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. “[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.” ― Boyd Tonkin , 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 “Morson’s special gift is to present Russian literature as an endlessly renewable source of revelation.” ― Bob Blaisdell , Los Angeles Review of Books “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.” ― Lee Trepanier , Public Discourse “ 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.” ― Joseph Epstein , Washington Free Beacon “ Wonder Confronts Certainty is a magnificent book, equally valuable as a work of scholarship and a meditation on the timeless urgency of reading.” ― Richard Hughes Gibson , Hedgehog Review “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.” ― Vladimir Golstein , Claremont Review of Books “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.” ― Jessica Hooten Wilson , Current “Will likely be [Morson’s] magnum opus…He is at the