Summer Reading: Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter by Gary Saul Morson (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2023; 492 pp.)

The short review: two out of two “thumbs up!” 

Gary Saul Morson provides a work of literary criticism, literary history, and a prosaic poetics of process (the latter being Morson’s innovation). A page-turner in its intensity, Morson’s book made this reviewer think of David Remnick’s journalist commentary on the drama, integrity outages and deep corruption of spirit that hastened the fall of the former Soviet Union, and which may well do the same for its authoritarian successor. Wonder Confronts Certainty can be appreciated as the prequel to David Remnick’s Lenin’s Tomb, though Morson’s work is one of literary criticism rather than journalism. (The tomb in question, of course, is Russia itself.)

The first part of Wonder Confronts Certainty makes the case for the humanizing contribution of Russian literature such as one finds in Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Solzhenitsyn (and many others). At risk of an oversimplification, such Russian literature is transformational. It provides the wonder that constrains and points the way forward to overcoming the fanatical certainty of the true believer belonging to the intelligentsia. This humanizing literature saved the nation and the Russian people, and, just as significantly, it enriched world literature. Of course, the challenge with humans is that they can be so inhumane. The idea is not to make a bad situation worse, but the Russian revolution inevitably seemed to do that, resulting in fanatically nihilistic calls for assassination, revolution, and terror, in turn leading to mass murder.

Meanwhile, an alternative literary canon existed that was committed to overthrowing the Czarist monarchy, even one committed to liberalism such as Alexander II, killing the kulaks (prosperous small farmers) and Mensheviks (socialists) at any cost, for which Nikolay Chernyshevsky’s What Is to be Done? is Exhibit A. Such “engaged fiction”—in Sartre’s French “engaged” literally means “committed (politically)”—tends to be didactic and lacking in humanizing nuance. The fight for social justice is never to be dismissed, yet the “engaged” tradition started to glorify and justify terrorism, assassination, and violent overthrow of authoritarian government(s) at all costs, not only putting its foot on the slippery slope of de-humanization, but ending up at the bottom of it. In contrast and on background, Theodor Adorno, no running dog of capitalism, urged that “[committed art] is not intended to generate, ameliorative measures, legislative acts, or practical institutions” (Adorno 1962: 180 ). Art’s resistance to existing social injustices occurs “by its form alone” (1962: 180). The latter is the process to which Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, were committed. (In all fairness, it must be noted that Adorno is my reference, not Morson’s – but (I assert) Adorno, a notorious contrarian, would support him.)

The term “intelligentsia” plays a pivotal role in the analysis in Wonder Confronts Certainty. Though it has meant many things—intellectual, vanguard of the proletariat, educated person—here it means “fanatic,” “true believer (in a negative sense),” and “extremist.” Someone who is so committed to The Cause that the person’s commitment rises to a delusional level and is cognitively impenetrable to critical thinking or argument. The belief system becomes a kind of secular religion. “God” is replace by “the Party” (or Big Brother). The psychology of delusion is analyzed on page 126—as Dostoyevsky is credited (accurately) with anticipating the origins of totalitarianism in The Possessed.  

It is a high probability one is dealing with the intelligentsia when, in the face of a setback to the Belief System (whether religion, political party, social movement, or spiritual cause) the adherent to the cause Doubles Down. Key term: double down. For example, the end of the world—or the political revolution—does not arrive on the expected date as predicted by the leader, the prophet, or the belief system. The space ship does not arrive from Alpha Centauri to take the members of the intelligentsia (the True Believers) to the promised land. Do the adherents of the belief system say: “Oops, we might have overlooked something—some facts or alternative point of view; we might have made a miscalculation; or some of our assumptions require improvement. Might we need to review our Dale Carnegie principles on how to win friends and influence people? Might we have made a mistake or two or overlooked a crucial detail?” No! The fanatics create an alibi, make excuses, point fingers, find someone to blame, and, as noted, double down on their fixed false beliefs.

