Albert Mohler:
This is Thinking in Public, a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about frontline theological and cultural issues with the people who are shaping them. I’m Albert Mohler, your host and president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. Every semester, the largest classroom at Northwestern University in Chicago is filled with hundreds of students who are eager to take a course devoted to Russian literature.
The answer as to why comes down to the who. That says something not only about the class, but about the professor who happens to be my guest today. He’s the Lawrence B. Dumas Professor of Arts and Humanities at Northwestern University, where he also serves as a Professor of Slavic Languages and Literature. He earned his PhD from Yale University. Since that time, he’s enjoyed a prolific scholarly in teaching career. He’s authored more than 200 peer reviewed articles.
He has written a dozen academic monographs on Russian literature, but it is who he is as a teacher that his most recent book, Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter, is the topic of our conversation today.
Professor Gary Saul Morson, welcome to Thinking in Public.
Gary Saul Morson:
Oh, it’s my pleasure to be here.
Albert Mohler:
Professor, we’ve had a conversation before, but I have been eagerly awaiting this one, as I’ve been eagerly awaiting what at least I’m going to call your magnum opus, Wonder Confronts Certainty. I saw a reference in the publishing literature that an editor had suggested this to you, and he may not have realized how long it was going to take to do this. I think at that point you said that you’ve been working on it for seven years. I’ll just say it really shows.
Gary Saul Morson:
Yes, no, he suggested it in 2016. This was an editor at Harvard Press came to me and said, “I have the book you were born to write.”
I said, “Really? What’s that?”
“Well, tell us the whole significance of the Russian literary intellectual experience for the past 200 years.”
I said, “Okay, well, I don’t think I can do that because I’m an expert on the 19th century, but not on the Soviet period. I’d have to learn that.”
“Well learn it,” he said.
I decided I would. First of all, so every time somebody asked me to review a book of 20th century literature, a new translation, I agreed. And then I kept reading the things I should have been reading had I been a specialist and taking very careful notes on it and fitting it into this pattern. At the end of about five years of reading, I had these wonderful notes, and then I just have to turn them into a book. But if that editor, his name was John Kulka, had not suggested this to me, I would never have imagined doing something like this. I owe him a great debt. He left Harvard Press, but the person who succeeded him, Kathleen McDermott, really understood what this was about. I was doubly fortunate there.
Albert Mohler:
Well, we all are. I just want to say on behalf of the reading public, we are indebted to the editor’s suggestion there. I would agree. This is the book you were meant to write and born to write. I do a lot of these conversations and books are such a big part of my life, including many of the books you discussed in this book. But Professor, I just want to tell you right up front, this was one of the most significant reading experiences I have had in a very long time. I say that with appreciation, but I also have to tell you, I’m worn out by this book.
Gary Saul Morson:
Tell me why.
Albert Mohler:
Because you are dealing with literature that deals with the deepest, most intense experiences of humanity, the deepest moral questions. Whereas I would say in comparison, in English or French literature, even in major writers, you find lighter, darker moments, forms of literature, experiences and issues discussed. I say this with great appreciation. I hope you hear it that way. Reading Wonder Confronts Certainty, it’s an emotional experience. I find that even in just thinking about portions of it.
Gary Saul Morson:
Well, I’m glad to hear because that’s what attracted me to Russian literature to begin with, the fact that it takes the world so seriously and asks the Russians call them the accursed questions, проклятый вопрос, meaning accursed because they will never have a final answer, ultimate questions, which are always of relevance everywhere, the universality to them. Well, Tolstoy is like this. You feel like you’re being held by the throat. No, you must think about this. You can’t live without it.
I find that absolutely thrilling, and I tried to convey some of that. People debate so intensely, and I tried to orchestrate the different positions. I pretended that everybody was in the same room together even if they lived a century apart answering each other. There’s a literary precedent for that. There was a form in antiquity called the Dialogues of the Dead where they did just that. They’ve written also in the Renaissance and even right up to the present that they’ve been written.
I try to, without literally having them in the room, imagine what each would say to each other, orchestrate the arguments as if everything were present and they were present to each other. And then there aren’t final answers to these questions. If there were, they wouldn’t be accursed questions. But you understand the questions a lot more deeply. If you don’t know what the answer is, you at least get an appreciation for what the answer can’t be that you might’ve thought it was.
Albert Mohler:
I am a theologian, Christian, Protestant, Confessional theologian. I’m trained in history. I am an ardent reader of literature. I have to tell myself this or remind myself of this, I tend to read literature as a theologian and as an historian.
Gary Saul Morson:
Well, I read it as a philosopher, so it’s pretty similar.
