Exploring Russian Literature's Modern Impact

Good afternoon. My name is David Azaran. I'm the director of the B. Kenneth Simon Center for Principles and Politics here at the Heritage Foundation, and I'd like to welcome you to one of our two annual Russell Kirk Lectures. At the end of Plato's Republic, Socrates famously speaks of an old quarrel between poetry and philosophy. Socrates thinks that the poets, by which he means all those who tell stories, which today would include playwrights, novelists and writers, that they harm the thought of those who hear them. The poets in turn dismiss the philosophers for being great in the empty eloquence of fools. Now, Socrates famously won the quarrel in the Republic by banishing the poets. But with the advent of modernity, both philosophy and poetry were banished by a new, mightier foe, science. Today, it rules supreme over the minds and souls of men. It alone presumes to explain to us the world we live in. As such, serious people, especially serious people of the modern age, in Washington, D.C., take neither philosophy nor poetry seriously. But if for a moment we ignore the dizzying array of material wonders brought forth by our science, and if we instead ask ourselves, what do we really know about what it means to be human? How well do we understand our regime? Then the limitations of our scientific worldview become manifest. For what can economics be? really teach us about courage? What does psychology know about genuine love? What does sociology have to say about the family? Very little that matters, it seems. The deepest questions, the human questions, are either ignored by our sciences or answered in superficial ways. Philosophy and poetry, or what we today call literature, may still have something to teach us after all. Now, I don't propose to reopen the quarrel between philosophy and poetry today, much less to settle it. But I have invited Gary Saul Morson to open our eyes to what Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, and the other giants of Russian literature may have to teach us, not about 19th century Russia, but about the world we live in today. For the questions they grappled with, questions about the problems of nihilism and materialism, the possibility of love and modernity, still confront us. Professor Morson teaches Russian literature at Northwestern University, where he's the Lawrence B. Dumas Professor of the Arts and the Humanities. His work ranges over a variety of subjects, including Russian and European thought, literary theory, and his favorite writers, Chekhov, Gogol, and above all, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. He's the author of several books, including... one in particular that is very dear to my heart, Anna Karenina in Our Time, Seeing More Wisely, which is one of the best academic books I've ever read in my life, although I hesitate to call it an academic book because it's so well written and insightful. His introduction to Russian literature class at Northwestern regularly attracts more than 500 students, making it one of the most popular elective classes there. We've invited him to the Heritage Foundation to give a talk on what Russian literature can teach conservatives. Please join me in welcoming Gary Selmorson. Thank you, David, and I am really truly honored to be here. The title of this talk, you'll see why later, is called Pray for Chekhov. It's in, you won't hear me, it's in 10 parts, and I I tell you that so that at any point you'll know how much more you have to sift through. It begins with an opening quotation from a Russian critic and philosopher writing in 1909 who wrote, The surest gauge of the greatness of a Russian writer is the extent of his hatred for the intelligentsia. Part one is called The Argument. I propose to recount a century-long argument with great relevance today. As my epigraph suggests, it pits the great Russian writers against the intelligentsia. Think of it as Trotsky versus Tolstoy, Lenin versus Dostoevsky, Bakunin versus Chekhov. We Americans have our intelligentsia, which increasingly resembles the classic Russian one, but we do not have anything like Russian literature with which to oppose it. We need to be able to understand the reality of the world. need to enrich our thinking if we are to avoid the Russian outcome of 99 years ago. Russia made two enormous contributions to the world. Though never good at physical technology, it devised the world's most influential political technology, which we have come to call totalitarianism. In 1999, Time magazine proclaimed Einstein the man of the century, the person who, quote, for better or worse, most influenced the last 100 years. But Einstein did not remotely affect so many lives as Lenin. Russia's other enormous contribution was its literature. Part two is called Slavery Romantics. Russian appreciation of literature has no rival. I can compare it only to the way the Hebrew Bible must have seemed when books could still be added to it. For Russians, the canon was and is sacred. Not only did literature represent life, as Westerners presume, but you could say that life existed to provide material for literature. When Tolstoy's Anna Karenina was being serialized, Dostoevsky enthused, at the end of one portion, that at last the existence of the Russian people had been justified. Can anyone imagine a Frenchman supposing that the existence of the French people required justification? And if it did, that it could be justified by a novel? When the writer Karolienko, who was half Ukrainian, was asked his nationality, he replied, my homeland is Russian literature. In her recent Nobel Prize acceptance speech of 2015, Svetlana Alexeevich echoed this comment by claiming three homelands. Her father's Belarus, her mother's Ukraine, and Russian literature. Like the poet Anna Akhmatova, she thought of literature as a people's equivalent of an individual's memory, without which a person or a culture is demented. Alexeyevich writes, I quote, Flaubert called himself a human pen. I would say that I am a human ear. When I walk down the street and catch words, phrases, and exclamations, I always think, how many novels disappear without a trace? Like the great novelist Alexeyevich's thought of life as the secret thoughts and feelings of individual souls which live in literature. So here is where the argument is joined. Is life a matter of grand politics or individual souls? And can it be captured in a theory, or is there always what Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin called a surplus exceeding the grasp of any conceivable theory? The intelligentsia believed in theories and crises. The novelists in the complexities of ordinary prosaic experience. So the intelligentsia was ready to sacrifice or enslave individuals who did not really matter to achieve their utopia. Alexeyevich refers to such people as, quote, slavery romantics, slaves of utopia. Alexeyevich quotes Varlam Shalamov, the Gulag's second most famous chronicler, who declared, quote, I was a participant in a colossal battle, a battle that was lost. for the genuine renewal of humanity, unquote. Alexeibus herself then continues, quote, and I reconstruct the history of that battle, its victories and its defeats, the history of how people wanted to build the heavenly kingdom on earth, paradise, the city of the sun. In the end, all that remained was a sea of blood, millions of ruined lives. There was a time, however, when no political idea of the 20th century was comparable to communism or the October Revolution as its symbol, a time when nothing attracted Western intellectuals and people all around the world more powerfully and emotionally. Raymond Aron called the Russian Revolution the opium of the intellectuals, end of quote. Today, that opium calls itself social justice. Alexeyevich insists... that we must not forget what socialism for all its aspirations meant in practice, quote, because arguments about socialism have not died down. A new generation has grown up with a different picture of the world, but many young people are reading Marx and Lenin again, unquote. On American campuses, there's no need to say again. Part three is called, Why Tolstoy Did Not Belong to the Intelligentsia. We get the word intelligentsia in English from Russian, where it was coined about 1860. In its strict sense, the Russian word meant something very different from what its English counterpart now means. It was not synonymous with intellectuals, well-educated people, or least of all, those who value independent thought. In any given society, well-educated people might or might not resemble an intelligentsia in the Russian sense. My fear is that in America, they increasingly do resemble it. To be an intelligent, that's a member of the intelligentsia, one had to satisfy three criteria which most educated people, including the great novelists, did not. First of all, an intelligent had to share a set of radical beliefs. There was no such thing as a conservative or moderate intelligent. Required beliefs varied from generation to generation, but in the classic period, they always included materialism, atheism, some form of socialism or anarchism, and revolutionism, by which was meant not a belief in revolution as a means, but as something valuable in itself. The terrorists are gay. Zayn al-Chayyaf's Catechism of a Revolutionary explains that one is not a true revolutionary