Prosaics and Russian literature : moral mastery

In this volume, Gary Saul Morson describes Russian literature as a unique blend of unsettling philosophical ideas and formal experiments. Because critics have downplayed the strangeness those ideas, his essays on Gogol, Turgenev, Chekhov, and Tolstoy contrast them with our own ways of thinking.

Translators need to understand these masterpieces not just as linguistics samples but as literature.

Dostoevsky's novels exemplify disturbing ideas that should shock as well as inspire.

As critics have muted his challenge to psychological and philosophical orthodoxies, they engage in "negative apologetics" regarding his more repellent views.

Readers will, perhaps, be most provoked by Morson's recreation of the hostile dialogue between the Russian intelligentsia and great Russian writers.

Their interactions shape classical Russian thought and still influence debate about politics, art, and the "accursed questions."