Albert Mohler:
Right. But you understand the fact that I have to remind myself to disengage, not as if I can be someone else as a reader, but I have to pay attention to the text and what the author is doing. You can have historical literature that’s about very moving experiences or moving moments, but the historical prose isn’t very moving. You can have that in any field. But what makes this Russian literature so overpowering at times is that it refuses to disengage.
Gary Saul Morson:
Yes. Part of the idea that you’ll get in many of the writers is that if you simply approach the question abstractly, as a series of arguments, you’re missing something very important. There’s a great deal that you can only learn through experience, and that’s why it’s told by having you let’s say trace the character’s experience. You identify with the character from within as she goes through the experience of different views of love and how you live them out or of meaning.
It’s the experience in life vicariously that teaches you something that the arguments wouldn’t. There’s a Chekhov story I talk about called Lights. It’s about an old man and a young man, both engineers, and the young man believes in a version of nihilism, which he gets out of Ecclesiastes. Well, it’s all vanity. Nothing matters. I’m free to do what I like. It’s all meaningless anyway. We’re all going to die. The old man tells a story to say what’s wrong with thinking that way, but he doesn’t conclude that Ecclesiastes is wrong.
He concludes that Ecclesiastes is wrong when you’re young. But if it’s the product of a lot of life experience, it won’t lead to that kind of cynicism. It will lead to something else. Now, you never get a philosopher, strictly speaking, to say it’s the same argument, right? It’s not the same argument behind you. That’s why you need literature, as well as philosophy to deal with this.
Albert Mohler:
Well, you make that point, I think, very tellingly late in the book when you point out that the novel or the novelist, let’s put it this way, can tell a story in which the character does things that are unexpected. You actually compare that, I don’t know, maybe to… I remember one of the people you compared it to. You said, James Bond will always do what James Bond does.
Gary Saul Morson:
I see, I see, okay.
Albert Mohler:
That’s your example.
Gary Saul Morson:
I didn’t remember I said that. Okay, but yes, it’s true.
Albert Mohler:
But when you look at the characters of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov and others, you see them develop and morally change even in ways that you argue were unexpected when the novelist began the work.
Gary Saul Morson:
Yes. If the novelist is really good, the novelist will allow the character to develop as a person would, which means they will be surprised what makes a person a person. Of course, the novelist could force the character to do what the novelist planned in advance, but then it will seem like there’s something false to it. I mean, one of my favorite examples of this is when Dostoevsky was writing The Idiot, he picked this hero who was call him a Christ figure but without supernatural powers.
Perfectly good man. The question was, would his example cause more good or more harm? Good for obvious reasons, people would be admired, but harm because you tend to resent people who are better than you. You can say, how dare you? I’ll show you. You could wind up causing more harm simply because people resent you for being better. Dostoevsky was the master of that second psychology. Of course, he didn’t want it to win, but he understood it. But at the end of the novel, it does win.
He just records it because it is intellectually honest. He was quite disappointed with that. He tried to charm out of it in an attempt to rethink that because he didn’t want the Christian idea to show up, but he was completely honest. It surprised him, but he recorded it.
Albert Mohler:
Professor, I want to take us back to the beginning of the book. And by the way, it’s a massive book. I heartily encourage listeners to read it because it’s an immersion into philosophy, morality, theology, history, politics in ways that are very difficult otherwise to combine. But when you begin modern Russian literature, you really begin it in the time of Czar Alexander II. Why? Is that arbitrary? I know it’s not, bu why during the time of Alexander II?
Gary Saul Morson:
Well, it’s at this period… He’s czar from 1855 to 1881. In this 26 year period, there’s probably never been a more intense period in literature in the history of the world. You get the four great Dostoevsky novels, you get War and Peace, Anna Karenina. And you get a lot more. You also get an incredible intensity of intellectual thought. I mean, the first formulation of the idea of what we call the neurological theory of consciousness comes up. Mendeleev invents the periodic table of the elements.
The first translations of Darwin are into Russian in this period. But all the great questions are defined in this period. The radicals, the intelligentsia, see it one way. The great writers respond another way. The radicals push their idea to the extreme so you can see where the ideas lead. There’s a wonderful passage in George Eliot’s philosophical novel in Middlemarch where she says, “but it’s a good thing about Englishman. They entertain the most radical ideas with no actual scorching,” she said. Because they go home and eat their dinner like everybody else. Well, that’s not true of Russians. Russians take it to the extreme and try to live it. If you think that, well, all morality is simply prejudice and murder is fine, you actually become a terrorist.
Albert Mohler:
There were many, many, many of them during this time.