quote, if one feels compassion for something in this world, unquote. Note the language here. Catechism. This world. Revolutionism was a substitute for religion, like I suppose environmentalism today. Dostoevsky once observed that Russians do not become atheists. They convert to atheism. The prototypical Intelligent was in fact either the child of a priest or a former student in a Russian Orthodox seminary. And so, in the Classic period, calling someone a seminarian was the equivalent of calling him a red. Ex-seminarians included the classic age's most influential figure, Nicholas Chernyshevsky and later, Joseph Stalin One reason no one would have considered Tolstoy an intelligent is that he believed in God Second, an intelligent had to identify primarily as an intelligent. Leave everything, abandon father and mother, and follow us. If you thought of yourself as a nobleman, a doctor, or a family man who just happened to be well-educated, you were not an intelligent. That is another reason no one would have called Tolstoy, who used his title of count, an intelligent. Chekhov particularly hated what he called this artificial overwrought solidarity because it entailed not thinking but repeating orthodoxies. I quote from Chekhov, Yes, our young ladies in political bows are pure souls, but nine-tenths of their pure souls aren't worth a damn. interactive sanctity and purity are based on hazy and naive sympathies and antipathies to individuals and labels, not to facts. It's easy to be pure when you hate the devil you don't know, and love the God you wouldn't have enough brains to doubt. Unquote. Does it sound familiar? Third, an intelligent embraced a particular lifestyle. In the 1860s and 70s, this entailed a rigid code of anti-manners, prescribing behavior formerly regarded as sordid. Chernyshevsky came by his lower-class manners honestly, but they became a model. Aristocrats took lessons in anti-refinement. Women just had to smoke. When Dostoevsky was looking to get remarried, he had trouble finding a woman who was well-educated, but not a radical. Once, to satisfy a deadline for producing a novel, he in desperation hired a graduate of Russia's new stenography school in order to dictate a novel, as it occurred to him. At their first meeting, he offered the stenographer a cigarette, but she declined. declined. Dostoevsky thought, if she doesn't smoke, perhaps she believes in God. In fact, she did, and that is how Dostoevsky met his second wife. Today we have our own ever-changing virtue signaling. Part 4 is called Little Napoleons. Behind these criteria lay a set of assumptions too obvious to be articulated. One, one had to argue for one or another theory. but not for theory, meaning theory of everything itself. Theory itself, as an explanation of everything, that was a given. One reason Marxism proved so appealing was its ambitious claim to resolve all contradictions. Think of Marx's assertion that, quote, communism is the solution of the riddle of history and knows itself to be the solution, unquote. No theory claiming... much less could appeal to Russian intelligence. Or if it did, it was habitually transformed into something all-explanatory, a habit of transformation that Dostoevsky called, quote, the Russian aspect of European doctrines, unquote. Here's how Dostoevsky explains that. It consists of those inferences from those doctrines, which in the form of unshakable axioms are drawn only in Russia, whereas in Europe, the possibility of such seductions is not even suspected, unquote. Or as Dostoevsky remarked elsewhere, a Russian intelligent is someone who can read Darwin and promptly resolve to become a pickpocket. If theory rules, then theorists must rule. The intelligents shared what Thomas Sowell has called the vision of the anointed. This is the key criterion without which a group cannot be anointed. intelligentsia in the Russian sense. Let every other intelligentsia belief change, Dostoevsky insisted, but the belief in themselves as saviors would remain. Raskolnikov, the hero of crime and punishment, invokes several contradictory theories to justify murdering an old prawn broker. First, he invokes utilitarianism. Just calculate, on one side is an old woman, sure to die soon anyway, whose life is worth, quote, no more than a cockroach, unquote. Less, in fact, since she does positive harm. On the other side, hundreds of lives that might be saved by her money. Quote, one death and a hundred lives in exchange. It's simple arithmetic, unquote. Not only is it moral to kill her, it would be immoral not to. But Raskolnikov also invokes radical relativism, which, unlike utilitarianism, denies any foundation for morality. Morality, he muses, quote, is all artificial terrors, and there are no barriers, and it's all as it should be, unquote, because the world understood naturalistically has only it. is not ought. There is no should be. Raskolnikov voices still more justifications for murder, but the one underlying them all is his Napoleonic theory. The world is divided into two sorts of people, the many ordinary and the few extraordinary. Ordinary people are conservative. They uphold tradition and the ancient law. They are people of the present, quote, mere material that serves only to reproduce its kind, unquote. Extraordinary people like Lycurgus, Solon, and Napoleon are men of the future who bring a new word. They are necessarily criminals. because the mere fact that they create a new law makes them violators of the old. They have the right, indeed the obligation, to do whatever their idea requires. Quote Raskolnikov, I maintain that if the discoveries of Kepler and Newton could not have been made known except by sacrificing the lives of one, a dozen, a hundred or more men, Newton would have had the right, would indeed have been duty-bound, to eliminate the dozen or hundred men, unquote. The Bolsheviks also required murder as not just permitted, but morally required. for Raskolnikov even men a little out of the common as he puts it must be criminals in this way this point is crucial because it allows for a group of special people not just one a century like Napoleon that group is the intelligentsia to appreciate how long lived is this idea of most people as mere material think of the frequent reference among western intellectuals to the Soviet experience experiment. A tacit justification of the revolution even though it didn't turn out as hoped. One experiments on mere material, not human beings like oneself. A true social scientist, Raskolnikov maintains that the exact number of extraordinary people must be governed by a natural law, which one could presumably discover. Quote, there certainly is and must be a definite law. It cannot be a matter of chance, unquote. It cannot be a matter of chance because for the social scientist, nothing is. Any more than there can be such a thing as free will. If something is governed by law, then everything is. Raskolnikov's sister replies with horror, quote, What is truly original in all this is that you sanction bloodshed in the name of conscience, and excuse my saying so with such fanaticism. That sanction of bloodshed by conscience is to my mind more terrible than the official legal sanction of bloodshed, unquote. Why more terrible? Bloodshed is bloodshed, isn't it? Look ahead to Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, where he asks why Macbeth killed only a few people while Lenin and Stalin murdered many. millions? The answer, he says, is that Shakespeare's villains had no ideology. I quote, ideology, that is what gives the evil doer the necessary steadfastness and determination. the social theory which helps to make his act seem good instead of bad in his own and others'eyes so that he won't hear reproaches and curses and receive praises and honors, unquote. If ideology applies everywhere, then, to quote Sergei Nechayev, the terrorist, quote, everything that promotes the revolution is moral, everything that hinders it is immoral. Lenin and Trotsky maintained, it is not just that the party never makes mistakes. Rather, whatever the party does is right because the party does it. The agent of history with a capital H itself, the party's actions are moral by definition. It follows that compassion to class enemies must be immoral. We teach children to overcome their natural selfishness, but the Soviets taught them to overcome their natural compassion, which might stay their hand from killing a class enemy. One valued not the bourgeois notion of human rights, which includes everyone, but class interest. As the novelist Vasily Grossman explained, what race was to the Nazis, class, that is the one you were born into, was to the Soviets. To refrain from torture, Trotsky declared, was, quote, the most pathetic and miserable liberal prejudice, unquote. In 1918, the founder of the Soviet secret police, Felix Dzerzhinsky, published an article in the journal Red Terror, I didn't make that up, in which he instructed, quote, we are not waging war against individual persons. