The Russian literary tradition, especially the realist novel associated with Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, made signal contributions to the self-understanding of modern man. This owes to the fact that its deepest subject is nothing less than the human soul and the “timeless questions” that confront all self-aware human beings. As the distinguished Slavist Gary Saul Morson establishes in his wise and authoritative Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter, this tradition, while hardly uniform in its approaches and emphases, forcefully challenges what we might call the Enlightenment Vulgate.¹

Against historical and sociological determinism, Russian literature defended the free will of human beings and illustrated the drama of good and evil that played out in every human soul. Against a facile faith in progress, it reminded modern men and women that material progress is hardly coextensive with moral advancement, that “man does not live by bread alone.” Against utopians and incipient totalitarians impatient to “engineer” the human condition out of existence, it defended decency and self-restraint, and, in some cases at least, taught deference to a providential God, however mysterious his presence might be. As Morson eloquently puts it, the great Russian novelists “rendered moral questions palpable, urgent, and bafflingly complex” without succumbing to the fashionable disdain for the old moral verities. In the pages of the realist novel, young and old alike engaged in disputations about God and immortality, free will and determinism, and utopia and dystopia.

Human beings