Gary Saul Morson

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...

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 nowhere else. In this wide-ranging meditation, Gary Saul Morson delineates...