Gary Saul Morson:
This is when the modern terrorist movement is born. I mean, by the end of the century, by the beginning of the next century, there were so many terrorists. It was a career that was inherited from parents to a child, including daughters who had become terrorists. It was a family tradition. There were thousands of them killing thousands of people, and it was considered, next to being a great writer, the most prestigious occupation in the world.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
“Oh, I plan to be a terrorist.”
Well, it was, of course, a dangerous career choice, but it was a respected one. That kind of thinking begins in 1855 to ’71 in a terrorist movement that begins in the 1870s and leads to be assassination of the czar in 1881 and other officials too, but the czar is the culmination. That was a disaster because this was the great reforming czar. Russia never had such a reforming ruler before, who introduced Western law courts, who liberated the serfs, who institutions of local self-government, which would not be immediately directed by central officials.
It was an amazing period. But you know what happens in cases like that is the more you get, the more you think that, but it still falls short of utopian perfection. You get more and more frustrated, and they murdered him. Of course, things got a lot worse after that.
Albert Mohler:
Indeed, they did. Professor, why Russia? We began here. But I mean, this isn’t like the literature of any other we’ll call Russia European in the sense. This isn’t like the literature of any other European nation. This is unique. It’s something that can be explained only by Russian experience. What in the world makes Russia so different? I could offer a historical argument. I want to hear your argument.
Gary Saul Morson:
Well, first, I’ll just mention that what you just say is what made Russian literature take Western Europe by storm leading the century. If you just read, for example, Virginia Woolf’s amazing article, “The Russian Point of View,” her appreciation of Russian literature, but she’s not the only one. There is a sense in which the main character is always the human soul, and it will not let you not take things seriously. We polite Englishmen, of course, we’re a little bit embarrassed to raise questions like that, but here it is.
Tolstoy was so much better than any other writer who ever lived that you couldn’t even remotely compare anyone to him. He addressed those questions. Why Russia? Well, these reasons are always inadequate, but I can suggest a few things. Russia had under Peter the Great been rapidly Westernized overnight. People started dressing differently, different table manners. Women come out of seclusion. They picked a Western calendar, which didn’t date from the beginning of the world, like in the Hebrew Bible, but from the birth of Christ.
Modern science, the first universities came in, the first academy of science. Everything comes in all at once, and they have to absorb all of Western culture very rapidly so that, I don’t know, writers who might be two centuries apart in England and feel very apart come in at the same time in Russia so they feel like contemporaries. You get a sense when you do this that things aren’t rooted, things are not natural. Culture is not natural. It’s up for grabs. Everything could be different because yesterday it was.
And that creates an intensity of the question because nothing just you can revert to habit. Another thing is it’s an authoritarian society. I mean, there were authoritarian societies in Europe, but the degree of authoritarianism in Russia was so extreme that people—let’s say used to Austrian authoritarianism— couldn’t imagine something like this. They were shocked by it. There was never any room, let’s say, for educated people to have the slightest political influence whatsoever, even the type they would have under an absolute monarch.
There was nothing, absolutely not. Naturally with no practical experience, they thought in extreme philosophical terms of ultimate good and evil because they never had to temper it with actually doing anything. That would be another reason.
Albert Mohler:
Well, Professor, when you consider just the Czar Alexander II, you mentioned famous for his reforms, but that is the problem, isn’t it? Is that if you earn an absolute autocrat, if you have total power, if you’re a despot in the sense that the Russian czars were extending far beyond what other monarchies would’ve imagined in Europe, if you try to reform, the problem is you set loose, as Dostoevsky would say, demons and they cannot be stopped.
And then one of the sad ironies, and Solzhenitsyn points this out, is you asked the question, what would’ve happened if Alexander II had lived? But he didn’t. He was assassinated.
Gary Saul Morson:
Yes. Solzhenitsyn also points out that even under that terrible Czar Nicholas II, he had one extraordinarily good prime minister, Stolypin, who was eventually assassinated.
Albert Mohler:
Of course.
Gary Saul Morson:
Having said that, if he had been able to put his reforms through, there would’ve been no revolution. That’s why he had to be assassinated, of course. Solzhenitsyn likes to say, if only he had lived, if only even wearing a bulletproof vest that day.
Albert Mohler:
Right, and he had been warned.
Gary Saul Morson:
And he had been warned. And indeed, the person who shot him was probably a double agent working for secret police and the terrorists at the same time. He imagines the Russia that might have been. Bolshevism was not inevitable. This is the Russia that might have been, that should have been. By the way, this is one of the problems I talk about in the book is the question of historical inevitability or are there actually alternative paths? The same is true in individual lives, and that becomes one of the great debates.