What went wrong? “We was robbed!” “Sabotage!” “Conspiracy!” “Betrayal!” “TREASON!” Outside agitators, the unwashed masses from a foreign land, a class or racial or ethnic minority stabbed us in the back. Just as often, the fault is internal to the individual. The faith of the member of the intelligentsia was not strong enough. The party member must confess his or her sins. “I was not resolute enough – oh, woe is me! “I was not committed enough in killing all the kulaks – I spared the children!” Preferably, the confessions of failings (and treason!) occur in a public show trial at which the fallen comrade embraces martyrdom for the cause. 

Morson documents the delusional level thinking and of Lenin, Trotsky, and their cohorts in literary detail. As noted, one of the defining documents and approaches was Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s influential utopian novel published under the title “What is to be done?” (1863). Lenin used the title in his own treatise on the bloody way forward to the Bolshevik paradise, which turned out to be indistinguishable from one of the lower rings of Dante’s Inferno. This path leads from the empathy of Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (okay, Fathers and Children) to the Russian genocide of Lenin’s mass liquidations and Stalin’s holocaust (however, with a small “h” even if technically more people died than at the hands of the Nazis), and is a path paved with the dead, both innocent citizens and revolutionaries. Not for the faint of heart reader, the steady drum beat by Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin of “kill every one whether guilty or innocent!” echoes across the land and the pages of Morson’s account. In the margins of pages 241—242 in a lengthy quote from Solzhenitsyn, I wrote “enough!” which, of course, marked my own limit and empathic distress, not that of the mass killers. 

The writing is hard-hitting and rich in exemplary quotations designed to get the reader to think about the big questions that literature and being human invite – God, freedom, the openness of time, the immortality of the soul, self-deception, the need for integrity, the possibility of happiness. Morson stands the ideologically dense (but poorly written) novel by Chernyshevsky, “What is to be done?” on its head and in a patterned way in chapter after chapter. For example, instead of “What is to be done?” Morson’s corresponding Chapter is entitled “What is not to be done?”—the answer to this question being whatnot to do—abandon critical thinking, abandon taking the opponent’s point of view, ignore the golden rule, follow orders without thinking. One of the causes of evil is thoughtlessness, and a noticeable lack of thinking occurs among the intelligentsia, who are too certain to need to think. After accounting events that can be described as on a par with Holocaust literature, Solzhenitsyn often is given space to express a moment of radical hope amid the ruins: “Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good from evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts” (p. 278). Just so. 

In another context [Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment], the anti-hero, Raskolnikov, debates to himself several inconsistent theories justifying killing, which is what he ends up perpetrating. Ultimately the heinous act is a kind of nihilistic existential decision that is so chilling precisely because it comes from nothing—no motive—just spontaneously erupting lack of humanness—that is, evil. The murder itself gives rise to theoretic justifications, not vice versa—money was beside the point; he “murdered two people for a theory” (p. 203). Killing becomes killing for the sake of killing. The comparisons with the murderous regimes of genocidal totalitarian systems is compelling.

Morson engages with literary history in the context of Russian history’s mass murders (the two may be inextricable). Yet what really stands out is the power of literature and storytelling over against philosophical argument and theory. After all it is the certainty of certain social theories that is one of the causes of the mass killing. 