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. During the investigation, do not look for evidence that the accused acted in deed or word against Soviet power. The first questions that you ought to put are, to what class does he belong? What is his origin? What is his education or profession? And it is these questions that ought to determine the fate of the accused, unquote. Like morality, truth is by definition what the party says it is. Georgy Pyatikov, who was twice expelled from the party and eventually shot, wrote that a true Bolshevik is, quote, ready to believe, not just to assert, that black is white and white is black, if the party required it, unquote. In 1984, you'll recall, O'Brien proclaims this very doctrine. Two plus two is really five, if the party says it is. which he calls collective solipsism. There are no limits. This is what the rule of theorists ultimately means. So let me lay my cards on the table. To the extent that a group of intellectuals comes to resemble an intelligentsia, to that extent is totalitarianism on the horizon. should that group gain power. That, not Swedish-style social democracy, is what I see happening here. I foresee, in years rather than decades, first a Putin-style managed democracy, and soon after, a Stalinist state. Or rather, one beyond Stalinism, since Stalin did not have access to today's monitoring technology. My scientist friends tell me we are on the verge of reading people's thoughts. from the outside. That would make 1984 a libertarian paradise. And now for the pessimistic part of my paper. Part 5 is called Equality. So far as I know, the only 19th century thinker to foresee totalitarianism was Dostoevsky. The reason he could, I think, is that he deeply understood the mentality of the intelligentsia and what it would do with power. Unlike Tolstoy, he had been a radical intelligent and recognized what he himself might have been willing to do. In one article, he refuted the idea common among conservatives that young radicals are simply idle and undeveloped people, as one journal put it. On the contrary, Dostoevsky declares, quote, I am myself an old Nechayevist. I myself stood on the scaffold condemned to death, and I assure you that I stood in the company of educated people. And therein, he says, lies the real horror that in Russia one can commit the foulest and most villainous act without being in the least a villain. The possibility of considering oneself, and sometimes even being, in fact, an honorable person while committing obvious and undeniable villainy, that is our whole affliction, unquote. And I might add, it's ours today. The villain in Dostoevsky's novel The Possessed, Pyotr Stepanovich, who was modeled loosely on the terrorist Nechayev, outlines his plans, which come amazingly close to what actually happened either in Russia, China, or Cambodia. He endorses the theory of one Shigaliov who famously declares, it may be the most famous line from the novel, quote, I am perplexed by my own data and my conclusion is a direct contradiction of the original idea with which I start. Starting from unlimited... freedom, I arrive at absolute despotism. I will add, however, that there can be no solution of the social problem but mine. Unquote. It is thinking we recognize. Deny any limit on individual, especially sexual morality, and then repress anyone who thinks differently. Far from being incompatible, the two go hand in hand. Shigulyov demands, quote, the division of mankind into two unequal parts. One-tenth enjoys unbounded power over the other nine-tenths. The others have to give up all individuality and become, so to speak, a herd, and through boundless submission will, by a series of regenerations, attain primeval innocence. They'll have to work, however, unquote. Another revolutionary objects that it would be better to take the nine-tenths and, quote, blow them up into the air instead of putting them into paradise. I'd only leave a handful of educated people who would live happily ever after on scientific principles, unquote. At last, Protas-Tapanovich endorses a proposal to cut off, quote, a hundred million heads. At the time, that sounded like sheer absurdity. But if you know Stepan Kortois'anthology of experts, The Black Book of Communism, that estimates, rather conservatively, that very total for communist killings worldwide. Is it any wonder Russian writers are considered prophets? Pyotr Stepanovich promises, quote, a system of spying. Every member of society spies on every other, and it's his duty to inform against them, end quote. Just as Stalin was to require. The boy Pavel Morozov was made a national Soviet hero for turning in his parents. We already have campuses where students are encouraged, sometimes required, if they have an honor code, to turn each other in if they hear expressions of bias. Pyotr Stepanovich's new society's key principle is to be absolute equality, which requires a complete suppression of individuality or great talent. Quote, Cicero will have his tongue cut out, Copernicus will have his eyes put out, Shakespeare will be stoned, unquote. Did Pol Pot know this novel? Even before achieving power, the intelligentsia offended great writers because it restricted art to political propaganda, assuming art should exist at all. Quote, boots are more important than Shakespeare, became a slogan. Art was suspect because it claimed to reveal the human soul, but the very idea of the soul was retrograde. Everyone knew the materialist saying that the brain secretes thought the way the liver secretes bile. In the early 1860s, the physiologist Ivan Sechenov, that was Pavlov's mentor, by the way, published his influential book, Reflexes of the Brain, which outlines a neurological explanation of consciousness. Dmitri Karamazov paraphrases the theory, what people used to call the soul is really so many neurons with their tails quivering. With the smallest change in wording, that theory is, of course, prevalent today. But I'm sorry to lose God, Dmitri concludes. Part six is called The Pursuit of Happiness. The Russian novel is known, above all, for psychology. What is less often appreciated is that in showing the complexity of the psyche, the novelists were making a polemical point. The intelligentsia denied that people were complex at all. Human complexity was an idea hindering radical action. action. Like Jeremy Bentham and mainstream economists today, Chernyshevsky insisted in his novel What Is To Be Done, a book that became the intelligentsia's bible, that everyone always does and should act according to their greatest advantage. Dostoevsky's notes from underground parodies Chernyshevsky's book by re-narrating its incidents as they might actually happen to people with real psychology. The underground man appeals to empiricism, which presumably a scientist should respect. No one actually observing human behavior could presume it is simple or rational. What is more, people, unlike molecules, can know the laws that supposedly govern their behavior and act to thwart them, a possibility that forever rules out a Newtonian account of human beings. What a person values most of all is that her action should be her own, that she is not just a piano key or an organ stop played upon by impersonal laws, that her choices could have been different and therefore matter. Rather than give up that sense of self, the underground man insists, people will act spitefully, meaning against their self-interest, just to prove that they are not piano keys or organ stops. If a rationalist utopia could ever be achieved, if everything were provided for one without effort, and if the laws of nature and society could show the future in advance, then life would become pointless. As Dostoevsky himself observed, in one of his articles, quote, people would see then that they had no more life left, that they had no freedom of spirit, no will, no personality. People would realize that there is no happiness in inactivity, that it is not possible to love one's neighbor without sacrificing something to him of one's labor, and that happiness lies not in happiness, but only in the attempt to achieve it, unquote. Part 7 is called The Surplus of Humanness. All the great realists, not just Russians, were master psychologists. From Jane Austen to Henry James, the genre of the realist novel depicts people as individuals who cannot be reduced to abstract categories. I begin where all categories, social or even psychological, that could account for me end. Mikhail Bakhtin, who argued that genres embody implicit philosophical assumptions, concluded that realist novels presuppose the irreducibility of individuals to abstractions. People have what he called a surplus of humanness, and here's the famous quotation. An individual cannot be completely incarnated into the flesh of existing socio-historical categories. There is no mere form that would be able to contain once and forever all his human possibilities. No form that he could fill to the very brim and yet at the same time not spill over the brim. There always remains an unrealized surplus of humanness. The difference between Russian and European novels is that Russian novels make this assumption explicit. Russians regard novels as another and superior form of philosophy. Westerners typically regard novelists as illustrating truths learned from some philosopher or social scientist. And so Proust is read as applied Bergson, Stern as enlivened Locke, and Jane Austen as illustrated Thomas Reed. But all one has to do is compare the philosopher's psychological theory with the great novelistic heroine, and it is plain that George Eliot must have known something no philosopher ever did. Otherwise, philosophers would have produced portraits of people as believable as Dorothea Brooke. But