A lot of the writers too, they try to show you that I’m going to tell the character’s life story, but it didn’t have to work out that way. Here’s a case where it easily could. This is just one of many possible stories. Here’s a moment when it could have gone the other way. Here’s another moment when it could have gone the other way. Whereas many novels try to say, well, at the end, you see, it had to be this way. We see it in the end at everything. For Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and others, that constitutes a misleading implication of good structure.
Good structure makes you have the feeling that it has to be that way, but that is not what real human experience of time is like. The human experience of time is the other possibilities are genuinely there. They’re not an illusion. You try to overcome that bias of the artifact, as I like to call it, towards inevitability. It’s fatalism. Some of their amazing experiments in War and Peace, for instance, are an attempt to convey that sense, whatever happened, something else might have happened in history and individual lives.
Albert Mohler:
The span, the scope is often beyond our imagination. But one of the other aspects of Russian literature you make very clear is the microcosm, the intensity of dialogue, the intensity of the development of character and the intensity of emotion. I have to tell you that I at several points even in your book and having read so many of the texts behind it, I mean, frankly, you forced me or helped me to read it in a different way, and in a way that’s just not true of so much other literature.
It comes with enormous emotional force. I am an older man than I was when I started reading this. Maybe that’s a part of it. I mean, when I was redirected by you to some of the passages from Vasily Grossman, they’re heart-wrenching. In other words, I feel like there’s something in this Russian literature that just doesn’t exist in the modern America. I have interest in what John Updike is up to speaking about the post-industrial, post-Christian society, but that’s very different than what the Russians are doing. The Russians take me back to Genesis.
Gary Saul Morson:
Yes. I mean, nothing wrong with being interested in post-industrial society in America, but that’s being interested in a particular historical moment. The Russians are interested in all that, but they’re also interested in the ultimate questions of the human condition that would be true anywhere. You get extremity, for example, of conditions under Stalin in the Gulag. I mean, the only thing you could I guess compare it to is, and as Grossman compares it to, to the Nazi death camps, but they existed for a comparatively short time.
They didn’t affect the whole society. In fact, as Grossman points out, one of the differences between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia was that in Nazi Germany, if you were a good, loyal, ethnic German, not a Jew or a gypsy or anything, and you didn’t criticize the government, you were safe. Nobody’s going to arrest you in Stalinist Russia. Everybody was subject to it. The secret police were busy arresting each other. The top generals would be arrested. Arrest would be by quota for a given area.
This was something extremely different. You arrested your most loyal supporters. This is a whole different sort of thing. In the Nazi camps… Well, I was just reading Primo Levi’s accounts of his experience. When you arrive at Auschwitz, they first separate those who can work from those who can’t, and they immediately gas all those in the camp. But of course, he wasn’t there. He was in the other group, and he described the working conditions. Well, the Soviets didn’t immediately send anyone to the gas chambers, so in that sense it was better.
But the working conditions, what shocked me about the book, is that the working conditions that Levi thought were intolerable were like a paradise compared to those in the Soviet. I mean, he complains that they had to work in temperatures below zero. In the Kolyma camps, you worked at 50 to 60 degrees below zero. 20 degrees below zero was springtime. I think there’s a passage I really love in one of the memoirs where the memoirist writes that… You know what he says?
“If only we had been slaves unto Pharaoh in Egypt, as they say, after all, we know they had families because they multiplied. Hebrews multiplied. We know that they were pretty well-fed, therefore. And of course, they didn’t work at 50 degrees below zero in Egypt. If only we had been slaves under Pharaohs.”
These passages are striking. Those extreme conditions that allows you to ask ultimate question, what happens to a human being when the person has been hungry for months?
The author Shalamov, who wrote some of these wonderful stories, was himself in one of the Kolyma camps. I think if I’m getting my figures right, he was a big man who arrived weighing 240 pounds. But at one point, he was down to 90 pounds. He almost was dead, but then he got transferred to somewhere where he could survive. He describes the narrowing of the human soul under those conditions. What emotions are lost? What ways of thinking are lost? There’s one wonderful story where he describes how it begins to reverse it all.
He was put in a place where he was fed, and he says, now what emotions came back first? Fear was first. Even before that, you had reached a point where you didn’t give a damn whether you lived or died. Fear came first. Love actually didn’t come back for quite a while. This is a kind of anthropology that no anthropologist has ever done, describe the human soul in those conditions. Again, the closest thing I can think of is, let’s say, I don’t know, Viktor Frankl’s memoir of Auschwitz. It’s that sort of book.