Wonder is different than hope, and it provides a way forward through the ruins of hope. Wonder shines forth in Part III, the best part of the book, also in terms of word count, on “Timeless Questions.” Aristotelian poetics gives one a sense of an ending, but the poetics of process (Morson’s innovation) embeds the diverse inflexion points of a narrative (including the last page) in “open time,” a dynamic expression of human freedom. The issue of the expression and experience of time in narrative is one of those liberating timeless moments. Morson’s idea of “open time” as exemplified in literature invites an imaginative variation, going back to the moment of decision, after which the outcome seems inevitable (necessary), and yet the outcome might have been different. Dostoevsky’s Kairova knew what she was doing when she took a razor and attacked the mistress of her no good, faithless husband, but she did not know what she would do next. What she was doing could be redescribed by the prosecuting attorney as attempted murder, the intention to kill, yet in the moment her “intention” was an indeterminate process unfolding in time, whose outcome was a wonder even to her. Notwithstanding the prosecutor’s accusation, her “decision” looked nothing like going to the ice cream parlor and making a decision, choosing between chocolate and vanilla. Technically it was not an insanity defense, yet her mental status was profoundly altered. She was expressing her suffering. Possibilities ramified. Literature gives the reader access to that process. Here Mikhail Bakhtin gets the main word: “The ultimate word of the world and about the world has not yet been spoken, the world is open and free, everything is still in the future and will always be in the future” (p. 319). 

I acknowledge that I need to get out more and discovering Morson’s penetrating and incisive analysis of Svetlana Alexievich’s The Unwomanly Face of War (1985) was an eye-opener (and winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize for literature). As I understand it, Alexievich listened—really listened empathically—to Russian women who had survived World War II, and wove their factual accounts of survival into narratives that seemed fiction-like because the events they narrated were not the kind of thing one would have predicted and they (the events) had never before been told—“a new kind of literary genera”—nonfictional yet also requiring a willing suspension of disbelief (the latter a mark of the fictional)—polyphonic—many voiced. 

The force of empathy is strong with Morson. A recurring theme is how the realist novel—especially in its Russian implementations—engages with the treatment of happiness, freedom in the face of contingency, open time, and self-deception in ways that brings forth a disclosive, novelist truth needed to supplement the inadequacies of theories of truth that fail to address our human hunger for emotional and spiritual satisfaction. The prosaic poetics of process comes into its own, by which the imaginative variations of fiction enrich the reader’s humanness and access to possibilities such as empathy, compassion, and community. At the risk of a compelling over-simplification, Morson’s entire work can be redescribed as a powerful argument that literature can do things in dissolving problems about which philosophy—and other theoretic projects—can only dream and speculate. This is the most powerful part of his work and the most important take-away. For example, Kant argues that what is to bring true lasting advantage to humans is “veiled in impenetrable obscurity” [it is], yet the way to duty is clear. While Kant’s insight should never be underestimated, Tolstoy’s Pierre (in War and Peace) manages to find the happiness hidden in plain view while preserving his moral integrity. Tolstoy squares the circle. This is not the Highest Good reconciling happiness and duty in heaven (or a fairy tale), but literally in the present moment of quietly being with one’s spouse. The following quote (which does not occur as a single passage in Morson (but is there)), nicely expresses Pierre’s struggle to experience and find the happiness that is hidden in plain view (War and Peace (1869): 1189): expressed at literary length in the following passage:

In the past he had never been able to find that great inscrutable infinite something. He had only felt that it must exist somewhere and had looked for it. In everything near and comprehensible he had seen only what was limited, petty, commonplace, and senseless. He had equipped himself with a mental telescope and looked into remote space, where that petty worldliness, hiding itself in misty distance, had seemed to him great and infinite merely because it was not clearly seen. And such had European life, politics, Freemasonry, philosophy, and philanthropy, seemed to him. But even then, at moments of weakness as he had accounted them, his mind had penetrated to those distances and he had there seen the same pettiness, worldliness, and senselessness. Now, however, he had learnt to see the great, eternal, and infinite in everything, and therefore—to see it and enjoy its contemplation—he naturally threw away the telescope through which he had till now gazed over men’s heads, and gladly regarded the ever-changing, eternally great, unfathomable and infinite life around him. And the closer he looked. the more tranquil and happy he became. That dreadful question, What for? which had formerly destroyed all his mental edifices, no longer existed for him.