no philosopher or social scientist has ever come close. When this failure becomes obvious, Westerners typically resort to the idea Freud uses in his essay on Dostoevsky. With condescending indulgence to a brilliant, if sloppy, mind, he presented the author of Karamazov as grasping merely intuitively deep truths that only superior thinkers like Freud himself could articulate explicitly. But this is even more absurd. Dostoevsky's characters, not just the bookish underground man, but even the brawling Dmitri Karamazov, deliver long speeches about the mind, so that one could more readily fault Dostoevsky for too much explicit articulation. Russians view their novelists not as illustrators, but as discoverers, with the philosophers lagging after to provide what Bakhtin called a partial but always inadequate transcription. of novelistic wisdom. For Bakhtin, that is the proper role of the critic, which is one reason so many philosophers, including Bakhtin himself, presented their ideas as explications of great writers. Bakhtin understood that the ideas he transcribed from Dostoevsky continued his argument with intelligentsia ideologues, now, in Bakhtin's time, represented by the Bolshevik regime. Part 8 is called Jones. So here is one lesson of Russian literature. There can never be a social science, if by that term we mean a discipline modeled on the hard sciences. The Russian writers were reviving a tradition in eclipse since the 17th century, when the idea took hold that any respectable discipline must resemble Euclidean geometry or, after Newton, physics. For the great rationalists and their heirs, real knowledge was theoretical, ideally mathematical, and all specific events were the mere consequence of the laws theory discovers. To the extent you need a narrative rather than laws to explain things, to that extent you fall short of scientific status. Real sciences don't tell stories. By the 19th century, this moral Newtonian, as Elie Halevy famously called it, became a mania, and not just with Marxists and social Darwinists. Before August Comte coined the term sociology, he planned to call his new discipline social physics. And Leon Walrus, a founder of modern economics, based his idea of equilibrium on the stability of the solar system. He even sought the endorsement of the day's greatest mathematician, Henri Poincaré. Even Freud found himself adopting hydraulic metaphors of the mind and claiming not just that some acts of forgetting are intentional, but that all are, since what sort of natural law admits of exceptions? But there is another tradition of thought, extending from Aristotle to Montaigne and Tolstoy. which holds that reality demands two types of reasoning. In addition to theoretical reasoning, Aristotle's episteme, we need practical reasoning, what he called phronesis. Like geometry, theory offers truths that are universal, precise, without exception, and timeless. One reasons from the theory down to the specific examples it subsumes. For the alternative tradition, some questions demand reasoning up from particular cases. Aristotle cites clinical disciplines like medicine. One does not want a physician whose only interest in one's illness is its potential contributions to science. No good doctor is ever just an applied biologist. He uses everything he knows, theory and untheorized experience, to devise a treatment for this patient and at this moment. Kindliness matters, except of course in the Department of Veterans Affairs, as it doesn't in geometry. The same holds true for ethical issues. If one reasons down from general rules, one will often wind up with monstrous answers, Aristotle notes, because rules are formulated with a paradigm case in mind, but real situations may differ in significant ways that cannot be foreseen. Then one must use judgment, which by definition cannot be formalized. Good judgment grows out of experience, mistakes, and reflection upon mistakes. A process yielding not theoretical knowledge, but practical wisdom. That is why, as Aristotle observes, young men can be good mathematicians, but not good ethicists, which requires long experience. Practical wisdom yields answers that are, to use Aristotle's favorite phrase, true on the whole and for the most part. Now, anyone who described the Pythagorean theorem as true on the whole and for the most part... would demonstrate he did not grasp what mathematical reasoning is. But by the same token, anyone who sought quasi-mathematical solutions to ethical problems would be just as wrong-headed. Marx's enemy, the Russian socialist Alexander Herzl, argued that there are no definitive solutions to social problems, that history has no aim, and that, quote, as he put it, there is no libretto. In history, all is improvisation. All is extemporary. The answers given by practical reasoning are always tentative, open to revision, depending on circumstances. That is why one never gives all power to anyone committed to a single answer, but allows for critics to point out failures. If not at Yale, then at least at the University of Chicago. In ethics, the tradition reasoning up... from cases is called casuistry, and the fact that the term is now pejorative suggests how thoroughly the theoretical view triumphed. Casuists use rules in the sense of rules of thumb, which serve as mere reminders of particular sorts of cases, the beginning but not the end of an argument. When the theoretical tradition triumphed, casuistry was banished from philosophy, but it found a home in the novel. Daniel Defoe began his career writing casuistical advice columns, you know, Dear Abby sort of things, and the cases he invented gradually grew in length to become novels like Mole Flanders. As a genre, the realist novel is casuistical. It teaches how to derive wisdom from careful consideration of particular, richly described cases. Philosophers still present ethical problems. by briefly sketching a dilemma that occurs to Jones, who was given no biography, lives in no society, and chooses at no particular time. Contrast that with the dilemmas facing Anna Karenina or Dorothea Brooke. Take this as a novelistic dictum. No one is ever Jones. Not even Jones. Again, the... The difference between the Russians and other realist novelists is that the Russians, especially Tolstoy, make the genre's casuistical assumptions explicit. At the end of Anna Karenina, Levin learns to make wise ethical choices not by applying rules, but by acquiring wisdom from particular cases sensitively observed. Bakhtin's early treatises on ethics also explore the ethical limitations of what he called theoretism. Part 9 is called A Good Night's Sleep. Tolstoy's heroes begin believing in theory, but then learn its limitations. In War and Peace, Prince Andrei at first admires the German generals who have purportedly discovered a hard science of warfare, which in this novel stands for any conceivable social science. Before Austerlitz, the generals claim that it is a mathematical certainty that Napoleon will be defeated and that, quote, every contingency has been foreseen, unquote. But when the generals lose, as they do so spectacularly at Austerlitz, they explain that their instructions were not properly carried out, which in battle is always the case. They behave just like economists today, who when predictions fail, say either that the recommendations were applied too cautiously, or that even though they were proven wrong, they have at least now adjusted their theory so that it now accounts for what happened. Like Paul Krugman, they are never wrong. Of course, even astrologers can adjust a theory after the fact to predict what already happened. Prince Andrei learns that a science of human affairs is impossible. He asks, this is a quotation, what science can there be in a matter, as in every practical matter, where nothing can be determined and everything depends on innumerable... conditions, the significance of which becomes manifest at a particular moment and no one can tell when that moment will come. We face tomorrow, he says, a hundred million chances which will be determined on the instant by whether we run or they run, whether this man or that man is killed, unquote. Irreducible chance matters. No one can tell whether a bullet will hit a brave man or a coward capable of infecting others with his cowardice. And timeliness matters. Things are decided on the instant, an instant that is not just the automatic derivative of earlier instance. And what is true of battle is true, quote, of every practical matter. Tolstoy's wise general, Kutuzov, who falls asleep in the Council of War before Austerlitz, at last calls a halt to the discussion. Gentlemen, he says, the disposition for tomorrow cannot be changed, and the most important thing before a battle is, he paused, a good night's sleep, unquote. Why a good night's sleep? Because in a world of radical contingency, where unforeseeable situations arise, rise, and opportunities must be seized instantly or lost. What matters is not theoretical knowledge, but alertness. The last part is called prosaics and indoor socialism. What Andrei fails to learn, but his friend Pierre does, is the insight for which a quarter of a century ago I coined the term prosaics, an idea central to numerous writers, most obviously Tolstoy and Chekhov. Radicals and romantics picture life in terms of dramatic events. The ordinary incidents between crises are viewed