoiac antisemitism, leading David Goldstein, in Dostoevsky and the Jews (1981), to conclude that the novelist was haunted by the “Jewish phantom,” since the Jew is a “challenge to the Messianic role of the Russian people that Dostoevsky would like to preempt for them. Until this phantom could be exorcised for all time and ground into ethnographical dust, Dostoevsky would be assailed by tormenting doubts as to the legitimacy of the exclusive God-bearing vocation and mission of the Russian people.” Those of us who are skeptical, to say the least, of Russia’s messianic role in world history will be forgiven for concluding that Dostoevsky’s answers to these “timeless questions” are utterly worthless. Dostoevsky’s biographer, Joseph Frank, responded to Goldstein by attempting to contextualize his subject’s antisemitism within the larger context of his “total xenophobia,” which doesn’t help all that much. Dostoevsky the antisemite, Dostoevsky the xenophobe, and Dostoevsky the messianic Russian chauvinist-nationalist — all these Dostoevskys are likewise suspiciously missing from Morson’s study.
We need not worry overmuch about judging historical figures by the standards of the present. Firstly, there were plenty of Russian writers who did not fall into these traps. Chekhov, for example, quarreled with the antisemitic editor of the newspaper Novoye Vremya, Aleksey Suvorin, during the Dreyfus Affair, and Turgenev urged his countrymen to join the bourgeois “European family, genus Europeum,” only to be attacked by nationalists and Slavophiles. Secondly, the writers that Morson idolizes (or idealizes) rejected the idea of relativism, historical or otherwise. Dostoevsky pointedly rejected “the doctrine of the environment,” which reduces man “to an absolute nonentity, exempts him totally from every personal moral duty and from all independence, reduces him to the lowers form of slavery imaginable…Enough contortions, gentlemen of the bar,” Dostoevsky roars, “Enough of your ‘environment.’” The individual’s moral responsibility is absolute, inalienable, and inescapable, even unto posterity.
Morson would like to draw a sharp dividing line between the refined sensibilities of Golden Age czarist Russia — that sublime era when pogroms were merely “spontaneous” — and the horrors of the Soviet Union.
Despite this, Morson has presented a sort of fairy-tale version of Russian history, in which the broadminded, nuanced wonder with which the realists regarded the world stands in stark contrast to the misguided certainty of the revolutionaries. In the cases of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, we see instead how even the greatest artistic geniuses of their time can succumb to egotism, misguided millenarianism, and supreme bigotry. Morson would like to draw a sharp dividing line between the refined sensibilities of Golden Age czarist Russia — that sublime era when pogroms were merely “spontaneous” — and the horrors of the Soviet Union. The actual historical record makes clear, however, that the pre-revolutionary Russian authorities were perfectly capable of committing enormities which horrified onlookers even at the time, ranging from the partition of Poland and the methodical cultural oppression of Ukraine to the brutal Siberian exile system and the Circassian Genocide, which resulted in more than a million deaths and millions more displaced, and was carried out under the supposedly liberal and reform-minded Alexander II. Morson is fond of quoting Vasily Grossman’s declaration that “it is a writer’s duty to tell the truth, and it is a reader’s civic duty to learn this truth. To turn away, to close one’s eyes and walk past is to insult the memory of those who have perished.” There are also aspects of Russia’s pre-revolutionary past that one should not simply walk past.
Wonder Confronts Certainty, with its insistent Russo-centrism, is also at times overly indulgent when it comes to the hoary old trope of Russian suffering. The zagadochnaya russkaya dusha, the supposedly “mysterious Russian soul,” has long been associated with a tolerance for pain and suffering, with the poet Fyodor Tyutchev positively reveling in it:
O land of long-suffering —
Land of the Russian people!
Morson cites Svetlana Alexievich, the sole representative of contemporary Russian-language writing in Wonder Confronts Certainty, who declared in her 2015 Nobel Prize speech that “suffering,” not oil or gas, “is our capital, our natural resource … It is the only thing we are able to produce consistently.” This obsession with suffering is not an answer to a timeless question, but a veritable national psychopathology, the likes of which Daniel Rancour-Laferriere explored in The Slave Soul of Russia: Moral Masochism and the Cult of Suffering (1995):
From a psychoanalytic perspective, the slave soul of Russia is best understood as an example of something Freud called moral masochism. Unlike erotogenic masochistic practices (sometimes called perversion masochism) in which an individual may need to be bound, beaten, or otherwise mistreated in order to achieve sexual orgasm, and unlike severe self-destructive and self-mutilative behavior based on a pervasive disintegration of psychic structures, moral masochism is a relatively mild disturbance in which the otherwise healthy individual searches for opportunities to suffer, to be humiliated, or to be defeated.
This masochistic tendency inevitably results, as Rancour-Laferriere has observed, in “Russian nationalism, collectivism, and the Russian narcissism of empire,” not to mention ressentiment, revanchism, and genocidal impulses. Suffering on this scale is, in any event, hardly a uniquely Russian phenomenon. Kazakhs, Tatars, Ukrainians, Poles, Baltic peoples, and many other formerly and presently captive nations have all suffered just as much, and at the hands of Russians and the Russian World. A line can, with minimal effort, be traced from the the antisemitic, anti-Catholic, xenophobic Dostoevsky and the mystical nationalist warmongers to come, Ivan Ilyin, Vladislav Surkov, and Alexandr Dugin among them. A rotten tree will bring forth rotten fruit. Morson seems strangely certain that none of this sordid tale has any place in his extended meditation on the meaning of Russia’s literary and political history.
