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

by Gary Saul Morson

Overview

An Air Mail Editor’s Pick
A Spectator Book of the Year

“[A] masterly panorama of classic Russian literature and its hinterland of ideas.”—Wall Street Journal 

“Wise and authoritative…As the best Russian literature teaches, the emancipation of the human will from all limits and restraints is the path of individual and collective perdition. We should all be grateful to Gary Saul Morson for drawing out that indispensable insight with such lucidity, erudition, and grace.” —Daniel J. Mahoney, New Criterion  

“Wonder Confronts Certainty is Gary Saul Morson's magnum opus.” —Joseph Epstein, Washington Free Beacon

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. 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674299184
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	08/05/2025
Pages:	512
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.80(d)

About the Author

Gary Saul Morson is a prizewinning literary critic and the author of “Anna Karenina” in Our Time, Narrative and Freedom, and, most recently, Minds Wide Shut, cowritten with Morton Schapiro. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Morson has written for the New York Review of Books, American Scholar, New Criterion, and Wall Street Journal. He is Lawrence B. Dumas Professor of the Arts and Humanities at Northwestern University, where for three decades he has taught an iconic course on Tolstoy and Dostoevsky that is frequently the university’s most popular class.

Editorial Reviews

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.

Current - Jessica Hooten Wilson

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.

Caryl Emerson Caryl Emerson

[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.

Wall Street Journal - Boyd Tonkin

Wonder Confronts Certainty is a magnificent book, equally valuable as a work of scholarship and a meditation on the timeless urgency of reading.

Hedgehog Review - Richard Hughes Gibson

For Morson, to read Russian literature is to live between wonder and certainty—to sit somewhere between an attitude of humble awe and unyielding dogmatism before the world. This oscillation between wonder and certainty not only shaped Russian intellectual, literary, and political debates for the past two centuries but also asks us in the West who we are in our own tradition—whether we are open to wonderment and surprise or smugly satisfied with our knowledge.

Public Discourse - Lee Trepanier

A profound, passionate, and wholly original celebration of Russian realism as both literary school and way of life. Invoking bitter historical precedent, Morson shows us that reality itself—the sensual, moral experience of living and loving actual humans—requires an able defender in the face of alluring theoretical abstractions, perfect futures, and idealized visions of humanity. And who better to defend the prosaic elements of lived experience than those writers whose unprecedented achievements depended on their ability to describe it so well?

Yuri Corrigan

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.

Washington Free Beacon - Joseph Epstein

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.

Mosaic - Hussein Aboubakr

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.

The Spectator

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.

Claremont Review of Books - Vladimir Golstein

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.

Robert Alter

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.

Daniel J. Mahoney

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.

First Things - Rowan Williams

Morson’s encyclopedic knowledge of Russian literature is remarkable, and his analysis masterful and profound…This [book] attests to the enduring relevance of the Russian literary greats.

Publishers Weekly

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.

Air Mail

Morson has been writing superb books about Russian fiction for over forty years, but Wonder Confronts Certainty is his most profound and capacious, taking on new concerns and periods in the ongoing engagement of the Russian novel with ideas, extreme conditions, and ultimate questions. With illumination from intellectual history, comparative literary history, and moral philosophy, it incisively captures what makes Russian literature both Russian and timeless, of its time and open-ended.

William Mills Todd III

Will likely be [Morson’s] magnum opus…He is at the height of his powers in Wonder Confronts Certainty.

Washington Examiner - Micah Mattix

Morson’s special gift is to present Russian literature as an endlessly renewable source of revelation.

Los Angeles Review of Books - Bob Blaisdell

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.

Caryl Emerson