as trivial or despised as bourgeois. Tolstoy and Chekhov believed the opposite. Life is lived at ordinary moments, and what is most real is what is barely noticeable, like the tiniest movements of consciousness. Tolstoy observes, the painter Bryulov once corrected a student's sketch. Why, you only touched it a tiny bit, the student remarked, but it is quite a different thing. Brulov replied, art begins where that tiny bit begins. Tolstoy concludes, that saying is strikingly true not only of art, but of all of life. One may say that true life begins where the tiny bit begins, where what seem to us minute and infinitesimally small alterations take place. True life is not lived where great external changes take place, where people move about. Clash, fight, and slay one another. It is lived only where these tiny, tiny, infinitesimally small changes occur, unquote. Tolsoi's novels describe the infinitesimal movements of consciousness, our smallest choices, and the mistakes we instantaneously forget, but which the novel records. And that is one reason his novels are so long. In our brief lives, every instant matters. The Russian novel is so long because life is so short. Tolstoy's wisest heroes learn to see the richness right in front of them, hidden in plain view. Learning this truth, Pierre comes to resemble, I quote the key passage, a man who after straining his eyes to peer into the remote distance finds what he is seeking at his very feet. In everything near and comprehensible, he had seen only what was limited, petty, and meaningless. But now he discarded the mental telescope through which he had been gazing over the heads of men and joyfully surveyed the ever-changing, eternally great, unfathomable, and infinite life around him. In Chekhov, ignoring ordinary experiences is what wastes lives, and such waste is his constant theme. In Uncle Vanya, one character observes, Ivan Petrovich, you are an educated man, and I would think you would understand that the world is being destroyed not by crime and fire, but by all these petty squabbles. Shockingly, Chekhov praised what no intellectual is supposed to respect, bourgeois virtues like cleanliness, ordinary decency, and even paying one's debts. In this spirit, Svetlana Alexeyevich's books orchestrate the voices of countless ordinary people responding microscopically to events historians treat macroscopically. She seeks to capture what she describes as, quote, the history of domestic indoor socialism. the history of how it played out in the human soul. I am drawn to that small space called a human being, a single individual. In reality, that is where everything happens, unquote. She is keenly aware of her debt to the great novelists and their dislike of grand theoretical systems. I quote from her again, it always troubled me that the truth doesn't fit into one mind. That truth is splintered. There is a lot of it. It is varied and it is strewn about the world. Dostoevsky thought that humanity knows much, much more about itself than it is recorded in literature. So what is it that I do? I collect the everyday life of feelings, thoughts, and words. The everyday life of the soul, the thing that the big picture of history usually omits or disdains. These novelistic insights, the existence of sheer contingency, true life as lived in the tiny bit. The openness of time, meaning that what we choose really matters, and the importance of the individual soul, all these insights are closely linked. The ideologues who look down on ordinary people as boors and rednecks, and who put their faith in the abstractions they alone master, will never understand them. They see the world, if viewed through the right lens, as ultimately simple. Unlike Pierre, who comes to appreciate, quote, the endless variety of men's minds which prevents a truth from ever appearing exactly the same to any two persons, unquote. By the novel's end, quote, the legitimate individuality of each person's views now became the basis of the sympathy Pierre felt for other people and the interest he took in them, unquote. My conclusion is brief. We face a choice between the dangerous theory-based uniformity of the intelligentsia and the wise perspective on life espoused by Russian literature. Pray for Chekhov. Thank you. I guess we have time for questions, David, is that right? I think the dichotomy that you drew between the Russian intelligentsia and the Russian novelist is an interesting one. Why in America do we tend to see the artists and the revolutionary on the same team? That's a good question because the artists, second and third rate artists typically are on the same team. Because if you can get praise as an artist by simply providing a ready, readily consumed... package of a received idea. You'll be celebrated as an artist for a generation or less. And those are the artists who, of course, will get the government grants and who will be taught in courses that one of my colleagues calls literature since Tuesday. But surely you would have to, you're not going to put Nathaniel Hawthorne or... Herman Melville into that category, are you? I mean, or God knows Henry James is not going to fit that, right? And those, of course, are the artists, you know, which are easiest to teach in. The literature writers, let's say, are easiest to teach in high school, right? Because they have a very simple message. which is easy to get across and easy to master. And, in fact, it raises the obvious question of why should the students read it at all? Why not just memorize the message? Which the students understand, and that's why I think... literature classes now turn people off literature. They don't give any reason to read it. I mean, if the book is only a message and you can memorize the message without reading the book, why bother? People talk about the decline of the humanities, but I think, you know, the way literature is taught makes student lack of interest in the humanities a rational conclusion. I don't know if that answers your question. Yes. Yeah, in the back there. My question concerns just an explanation for the potential irony of why the intelligentsia with the most elitist view of human affairs most often associate themselves with the most proletarian populist viewpoints, and why they... find success in advocating those viewpoints for a population that they seem to clearly disdain? Well, I mean, the reason they do that is because they disdain them. That is, those people cannot speak for themselves in the assumption. Therefore, we have to speak for them. We represent. They can't very well come out and say, you should believe us because we are advocating our self-interest. They have to say, we are not advocating our self-interest, but the class of the oppressed, we define who the oppressed are, of course, given our theory. And so, you have to be able to... able to do that, right? If you do not despise those people, you would allow them to speak for themselves. But that means that if they speak for themselves, then who are you to speak for them? The two go together, you see. They have to go together, right? If those people who you are speaking for suddenly find a way of speaking for themselves, I don't know, Twitter? positively an insult. It's not just that they're not doing what they're supposed to. It's that they're challenging your role in the world. They're self-image. And that simply can't be allowed. That's why it's really, you know, people get so angry at it. I think that's the connection. You have to describe the oppressed that way, or who you speak to. Yeah, we're back. Just a slightly different angle, thinking of Anton Chekhov, a play like The Cherry Orchard, you've got the old aristocracy who he seems to be critiquing, but also a young revolutionary who he somewhat mocks as well. Are we to infer from that what Chekhov's own politics were, or was he being deliberately ambiguous both in art and in life? I think a mistake would be to assume that what Chekhov is writing about is politics. He's writing about basic questions of human values, of... play about love, about the experience of time, about... And the people who he's going to come out the worst in those plays are the people who see the world either... simplistically like the revolutionary, but not because they're revolutionary, because they see the world simplistically. Or, and this is his most common technique, people who view the world melodramatically. The key thing about all Chekhov's plays is that they are plays of inaction, which is a revolutionary thing to do. I mean, you know, one of the critics remarked that the only thing that happens in The Three Sisters is that Three Sisters do not go to Moscow. and that really is right because in most dramas people who see the world melodramatically are in tune with the universe that the play represents But in Czechoslovakia, they're ridiculous. If you make grand speeches like Uncle Vanya, right? If you are one of those characters who says, you know, goes around like some yoni of the Three Sisters who says, hmm, hmm, people say I even look like Leventov. You're absurd. It's the people who are in the background, who do their work, like Sonia and Uncle Vanya, and... Have basic sensitivity to others. Don't waste human beings and resources. And don't view the world dramatically. So, I mean, I think he's... That's the view he's trying to... It's not... Insofar as there's a politics