Wonder Confronts Certainty : Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter / Gary Saul Morson.
Morson, Gary Saul, author.
2023
PG2948 .M67 2023
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Title Wonder Confronts Certainty : Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter / Gary Saul Morson.
Author Morson, Gary Saul, author.
ISBN 9780674293434
DOI https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674293434
Published Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, [2023]
Copyright ©2023
Language English
Language Note In English.
Description 1 online resource (464 p.)
Item Number 10.4159/9780674293434 doi
Call Number PG2948 .M67 2023
Dewey Decimal Classification 891.709
Summary 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.
Access Note Access limited to authorized users.
System Details Note Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
Digital File Characteristics text file PDF
Source of Description Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 29. Mai 2023)
In EBOOK PACKAGE COMPLETE 2023 English
EBOOK PACKAGE COMPLETE 2023
EBOOK PACKAGE Literary Studies 2023 English
EBOOK PACKAGE Literary Studies 2023
Harvard University Press Complete eBook-Package 2023
Available in Other Form print 9780674971806
Linked Resources Online Access
Record Appears in Online Resources > Ebooks
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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

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