Albert Mohler:
It is hard to say this without saying something morally wrong. It’s a different form of darkness in terms of how it is not a phase in the culture, but in many ways it just becomes the culture.
Gary Saul Morson:
Well, and Lenin was really clear about this. When they were writing the first Soviet law code, he instructed the person writing it, don’t treat mass terror as something that we did just during the Civil War to gain power. It is to be a permanent feature of the regime. Period. For everybody, that’s what mass terror mean. I mean, even the Nazis didn’t think of that.
Albert Mohler:
Well, and it wouldn’t have worked. For instance, one historian points out that had the Nazis tried to operate on the Russian scale internally, they would’ve run out of Germans. A part of this at least is in part Russia’s immensity. I mean, Russia didn’t have to have Lebensraum as the Nazis wanted, living space. They were living space, which is part of the reason why Hitler declared war on Russia. He wanted that space. It’s like human life, all of it—this is a point you just make—it’s not just selecting certain persons ethnically, religiously, genetically. It’s just saying humanity isn’t worth anything.
Gary Saul Morson:
They did it, exterminate all ethnic groups and above all social class, which was the equivalent of race for them, but they also just had it purely arbitrarily. At no point did Hitler have the SS turn on itself and start arresting other SS members or just arrest generals-arbiter.
That’s one reason they lost so badly when the Nazis invaded. Stalin had purged 90% of the top officers and admirals in the Army and Navy, so completely inexperienced officers were left. Why did he purge them? There’s no good reason, except that terror was the basic principle of the regime. You’d have to ask why he wouldn’t do that.
Albert Mohler:
Well, and the institutionalization of all of this at the service of ideology, that’s another issue that comes up again and again in your book. You don’t use the term very often, by the way, but I think in the background on almost every page is this human propensity to seize upon an idea at the expense of humanity where human beings simply become cogs in a wheel of some unfolding ideology.
I’ve seen this before, but I’ll tell you, just reading Wonder Confront Certainty again, you become reconvinced of the fact that Lenin and Stalin believed what they were saying. I mean, they actually lived it out.
Gary Saul Morson:
Yes, I think they did. And by the way, you mentioned cogs of the machine. There’s a famous toast that Stalin once gave to his followers, to the cogs. People are cogs in the machine. We give a toast to the cogs. He couldn’t pretend it was anything else. That was the Bolshevik way of looking at things. Because if you thought that, well, human life is valuable, we don’t kill people unless we have to, of course, that view would’ve been regarded as completely un-Bolshevik.
Albert Mohler:
Bourgeois.
Gary Saul Morson:
Well, no, it could have been sort of these fuzzy minded, other socialists might’ve had, or Kropotkin the anarchist. We kill people, but only the minimum that we have to. From Lenin’s point of view, that presupposes that human life has a sacred value of its own, so you economize how many you kill. But if you believe that, where do you get that idea? No materialist view could get to that.
People are just material objects. It means you must be, whether you know it or not, covertly religious to think that way. The prime ethical principle was radical materialism, get rid of anything that’s religious, especially the idea that there’s something about human life, which is sacred, then you’re not a materialist anymore.
Albert Mohler:
I think, Professor, I read something you wrote very early. When you said that you had studied dialectical materialism, you saw it as an oxymoron. It could be dialectical or it could be materialism, but it couldn’t be both. I think that’s a bit in play in what you’re describing here.
Gary Saul Morson:
Yeah. Before I studied Russian literature, I was going to be a physicist at one point, and one of the things you don’t do there is you don’t attribute human characteristics to atoms. You don’t say that a stone falls because it wants to reach the earth. I mean, that might be a metaphor, but you don’t really believe it. What dialectical materialism does is precisely that. Dialectics is dialogue. It’s human conversation, and you attribute it to matter, right?
It’s absolutely crucial to Marxists and Leninists to do that because unless you do that, you don’t have the conclusion that it is given in the nature of things that not only is evolution, the human species given in matter, but the evolution of society as well as communism is. Matter has a direction, which is where history gets its direction. If you’re not thinking that way, if you’re trained, I don’t know, as I wasn’t, I don’t know, Newtonian physics, you think that these stones have a purpose in falling?
It doesn’t make any sense. But in the Soviet view, it does make sense. And that’s why I was always so shocked that this is supposed to be materialism, but it sure doesn’t look like it. Their manner doesn’t look material to me.