implied by that, it's... It's the politics of, you know, assuming that the world is about dramatic action. But it's not directly political, I think. So I don't... Again, you know, it's easy when you take... a great writer, to interpret the writer as a document of his times and find the social correlates of what's being talked about. It's always true, of course, but it's never what makes the writer a great writer. Everybody is equally a document of their times. I mean, Dickens shows the conditions of the working class in England in his time, and of course he does, but a factory survey, as he reports, would probably do an even better job. What makes... make something great literature is what you don't need to know the historical context for. That's what makes it readable for people who don't give a damn about Russian culture in 1900. And another way you kill literature is to take it as, well, this shows us the document of its time. Yeah, so does everything. Who needs it? I don't care about Russia in 1900. Why should I read it? It's a perfectly rational answer to make to that description. but that it shows you something about how human beings experience time, death, change, this is not something limited to 19th century and that's what makes it worth reading ultimately unless you already believe like me or interested in 19th century I'm struck by how the literary canon of high school students has changed in my lifetime. When I was a teenager, Catcher in the Rye was banned in many places, and I would never have let my parents know I was reading it. Now it was required to read it. in my daughter's high school class at a Catholic school. So this incredible sort of topsy-turvy turnaround of the canon, what's behind it? Are there certain ideas that are being put forward with this change, or is it just sort of accidental? that one group books out and another's in? No, I don't think it's accidental. Once you don't have the notion of great literature, you know, it's been the orthodoxy now for, I'm going to take a rough stab, I could probably calculate it, 40 years that there is no such thing as great literature. That's a reactionary notion. Certainly. the only thing is there are works called great literature by hegemonic forces of oppression who want you to make a thing. That is, if you said anything else in an English department, you would be shocked. People would be shocked right now. Once you, if you really believe that, of course the canon is going to change, right? I mean, there is, you teach books then that bring your message across best, that are easy to teach. Any other, but not because... you think there are great books. By the way, this has never taken place in Russia, by the way. I mean, everybody still knows Pushkin and Gogol and Tolstoy. It's just... Even in the Bolsheviks, that did not change. You interpreted them in a different way. But my God, the canon was the canon. I remember a scholar brought up in the Soviet Union who happened to look at the required reading for the... our English PhD list at Northwestern at one point, remarking that such a thing would never have happened even in the worst days of Stalinism. You would never have gotten, for example, Melville off the list as this list did. Emily Dickinson would never have been off the list in place of let's say Toni Morrison, Dreiser Uncle Tom's Cabin and so on but it follows from the notion that there is no such thing as great literature and again, once you if you tell students there's no such thing as great literature Why should they want to read it? I mean, why put in the effort for something that isn't that great? A lot of great literature isn't easy to read. Try teaching Paradise Lost to somebody who's been told there's no such thing as great literature. literature. So, you know, I think the change in canon, there are other reasons, like it's easier to do it this way, and once you're freed from the necessity of doing great books, you can do whatever is most easily teachable. So it's not only that, but it's And one can suspect that, you know, the canon will continually shift of taught books based on the needs of the moment. And also because what the political criteria for acceptability are keep shifting quite rapidly. So that, you know, things that might have been considered liberatory, like, I don't know, every watch reruns of MASH. I mean, which was considered quite liberal at the time. I mean, it's nothing but, you know, sexual harassment today. It is, by the way. You know, I thought so then. But now it will be recognized as such. I was thinking about some of the general themes that you were talking about, and I was wondering, it seems like free speech is under assault a lot in our society right now. because, you know, can it offend somebody in the room next to me or, you know, it's just not worth, you know, it seems to be devalued. I was wondering, is there any role in American novels, you think, currently to defend the right, you know, free speech? Free speech has to be defended because, you know, it's offensive either to a government or to somebody else. But that seems to be lost a lot. You know, we're giving up free speech for other considerations. Well, the defense... free speech is not going to be done by novels. I mean, except insofar as novels show why whenever you think you have the truth with a capital T, you're wrong. Which is what all realist novels will show. But it doesn't matter what the truth is in that case. But there, you know, even Henry James'political novels, Joseph Conrad's, anyone who thinks they know what the score is. and everybody else is just dumb, is going to discover that the world is more complex than that. If that's the case, then you always want to hear other points of view. The way, you know, in a bare passage, which you can quote to that effect in Tolstoy, where the argument is somewhat different, it's that when Levin wants to reform agriculture on his estate, and he borrows all the theoretically progressive theories and it fails, as most reforms do. Well-intentioned, but the world isn't too complex. What you want to do then is do what he does, find people who have other experiences and figure out why your reforms are failing so you can adjust. What you don't want to do is what most intellectuals and me do is completely discount the evidence and do it. But then the question is, this is how I put it to my students, you have a choice. When you want to make social change for certain goals, if you want the goals to be reached, you invite criticism because you want them to work. And only if you hear... This is why John Stuart Mill said, you know... who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. You need the criticism. You can adjust. Ah, okay, this part has been tried before. Let's do it that way. If you believe in the goal, you invite criticism. If you don't invite criticism, you don't believe in the goal, you be, you believe. believe in numbering yourself among the good people. And I tell my students, that is the choice you have to make. Do you really care about the goal, or do you care about hanging out with the right people? And I think that's the argument that you can, you know... make and you know, it's a perfectly rational egotistic thing to want to hang out with the right people but At least then you'll know that that's what you're doing. I Can't think of a better way of doing it, but This is going to be the last question I gather. Well, I'm certainly hearing the other side of the case today. But I have two questions for you, and I hope they're related. One is, I think I heard you say... You refer early on to social justice, and I got the impression you're not a big fan of it. Could you just define what social justice, that term, is to you? And the second question, and I think it's related, is what are some of the characteristics of your society that you would like to see? What's just and happy? What is a good society for you? Well, I'll answer the first question, but not the second question, because the second question presupposes that I think my views about what society should be are particularly good or enlightened or well-informed, and I don't. It's not what an expert, I don't know that sort of thing. You know, that's why I won't directly write about whether we should keep Obamacare or not have a general election. I don't know that. I know... How you need to think about it. How to entertain other views. How to think about the effect of theory on particular people. What questions you need to ask. I don't know the answer because I don't... I really can't answer that one. By social justice, of course, everyone believes in social justice. There are no... Outside of Spider-Man comics, nobody goes home and says, Oh, are we going to commit evil? Isn't it wonderful? Everybody believes in social justice. The question is what you call social justice. And when I was... was talking about is what is often called social justice, which is the typical things that happen on campus today, which excludes diversity of points of view, excludes legal protections in hearings, that kind of thing. Which I put in quotation marks because I don't know exactly what social justice is, but I know that it isn't that. When I want to know a better idea of what it might really be and how to achieve it, then I read a report from the Heritage Foundation. Well, thank you. Thank you very much, Gary. Thank you.