Pierre has to work his way through Freemasonry, philosophy, philanthropy, wandering dazed through the aftermath of the battle of Borodino, and politics before he is able to throw away the telescope and see what is hidden in plain view in front of his nose. The page number 1189 is itself a data point of significance, though not a fact within the narrative; and it points one, as reader, to the distance in narrative time that Pierre had to traverse before he was able to return home, literally seeing what was in front of him. “The great, eternal, and infinite” are available in the ordinary, everyday details and nuances around Pierre. That is the universe in a grain of sand; and in true Tolstoian (or Wittgensteinian) fashion, the problem is dissolved. To Morson’s great credit, he does not say it is simple to see what is hidden in plain view—often it is hard to grasp—but he does urge being open to the possibility. This is the moment when wonder—the possibility tranquility and happiness in the moment—overcome the near delusional certainty of the fanatical true believer. 

Next Morson argues persuasively, though not without controversy, that the person Anna Karenina (in Tolstoy’s novel of the same title) can be self-deceived in a way not able to be captured by a straightforward philosophico-logical analysis. The terms of the self-deception slip and slide across time, subtly morphing from one momentary context to the next in Anna’s own introspective explanation of her own motives. She is self-deceived—has a blind spot about her grasp of her own motives and those of her husband—and is more committed to being righteous and justified—being certain—about her own behavior than about her self-interested desire. This is not to say that she should not have behaved exactly as she did—at least up until the very end—but that disentangling the sources of her suffering require telling a story, not merely arguing logically.

Again, using the example of Anna Karenina, extra effort is required for one (the reader) to get access to what the agent is doing or not doing. The agent is making a decision, and yet denying making a decision about what she precisely chooses not to know. “Anna’s process of self-deception illustrates the mistake of locating all choices at a moment. People mistakenly equate intention with a choice immediately preceding an action but a person may be responsible without such an immediately prior intention or choice. Instead of a single choice for instance, there may have been many small ones, none of which were taken with the end result in mind” (p. 265). Once again, this is not going to the ice cream parlor and deciding between chocolate and vanilla. The distinction between conscious and unconscious starts to breakdown, and the automaticity of the unconscious surreptitiously guides thinking and behavior over the course of time as Anna selectively filters the describing and redescribing of her husband’s behavior as an integrity outage and as justifying her own integrity outage. Not akrasia (weakness of will), but two wrongs that do (not) make a right. 

Light dawns gradually over the whole. One discovers that people have blind spots. This “talking herself out of what she sees” is the conversation one is constantly having with oneself to prevent one from seeing what is present in plain view unless one takes steps to hide it in a smoke screen of words, distractions, and busyness. For example, Freud (in a passage not cited in Morson but supporting wonder) writes of “the strange state of mind in which one knows and does not know a thing at the same time” (1893: 117ftnt). This knowing and not knowing at the same time requires “shifting perspectives . . . [as] readers practice empathy . . .” (Morson, p. 392). Morson’s work might also have been titled “empathy against fanaticism.” Empathy teaches us to dance in the chaos. Novelistic truth teaches the reader to give up absolute truth—certainty—and learn to dance in the dynamics of life’s sometimes chaotic but committed conversations in which dogmatic agreement yields to the give and take of empathic relatedness. The rumor of empathy in Gary Saul Morson’s Wonder Confronts Certainty is no rumor—empathy lives in Morson’s work. 

References

Theodor W. Adorno. (1962).  “Commitment,” in Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, Geog Lukás, Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso, 1977).  

Eric Hoffer. (1951). The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements. New York: Harper Perennial.

Sigmund Freud. (1893). Miss Lucy R, case histories, Studies on Hysteria.” In The Standard Edition of the Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud edited by James Strachey, Vol 2: 106–124. 

Leo Tolstoy. (1869). War and Peace, trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude, ed. Amy Mandelker. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. 

Categories: a rigorous and critical empath, empathy against fanaticism, Russian literature, timeless questions

Tags: empathy against fanaticism, Russian literary greatness, ultimate timeless questions