Albert Mohler:
It won’t stay material, just merely material. For example, you just mentioned science, Lenin and the Bolsheviks, they’re ready to throw science out if it didn’t fit their ideology. It’s one of the things I thought in reading your book. This eventually doesn’t work, especially when you get into the Cold War. You’ve got to come to terms with at least some science as it is, but the power of ideology, and I think Solzhenitsyn deals with this so brilliantly, the power of ideology is so self-blinding, it certainly has to be a warning to us all.
Gary Saul Morson:
Yes. What the literature also talks about is, and some of the memoirs, how seductive it is. People want simple moral judgments, simple judgments about life, right and wrong. They will gravitate towards ideologies of this sort. They have an enormous appeal to people. A lot of the writers described what this appeal was, even people who should have known better, like Nadezhda Mandelstam, the wife of the poet Osip Mandelstam. She wrote these wonderful memoirs. Her picture’s on the cover of the book, by the way.
The woman on there is Nadezhda Mandelstam, whose memoirs I really admire. They’re a wonderful piece of literature too. She describes how even her husband, who was eventually, of course, executed by stone. In the ’20s, he was among those who couldn’t bear to give up the idea of revolution, that we are on the side of revolution. The word had a fascination and an attraction that intellectuals could not give up, she says, to the point where I wonder why they thought they needed terror and secret police.
It’s an extraordinary passage, and that’s true. It may not be the word revolution, but there’s something that in many societies will have that kind of appeal that gets you to shut down thought.
Albert Mohler:
In the 19th century, you begin with Alexander II, that period in which there was such repression, but such hope. There was reform, but then assassination, and then catastrophe after catastrophe. And then you have nihilism that also appears at the very same time in a particularly intense Russian way. But then you do have the greats of Russian literature, but then you’ve got the Bolshevik Revolution.
Do you draw lines of continuity? I mean, we’re not even getting to the say mid 20th century. But just in terms of say from Alexander II until the First World War, is there a break in Russian literature or is it continuity? Because when you talk about the greats, you’re talking basically about the 19th century.
Gary Saul Morson:
Well, the way I set it up is in the 1860s, let’s say, 1860s and ’70s, the argument is, roughly speaking, between the ideologues, the intelligentsia. The word intelligentsia, which we get from Russian, but in Russian, it doesn’t mean intellectual. It’s almost the opposite. It means politically committed ideologues. You don’t even have to be able to read, but you can be a member of the intelligentsia, whereas Leo Tolstoy would not have been because he believed in the complexity of things.
He believed in God. You have to be a materialist. He would never have been thought of one. A moderate liberal couldn’t be a member of the intelligentsia. You get the argument between the intelligentsia in that sense. And the great writers, one thinking the world is fundamentally simple and we know all the answers, the other about the complexity of things. What happens is that now the intelligentsia gradually grows, so it has more and more strings in it, to the point where this intolerant one is only one of them.
It’s the most prestigious, but it’s only one, but that’s the one that seizures control in 1917. Lenin advices the earliest intelligentsia people, the most intolerant ones, and he seizes control. And then the group that was opposed to the writers now is in control and can dictate what literature is going to be. It’s not going to be this open-minded complex and stuff. It’s going to be propaganda of the scientific truth. Great literature isn’t wiped out. It goes on the ground.
A lot of great books are written, as they said, for the drawer, and there’ll be a loosening, called a fawn, and some things will come out that were written 20 years before, or this Russian tradition of smuggling literature abroad or even going into exile. A great deal of Russian literature is either written or published in exile. That was even true under the czars, but much more so under the Soviets. The Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov tradition continues. It’s just not official. You get the official literature, and then this continues.
Albert Mohler:
Which is known as Soviet realism.
Gary Saul Morson:
Socialist realism is the official.
Albert Mohler:
That’s what I’m saying. The official Soviet literature was this socialist or soviet realism. That leads me to want to jump into the 20th century. There’s a sense in which Solzhenitsyn is different, I would argue, and you’re the expert here, than Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in one sense, but he’s continuous.
In other words, when I read Solzhenitsyn, I see a man who is on the other side of the Bolshevik revolution and on the other side of some of the things that Tolstoy and Dostoevsky saw in their imagination. Solzhenitsyn has seen them in life. It’s not that he was writing contrary to realism, but against the lie of socialist realism.
Gary Saul Morson:
Yes. I mean, with the exception of Dostoevsky, nobody before the 20th century could have imagined the sort of horrors that we got, millions of people tortured. I don’t mean like the loose way we sometimes use the term. I mean real torture. That was starting in 1937. Everybody arrested was subject to it. I could go on and on about that, and the tortures are so horrible that I don’t even want to describe them, and then winding up in his labor campuses. Nothing could have been imagined there.