Socrates thinks that the poets, by which he means all those who tell stories, which today would include playwrights, novelists and writers, that they harm the thought of those who hear them. The poets in turn dismiss the philosophers for being great in the empty eloquence of fools. Now, Socrates famously won the quarrel in the Republic by banishing the poets.

But with the advent of modernity, both philosophy and poetry were banished by a new, mightier foe, science. Today, it rules supreme over the minds and souls of men. It alone presumes to explain to us the world we live in. As such, serious people, especially serious people of the modern age, in Washington, D.C., take neither philosophy nor poetry seriously.

But if for a moment we ignore the dizzying array of material wonders brought forth by our science, and if we instead ask ourselves, what do we really know about what it means to be human? How well do we understand our regime? Then the limitations of our scientific worldview become manifest.

For what can economics be? really teach us about courage? What does psychology know about genuine love? What does sociology have to say about the family?

Very little that matters, it seems. The deepest questions, the human questions, are either ignored by our sciences or answered in superficial ways. Philosophy and poetry, or what we today call literature, may still have something to teach us after all. Now, I don't propose to reopen the quarrel between philosophy and poetry today, much less to settle it. But I have invited Gary Saul Morson to open our eyes to what Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, and the other giants of Russian literature may have to teach us, not about 19th century Russia, but about the world we live in today.

For the questions they grappled with, questions about the problems of nihilism and materialism, the possibility of love and modernity, still confront us. Professor Morson teaches Russian literature at Northwestern University, where he's the Lawrence B. Dumas Professor of the Arts and the Humanities. His work ranges over a variety of subjects, including Russian and European thought, literary theory, and his favorite writers, Chekhov, Gogol, and above all, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy.

He's the author of several books, including... one in particular that is very dear to my heart, Anna Karenina in Our Time, Seeing More Wisely, which is one of the best academic books I've ever read in my life, although I hesitate to call it an academic book because it's so well written and insightful. His introduction to Russian literature class at Northwestern regularly attracts more than 500 students, making it one of the most popular elective classes there.

We've invited him to the Heritage Foundation to give a talk on what Russian literature can teach conservatives. Please join me in welcoming Gary Selmorson. Thank you, David, and I am really truly honored to be here. The title of this talk, you'll see why later, is called Pray for Chekhov.

It's in, you won't hear me, it's in 10 parts, and I I tell you that so that at any point you'll know how much more you have to sift through. It begins with an opening quotation from a Russian critic and philosopher writing in 1909 who wrote, The surest gauge of the greatness of a Russian writer is the extent of his hatred for the intelligentsia. Part one is called The Argument. I propose to recount a century-long argument with great relevance today. As my epigraph suggests, it pits the great Russian writers against the intelligentsia.

Think of it as Trotsky versus Tolstoy, Lenin versus Dostoevsky, Bakunin versus Chekhov. We Americans have our intelligentsia, which increasingly resembles the classic Russian one, but we do not have anything like Russian literature with which to oppose it. We need to be able to understand the reality of the world.

need to enrich our thinking if we are to avoid the Russian outcome of 99 years ago. Russia made two enormous contributions to the world. Though never good at physical technology, it devised the world's most influential political technology, which we have come to call totalitarianism. In 1999, Time magazine proclaimed Einstein the man of the century, the person who, quote, for better or worse, most influenced the last 100 years.

But Einstein did not remotely affect so many lives as Lenin. Russia's other enormous contribution was its literature. Part two is called Slavery Romantics. Russian appreciation of literature has no rival. I can compare it only to the way the Hebrew Bible must have seemed when books could still be added to it.

For Russians, the canon was and is sacred. Not only did literature represent life, as Westerners presume, but you could say that life existed to provide material for literature. When Tolstoy's Anna Karenina was being serialized, Dostoevsky enthused, at the end of one portion, that at last the existence of the Russian people had been justified.

Can anyone imagine a Frenchman supposing that the existence of the French people required justification? And if it did, that it could be justified by a novel? When the writer Karolienko, who was half Ukrainian, was asked his nationality, he replied, my homeland is Russian literature. In her recent Nobel Prize acceptance speech of 2015, Svetlana Alexeevich echoed this comment by claiming three homelands.

Her father's Belarus, her mother's Ukraine, and Russian literature. Like the poet Anna Akhmatova, she thought of literature as a people's equivalent of an individual's memory, without which a person or a culture is demented. Alexeyevich writes, I quote, Flaubert called himself a human pen. I would say that I am a human ear. When I walk down the street and catch words, phrases, and exclamations, I always think, how many novels disappear without a trace?

Like the great novelist Alexeyevich's thought of life as the secret thoughts and feelings of individual souls which live in literature. So here is where the argument is joined. Is life a matter of grand politics or individual souls? And can it be captured in a theory, or is there always what Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin called a surplus exceeding the grasp of any conceivable theory?

The intelligentsia believed in theories and crises. The novelists in the complexities of ordinary prosaic experience. So the intelligentsia was ready to sacrifice or enslave individuals who did not really matter to achieve their utopia.

Alexeyevich refers to such people as, quote, slavery romantics, slaves of utopia. Alexeyevich quotes Varlam Shalamov, the Gulag's second most famous chronicler, who declared, quote, I was a participant in a colossal battle, a battle that was lost. for the genuine renewal of humanity, unquote. Alexeibus herself then continues, quote, and I reconstruct the history of that battle, its victories and its defeats, the history of how people wanted to build the heavenly kingdom on earth, paradise, the city of the sun. In the end, all that remained was a sea of blood, millions of ruined lives.

There was a time, however, when no political idea of the 20th century was comparable to communism or the October Revolution as its symbol, a time when nothing attracted Western intellectuals and people all around the world more powerfully and emotionally. Raymond Aron called the Russian Revolution the opium of the intellectuals, end of quote. Today, that opium calls itself social justice. Alexeyevich insists...

that we must not forget what socialism for all its aspirations meant in practice, quote, because arguments about socialism have not died down. A new generation has grown up with a different picture of the world, but many young people are reading Marx and Lenin again, unquote. On American campuses, there's no need to say again.

Part three is called, Why Tolstoy Did Not Belong to the Intelligentsia. We get the word intelligentsia in English from Russian, where it was coined about 1860. In its strict sense, the Russian word meant something very different from what its English counterpart now means. It was not synonymous with intellectuals, well-educated people, or least of all, those who value independent thought. In any given society, well-educated people might or might not resemble an intelligentsia in the Russian sense.

My fear is that in America, they increasingly do resemble it. To be an intelligent, that's a member of the intelligentsia, one had to satisfy three criteria which most educated people, including the great novelists, did not. First of all, an intelligent had to share a set of radical beliefs.

There was no such thing as a conservative or moderate intelligent. Required beliefs varied from generation to generation, but in the classic period, they always included materialism, atheism, some form of socialism or anarchism, and revolutionism, by which was meant not a belief in revolution as a means, but as something valuable in itself. The terrorists are gay.

Zayn al-Chayyaf's Catechism of a Revolutionary explains that one is not a true revolutionary quote, if one feels compassion for something in this world, unquote. Note the language here. Catechism.

This world. Revolutionism was a substitute for religion, like I suppose environmentalism today. Dostoevsky once observed that Russians do not become atheists. They convert to atheism.

The prototypical Intelligent was in fact either the child of a priest or a former student in a Russian Orthodox seminary. And so, in the Classic period, calling someone a seminarian was the equivalent of calling him a red. Ex-seminarians included the classic age's most influential figure, Nicholas Chernyshevsky and later, Joseph Stalin One reason no one would have considered Tolstoy an intelligent is that he believed in God Second, an intelligent had to identify primarily as an intelligent. Leave everything, abandon father and mother, and follow us. If you thought of yourself as a nobleman, a doctor, or a family man who just happened to be well-educated, you were not an intelligent.

