Walter C. Clemens, Jr. Boston University, Profess
Walter C. Clemens, Jr. Boston University, Profess
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Walter C. Clemens, Jr. Boston University, Professor Emeritus
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Walter C. Clemens, Jr. Boston University, Profess
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Walter C. Clemens, Jr. Boston University, Profess
If God does not exist, are good and evil just human constructs? To understand the essence
of human life, should we explore ordinary or extreme conditions? Exploring apologies for
bloodshed, Morson adapts Mikhail Bakunin’s concept of the non-alibi—that no one can escape
responsibility for ...
An Interdisciplinary Journal
http://www.netsoljournal.net/
Volume 9, Issue 1, pp.60-63, Spring 2024
https://doi.org/10.24819/netsol2024.6
Date Submitted: January 22, 2024 Date Accepted: May 10, 2024
Book Review
Gary Saul Morson, Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless
Questions and Why Their Answers Matter, Cambridge MA: Harvard University
Press, 2023.
Key Words: Russia, Russian Literature, World Literature, Russian History
Walter C. Clemens, Jr.
Boston University, Professor Emeritus
Here is a nearly 500-page book that concerns not only Russian but world literature; not
only writers, such as Dostoevsky and Chekhov, but political agents, such as Lenin and Stalin; not
only the wonder evoked by many Russian authors, but also persistent efforts to find certainty in
answers to the big questions about the meaning of life, good and evil, and human freedom versus
determinism.
Morson holds an endowed chair in Slavic languages and literatures at Northwestern
University where his introduction to Russian literature draws five hundred students each year. He
and university president Morton Schapiro co-teach a course called “Economics and the
Humanities: Understanding Choice in the Past, Present and Future.”
Wonder Confronts Certainty is dense. It refers to hundreds of Russian and other authors,
mostly from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, analyzing how each of them dealt with the big
questions. Morson’s timeless questions include: What cannot theory account for? Ethics and
materialism—what is not to be done? The search for an alibi—who is not to blame for what has
gone wrong? The trouble with happiness—what does not it all mean?
walter.clemens@gmail.com
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