It raises questions about the nature of good and evil that Chekhov, George Eliot, nobody could have thought of before. My favorite philosopher, literary critic of the Russian period, Mikhail Bakhtin, some of his memoirs have come out recently. In one of them he says, the Greek tragedians, Shakespeare, they were great writers, of course, but they were quite naive. They were naive because they could not understand what evil really could be. Their evil seems petty in the light of our experience.
It’s an extraordinary comment to make. The questions about evil that Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are asking now can be posed in a much more radical way against the background of this experience. And that’s what Solzhenitsyn does and Grossman does and Sholama and a few other writers who can do this, and that’s what makes them so absolutely riveting.
Albert Mohler:
Professor, I think when I teach moral theology, one of the things I talk about is situations in extremisms. There’s always the temptation to want to redefine morality in extremisms. The honest Christian theologian has to take the situations into full account and honesty, but they still are in extremisms. For instance, when you talk about English literature or Shakespeare, every horrible thing that you could imagine in Russia or in the Soviet Union, in all likelihood happened somewhere, the same extremity, but not as official policy, not as an enduring ideological movement, not as the norm.
The haunting thing to me, and this is part of why reading some of this is morally difficult for me, it’s very heavy, is that the inextremist now becomes the absolutely normal. This is the mundane every day. Every day is just this horrifying.
Gary Saul Morson:
Yeah, it’s why you can imagine some Russian emigres come over and they criticize Western life for not being serious. And they say, “Oh, you just come from a strange. You don’t understand what life is. You come from one of these weird places. You think you know what life is as a reply? You who can’t imagine anything worse than your retirement account falling in value? You think you understand?”
You can see that that was for the reaction, for example, when Solzhenitsyn gave, let’s say, his speech at Harvard. He wasn’t the only one. The closest I can guess would be imagining someone saying that to someone who had survived Auschwitz. People do think that, yes, well, their views are deformed by their unusual experience. Maybe. Maybe in some respects they are, but maybe your views are limited because they haven’t had to confront real evil.
Albert Mohler:
Certainly not in the sense that Russian literature does. I want to turn the tables a little bit. I guess before I do, let me just tell you that one of the things about your book for which I want to express appreciation is that many of the works I have read over a period of lifetime, I’m now 63, I read them 40 years ago or more, 45 years ago when I was a teenager, a young adult, I missed a lot. A part of me wants to go back and reread everything I’ve ever read. I just tell you, that’s not going to happen.
But I can do as much of that as I can. But for instance, as I mentioned, Vasily Grossman in Life and Fate and in some of the Solzhenitsyn works, I think as a young man, I was reading a lot of it to get something out of it and missed a lot of what was there because I was looking for something. And perhaps even more politically, apologetically, philosophically attuned because all these Russian writers give you that.
Gary Saul Morson:
They do.
Albert Mohler:
You see the detail. I appreciate that you made me look at things I hadn’t seen there before.
Gary Saul Morson:
Well, yeah. This is a cliche, of course, but if a literary work that you don’t get a lot more from reading over a few years later, “Okay, I got the message. I’ll just get it again,” it’s not a great literary work. Just like a work where you say, well, its significance is that it shows us, I don’t know, the conditions of factory workers in Victorian England, as people sometimes say about Dickens. Yes. But if that’s all that were, you might as well read a factory surveyor’s report. It’s not what makes it great.
The idea that it can’t be reduced to any message you paraphrase. Although messages are there and that it’s of interest to people who don’t care at all about the circumstances in which it was written, it tells you ultimate truths. I mean, there’s a tendency that I went through as a professional studying Russian that you read some of these great novels and the criticism or the papers of it. Well, you see, this is really an allusion to this event in Soviet history, and this is an allusion to this character.
Very often it’s true. Sometimes the reasoning is for some. But if that’s all it is, who needs it? Yes, that’s there, but that’s not what makes it really important.
Albert Mohler:
Professor, there’s another aspect that I really think needs to be underlined, and you do that wonderfully. This is very much in Tolstoy, also in Dostoevsky, Chekhov, I think, to a lesser degree, but certainly in Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. There is real human joy.
There is real human dignity. There is real human faithfulness. I mean, you certainly see that in the characters. It’s a mother caring for her children who turns out to be the hero of the story, not a czar, not a commissar, nor even her husband who has no idea what a husband’s supposed to do. There are heroes and heroine.
Gary Saul Morson:
The heroine is really Dolly, that mother.
Albert Mohler:
That’s right.