*****
The philosopher Pyotr Chaadayev, whose works admittedly predate the era with which Morson is concerned, famously lamented how “we [Russians] are an exception among people. We belong to those who are not an integral part of humanity but exist only to teach the world some type of great lesson.” Gary Saul Morson has reason to believe that Russia and its writers, particularly of the 19th century, have certain great lessons to teach us. These lessons are more often than not negative or cautionary in nature, as Morson seems to acknowledge with many of his chapter titles (“What Is Not to Be Done?”, “Who Is Not to Blame?”, “What Time Isn’t It?”, “What Don’t We Appreciate?”, &c.). Russian history warns us of the danger of collective moral masochism. It warns us of the seductive nature of chauvinist, eliminationist nationalism. It warns us that otherwise humane writers, from Pushkin to Dostoevsky to Brodsky, can succumb to a violent hatred and contempt of neighboring peoples yearning to be free. And it warns us that a flourishing artistic tradition does not serve as a firebreak against despotism, as Kamenev, Radek, and Rykov learned after their ominous picnic with Stalin.
Katia Margolis, in her insightful Eurozine essay “Don’t Blame Dostoevsky, Blame Ourselves,” demonstrated how:
Despite a glitteringly instructive cultural heritage and a turbulent history packed with readily legible object lessons, many Russians have learned little or nothing from it, and remain content to pursue the same self-destructive life-cycle as we have for centuries….Many of us…are sometimes tempted to present Russians as the impotent and fatalistic victims of a malign force far greater than ourselves. This, however, is a conveniently passive and self-perpetuating view of the Russian spirit that, coming very naturally, is easy to hide behind. Such a position is dangerous and counter-productive, too straightforward a way out, presuming as it does that victimization exempts us from self-criticism, and what’s more that this exemption is an inherent property of our culture and literary canon.
In recent months and years I have found the following litmus test quite useful: if a writer, literary critic, or historian approvingly and unthinkingly cites Mikhail Bulgakov’s dubious maxim that “manuscripts don’t burn” in support of the proposition that poets can be killed but poetry cannot, as Morson does in Wonder Confronts Certainty, then it is probable that the lessons of the age of genocide have not, in that instance, been fully internalized. As Victoria Amelina, who perished in the July 27, 2023, Russian missile attack on the RIA Pizza restaurant in Kramatorsk, observed in her impassioned 2022 piece “Cancel Culture vs. Execute Culture”:
Russian manuscripts don’t burn; that might be true. But Ukrainians can only laugh bitterly. It’s imperial manuscripts that don’t burn; ours do. Have you ever read The Woodsnipes by the Ukrainian writer Mykola Khvylovy? Nor have I. And the devil from the Russian book won’t help us out. Russians destroyed the second part of Khvylovy’s manuscript, confiscating all the copies of the Ukrainian magazine that featured it. Not a single copy was ever found. The magazine was confiscated in 1933, the same year that Khvylovy died in Kharkiv. At that time, Ukrainians around the city had had all their food confiscated by the regime. Millions died in the Holodomor, which is now recognized as a genocide. The “lesser” crime of confiscating the magazine and destroying another work of Ukrainian literature went unnoticed for years. Most of those who would know about it were executed. Ukrainian lives, paintings, museums, libraries, churches and manuscripts do burn. They are burning now.
We should, as Alla Marchenko noted while elaborating on Amelina’s theme, “remember who uttered the phrase about manuscripts that do not burn — it was Voland, an embodiment of devil in the novel The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. Unfortunately, war atrocities demonstrate that everything can be burned down and devalued, once the silent majority permits. Unwritten manuscripts, as well as unspoken conversations, can never be digitalized.” Mykola Khvylovy’s manuscripts burned very nicely indeed, as did those of Vasyl Stus, and countless other writers and dissidents persecuted over the centuries. So did the manuscripts, books, sheet music, and religious texts confiscated and destroyed by czarist authorities in the aftermath of the Valuev Circular, issued on July 30, 1863, and the Ems Decree, issued on May 30, 1876 — during the reign of the allegedly liberal Alexander II, in case some need reminding.
Gary Saul Morson, doubtless with the noblest of intentions, has endeavored to package the best of Russia’s “glitteringly instructive cultural heritage,” in the hopes that it might help us answer life’s most pressing questions. To again cite Tolstoy’s literary creation Sergei Koznyshev, “philosophy’s main task throughout the ages has consisted specifically in finding the essential connection that exists between the individual and the common interest.” The Russian state has, since the days of the Golden Horde, consistently come up with the worst possible answers to that fundamental question, while Russian writers, realists and radicals alike, have a mixed record on this front, all of which is, in its own way, quite instructive. Morson concludes his exhaustive, eminently readable, often compelling, occasionally exasperating study with a call to “keep the conversation going.” Russian history, with its flawed heroes, grotesque villains, and countless victims, provides endless fodder for that conversation. Wonder Confronts Certainty is as good a place as any to begin listening in on that ongoing dialogue of the dead. It is far from the last word on the matter.
READ MORE by Matthew Omolesky:
‘Mere Memory’ Is Not Sufficient to Prevent Genocide