Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Th
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Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Th
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A book that has been read but is in good condition. Very minimal damage to the cover including scuff marks, but no holes or tears. The dust jacket for hard covers may not be included. Binding has minimal wear. The majority of pages are undamaged with minimal creasing or tearing, minimal pencil underlining of text, no highlighting of text, no writing in margins. No missing pages.
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eBay item number:336098747046
Item specifics
- Condition
- ISBN
- 9780674971806
About this product
Product Identifiers
Publisher
Harvard University Press
ISBN-10
0674971809
ISBN-13
9780674971806
eBay Product ID (ePID)
13057242964
Product Key Features
Book Title
Wonder Confronts Certainty : Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter
Number of Pages
512 Pages
Language
English
Topic
Modern / 20th Century, Modern / 19th Century, Russian & Former Soviet Union
Publication Year
2023
Genre
Literary Criticism
Format
Hardcover
Dimensions
Item Height
0.2 in
Item Weight
33.7 Oz
Item Length
0.9 in
Item Width
0.6 in
Additional Product Features
Intended Audience
Trade
LCCN
2022-037065
Dewey Edition
23
Reviews
Wonder Confronts Certainty is a magnificent book, equally valuable as a work of scholarship and a meditation on the timeless urgency of reading., Morson's special gift is to present Russian literature as an endlessly renewable source of revelation., Morson brilliantly deals with the critical questions raised by Russian fiction while at the same time offering a riveting history of an empire both before and after the 1917 revolution., [A] masterly panorama of classic Russian literature and its hinterland of ideas...With light-footed erudition, Morson passes nimbly among a crowd of guests at this lavish banquet of ideas. Readers familiar with his book's corpus of fictional classics may find fresh illumination, for instance, in the liberal thinker Semyon Frank; the storyteller Vsevolod Garshin, whom Morson considers 'underrated'; or the heartrending Soviet memoirists Nadezhda Mandelstam and Evgeniya Ginzburg...Against the iron grip of ideology and destiny, his authors illustrate how freedom works--with all its chaotic consequences., For Morson (and for this author), the Russian writers matter because we are all meant to be free souls, yet we all reside in a world where society can oppress our freedom with sentimental and ideological illusions...In the vast 'dialogues of the dead' that Morson relays for his readers, Russian literature--in spite of the barrage of lies around us--has the power to awaken our souls to truth again and again., Will likely be [Morson's] magnum opus...He is at the height of his powers in Wonder Confronts Certainty ., 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., A compelling and necessary book. Drawing on a vast fund of knowledge of Russian history and literature and a fine understanding of Russian fiction, Morson joins together two large subjects: a riveting--and scary--account of the Russian cult of murder from nineteenth-century terrorism to its continuation in Soviet state terror, and its humanistic antidote in the great Russian novelists., Enlists Russian literary titans from Tolstoy to Vasily Grossman to stage an enthralling dialogue between humanistic hope and doubt, and the murderous self-righteousness of the Russian 'revolutionist' tradition. Under Morson's eyes, classic works illuminate still-burning questions of idealism, ideology and violence: criticism at its urgent, heartfelt best., Wanderer, Idealist, Revolutionary: in his latest guide, Gary Saul Morson plots these three personality types through two centuries of Russian literature. This is not a neutral book. Among its several purposes is to prod readers into realizing that the passion to possess a definitive ideology--urgent, materialist, maximalist--can be as dangerous an appetite as the drive to possess physical bodies., [A] masterly panorama of classic Russian literature and its hinterland of ideas...With light-footed erudition, Morson passes nimbly among a crowd of guests at this lavish banquet of ideas. Readers familiar with his book's corpus of fictional classics may find fresh illumination, for instance, in the liberal thinker Semyon Frank; the storyteller Vsevolod Garshin, whom Morson considers 'underrated'; or the heartrending Soviet memoirists Nadezhda Mandelstam and Evgeniya Ginzburg., This volume is vintage Morson. It addresses serious subjects with the gravity they deserve, conveying the sense of wonder one experiences when reading great fiction...A richly detailed book, filled with insights into the Russian literary tradition., This highly readable and engaging book is a literary history like no other, taking Russian novels, stories, and plays as the great explorations of the human condition they are. Both a brief for literature itself and a window into the "Russian soul," much of it is strikingly relevant for the questions of today., How shall we live together in full accountability for one another's life and hope? Morson is right to make us think through the ways in which these issues have been meditated on (and lived out) in the rich, conflicted, extreme, fertile soil of modern Russian civilization. Any possible political renewal in our present wilderness must be nourished by that landscape., An impeccable contribution to literary criticism, social philosophy, and philosophical anthropology. Against debilitating nihilism and secular and religious fundamentalism, it affirms dialogue, conversation, and the 'polyphonic' expression of rich and diverse personal points of view. Morson embodies the best insights of the Russian literary tradition he sets out to illuminate.
Dewey Decimal
891.709
Synopsis
Gary Saul Morson brings to life the intense intellectual debates shaping two centuries of Russian writing. Dialogues of great writers with philosophical wanderers and blood-soaked radicals reveal a contest between unyielding dogmatism and open-minded wonder, rendering the Russian literary canon at once distinctive and universally human., 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.
LC Classification Number
PG2948.M67 2023
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