Gary Saul Morson:
She’s not dramatic. And also, there’s a passage in Anna Karenina which doesn’t really fit the plot very much, but it’s so important. It’s about the hero Levin going to peasants to learn how to mow. He experienced this incredible joy where he loses track of time. Today, there’s a psychologist at the University of Chicago who calls this flow, but it’s right there. If you don’t have that kind of experience in life, it’s as if you’ve missed something, the most important thing. In War and Peace, there’s a wonderful scene.
Again, it wouldn’t have to be there for the plot. One of the heroes, not the most dramatic hero, just Nikolai Rostov, who’s an ordinary guy, is home from the war. He’s a soldier and he’s at a wolf hunt. England, they have fox hunts. Russia, they have wolf hunts. He and his dogs, he’s on his horse lying and he’s begging God that the wolf will come. “Oh Lord, I know it’s a sin to ask this, but make the wolf come my way and let my dog cry and get her by the throat.” And then the wolf appears.
The greatest happiness had come to him without any pump or fanfare, and he doesn’t even know what happened. He starts riding after it. What happened, when you’re so focused, you’re not deciding to ride. And then it looks like the dog is going to fail. The wolf’s going to get away, but the dog finally catches the wolf. There’s this amazing sentence, that moment when and describes in enormous detail how the dog has him by the throat and the wolf has his ears laid back and tearing his leg and it goes on and on and on.
That moment was the happiest moment of Nikolai Rostov’s life. Now, you want to say, how do you know? But isn’t it true that would be the source of one’s happiest moment? The crucial thing about it is that you are so wrapped up in the moment you wouldn’t remember it. Because if you remember it, part of you is not wrapped up. The happiest moments of your life is probably one you can’t recall. That’s a really interesting observation, and yet it would look sort of like this.
Now, I don’t know any other writer who would give you not just the horrors of things, but that unbelievably intense happiness that you get there. That’s also in Russian literature.
Albert Mohler:
Someone told me years ago about you and your teaching at Northwestern. Someone said to me, he knew that hundreds and hundreds of freshmen were trying to sign up for your class in Russian literature, and there had to be some reason. He said, one of the things that you deal with in the class, which 18-year-olds, young men and young women, are desperate to know is that love is real.
Can you expand on that just a moment? Because we’ve talked about all the darkness here. I mean, those hundreds of teenagers are trying to get into your class because they want to know that love is real.
Gary Saul Morson:
It’s not just that it’s real, it’s that it’s one word for many different things. There are different kinds of love. There’s the love that Anna Karenina chooses, the love of the troubadours, or Romeo and Juliet, the great romantic passion, which is incompatible with daily life, and then this family love, which is completely different. You can’t have both at the same time. In the classic European, the romantic heroine marries and finds it very boring. It’s not like Romans, so he goes off having an affair.
Quite so much adultery in the European novel, but family love isn’t trying for the most intense experience. The most meaningful experience is an ordinary prosaic one. That’s a different kind of love. The love of being a good mother, a good parent is very different from the love that’s in the Hollywood romance. Both are real, but they’re very different. You must choose. When they see that, I think that helps them sort out their values, which they want.
Sometimes I’ve occasionally gotten students to bring their parents to class, and more than once I’ve had after class a mother come up and thank me for my lecture for showing what’s so important about motherhood. Well, it wasn’t me, it was Tolstoy. I was paraphrasing it. If you’re looking for a truly romanticized image of life, oh, well, being a mother, it’s kind of boring. Not for Tolstoy. It’s the most important thing in the world. The students get to see, okay, there’s this love. There’s more loves than that. There’s the love which of Dolly’s husband, which is basically just pleasure.
There’s several types of love, but they get concrete pictures of what a life devoted to each of them is, and then they can make a more informed choice. It doesn’t tell them what choice to make, but it lets them see what’s at stake, so they’re not stumbling blind. Well, I’m supposed to marry who I love, but love can be more than one thing. Marry who you love in what way. They begin to think that, oh no, I have to think this through. They have the literature to show them that. That’s what I hope it will do and make them make wiser choices in their life.
Albert Mohler:
Professor, you’ve been my teacher in Russian literature. And for that, I just want to say thank you. I want to commend the book Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter. Better than the book is the opportunity for the conversation with you, and I want to thank you for joining with me today for Thinking in Public.
Gary Saul Morson:
Well, thank you so much for having me. It was a delight. Thank you.
Albert Mohler:
Many thanks to my guest, Professor Gary Saul Morrison, for thinking with me today. If you enjoyed today’s episode of Thinking in Public, you will find more than 185 of these conversations at albertmohler.com under the tab, Thinking in Public.
For information on the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College, just go to boycecollege.com.
Thank you for joining me for Thinking in Public.
And until next time, keep thinking.