Wonder Confronts Certainty

By Gary Saul Morson,

Book cover of Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter

Book description

A noted literary scholar traverses the Russian canon, exploring how realists, idealists, and revolutionaries debated good and evil, moral responsibility, and freedom.

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…

When you buy books, we may earn a commission that helps keep our lights on (or join the rebellion as a member).

Why read it?

1 author picked Wonder Confronts Certainty as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

In this book, literary theorist Gary Saul Morson describes the competing ways in which Russian ideologues and novelists answered the “timeless questions” about human nature, fate, and politics. Morson’s analysis clearly shows that novelists and poets allow for much more complexity and nuance in their worldviews than ideologues. The famous Russian writers, in other words, appear to excel in the type of open-minded thinking that I argue is conducive to liberal democratic values.

By reading Morson’s book, one sees clearly the importance of Russia’s literary traditions and how their works inform an open-minded outlook on the timeless questions of human…

If you love Wonder Confronts Certainty...

Ad

Book cover of Tap Dancing on Everest: A Young Doctor's Unlikely Adventure

Tap Dancing on Everest by Mimi Zieman,

Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.

The team attempts a new route up…

Want books like Wonder Confronts Certainty?

Our community of 12,000+ authors has personally recommended 100 books like Wonder Confronts Certainty.

Browse books like Wonder Confronts Certainty

Book cover of How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence
Book cover of Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life
Book cover of How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

Share your top 3 reads of 2024!

And get a beautiful page showing off your 3 favorite reads.

1,996

readers submitted
so far, will you?

Ad

📚 If you like Wonder Confronts Certainty, you might also like...

Norman Mailer at 100 by Robert J. Begiebing,

Book cover of Norman Mailer at 100: Conversations, Correlations, Confrontations

Winner of the Robert F. Lucid Award for Mailer Studies.

Celebrating Mailer's centenary and the seventy-fifth publication of The Naked and the Dead, the book illustrates how Mailer remains a provocative presence in American letters.

From the debates of the nation's founders, to the revolutionary traditions of western romanticism,…

Harry and Arthur by Lawrence J. Haas,

Book cover of Harry and Arthur: Truman, Vandenberg, and the Partnership That Created the Free World

With Franklin Roosevelt’s death in April 1945, Vice President Harry Truman and Senator Arthur Vandenberg, the Republican leader on foreign policy, inherited a world in turmoil. With Europe flattened and the Soviets emerging as America’s new adversary, Truman and Vandenberg built a tight, bipartisan partnership at a bitterly partisan time…

5 book lists we think you will like!

Interested in Russia, philosophy, and intellectual?

Russia 390 books
Philosophy 1,820 books
Intellectual 29 books