That is another reason no one would have called Tolstoy, who used his title of count, an intelligent. Chekhov particularly hated what he called this artificial overwrought solidarity because it entailed not thinking but repeating orthodoxies. I quote from Chekhov, Yes, our young ladies in political bows are pure souls, but nine-tenths of their pure souls aren't worth a damn.

interactive sanctity and purity are based on hazy and naive sympathies and antipathies to individuals and labels, not to facts. It's easy to be pure when you hate the devil you don't know, and love the God you wouldn't have enough brains to doubt. Unquote.

Does it sound familiar? Third, an intelligent embraced a particular lifestyle. In the 1860s and 70s, this entailed a rigid code of anti-manners, prescribing behavior formerly regarded as sordid. Chernyshevsky came by his lower-class manners honestly, but they became a model. Aristocrats took lessons in anti-refinement.

Women just had to smoke. When Dostoevsky was looking to get remarried, he had trouble finding a woman who was well-educated, but not a radical. Once, to satisfy a deadline for producing a novel, he in desperation hired a graduate of Russia's new stenography school in order to dictate a novel, as it occurred to him. At their first meeting, he offered the stenographer a cigarette, but she declined.

declined. Dostoevsky thought, if she doesn't smoke, perhaps she believes in God. In fact, she did, and that is how Dostoevsky met his second wife.

Today we have our own ever-changing virtue signaling. Part 4 is called Little Napoleons. Behind these criteria lay a set of assumptions too obvious to be articulated.

One, one had to argue for one or another theory. but not for theory, meaning theory of everything itself. Theory itself, as an explanation of everything, that was a given.

One reason Marxism proved so appealing was its ambitious claim to resolve all contradictions. Think of Marx's assertion that, quote, communism is the solution of the riddle of history and knows itself to be the solution, unquote. No theory claiming... much less could appeal to Russian intelligence. Or if it did, it was habitually transformed into something all-explanatory, a habit of transformation that Dostoevsky called, quote, the Russian aspect of European doctrines, unquote.

Here's how Dostoevsky explains that. It consists of those inferences from those doctrines, which in the form of unshakable axioms are drawn only in Russia, whereas in Europe, the possibility of such seductions is not even suspected, unquote. Or as Dostoevsky remarked elsewhere, a Russian intelligent is someone who can read Darwin and promptly resolve to become a pickpocket. If theory rules, then theorists must rule. The intelligents shared what Thomas Sowell has called the vision of the anointed.

This is the key criterion without which a group cannot be anointed. intelligentsia in the Russian sense. Let every other intelligentsia belief change, Dostoevsky insisted, but the belief in themselves as saviors would remain. Raskolnikov, the hero of crime and punishment, invokes several contradictory theories to justify murdering an old prawn broker. First, he invokes utilitarianism.

Just calculate, on one side is an old woman, sure to die soon anyway, whose life is worth, quote, no more than a cockroach, unquote. Less, in fact, since she does positive harm. On the other side, hundreds of lives that might be saved by her money.

Quote, one death and a hundred lives in exchange. It's simple arithmetic, unquote. Not only is it moral to kill her, it would be immoral not to.

But Raskolnikov also invokes radical relativism, which, unlike utilitarianism, denies any foundation for morality. Morality, he muses, quote, is all artificial terrors, and there are no barriers, and it's all as it should be, unquote, because the world understood naturalistically has only it. is not ought.

There is no should be. Raskolnikov voices still more justifications for murder, but the one underlying them all is his Napoleonic theory. The world is divided into two sorts of people, the many ordinary and the few extraordinary. Ordinary people are conservative.

They uphold tradition and the ancient law. They are people of the present, quote, mere material that serves only to reproduce its kind, unquote. Extraordinary people like Lycurgus, Solon, and Napoleon are men of the future who bring a new word. They are necessarily criminals. because the mere fact that they create a new law makes them violators of the old.

They have the right, indeed the obligation, to do whatever their idea requires. Quote Raskolnikov, I maintain that if the discoveries of Kepler and Newton could not have been made known except by sacrificing the lives of one, a dozen, a hundred or more men, Newton would have had the right, would indeed have been duty-bound, to eliminate the dozen or hundred men, unquote. The Bolsheviks also required murder as not just permitted, but morally required. for Raskolnikov even men a little out of the common as he puts it must be criminals in this way this point is crucial because it allows for a group of special people not just one a century like Napoleon that group is the intelligentsia to appreciate how long lived is this idea of most people as mere material think of the frequent reference among western intellectuals to the Soviet experience experiment. A tacit justification of the revolution even though it didn't turn out as hoped.

One experiments on mere material, not human beings like oneself. A true social scientist, Raskolnikov maintains that the exact number of extraordinary people must be governed by a natural law, which one could presumably discover. Quote, there certainly is and must be a definite law. It cannot be a matter of chance, unquote.

It cannot be a matter of chance because for the social scientist, nothing is. Any more than there can be such a thing as free will. If something is governed by law, then everything is.

Raskolnikov's sister replies with horror, quote, What is truly original in all this is that you sanction bloodshed in the name of conscience, and excuse my saying so with such fanaticism. That sanction of bloodshed by conscience is to my mind more terrible than the official legal sanction of bloodshed, unquote. Why more terrible?

Bloodshed is bloodshed, isn't it? Look ahead to Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, where he asks why Macbeth killed only a few people while Lenin and Stalin murdered many. millions?

The answer, he says, is that Shakespeare's villains had no ideology. I quote, ideology, that is what gives the evil doer the necessary steadfastness and determination. the social theory which helps to make his act seem good instead of bad in his own and others'eyes so that he won't hear reproaches and curses and receive praises and honors, unquote. If ideology applies everywhere, then, to quote Sergei Nechayev, the terrorist, quote, everything that promotes the revolution is moral, everything that hinders it is immoral.

Lenin and Trotsky maintained, it is not just that the party never makes mistakes. Rather, whatever the party does is right because the party does it. The agent of history with a capital H itself, the party's actions are moral by definition. It follows that compassion to class enemies must be immoral. We teach children to overcome their natural selfishness, but the Soviets taught them to overcome their natural compassion, which might stay their hand from killing a class enemy.

One valued not the bourgeois notion of human rights, which includes everyone, but class interest. As the novelist Vasily Grossman explained, what race was to the Nazis, class, that is the one you were born into, was to the Soviets. To refrain from torture, Trotsky declared, was, quote, the most pathetic and miserable liberal prejudice, unquote. In 1918, the founder of the Soviet secret police, Felix Dzerzhinsky, published an article in the journal Red Terror, I didn't make that up, in which he instructed, quote, we are not waging war against individual persons.

We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. During the investigation, do not look for evidence that the accused acted in deed or word against Soviet power. The first questions that you ought to put are, to what class does he belong?

What is his origin? What is his education or profession? And it is these questions that ought to determine the fate of the accused, unquote.

Like morality, truth is by definition what the party says it is. Georgy Pyatikov, who was twice expelled from the party and eventually shot, wrote that a true Bolshevik is, quote, ready to believe, not just to assert, that black is white and white is black, if the party required it, unquote. In 1984, you'll recall, O'Brien proclaims this very doctrine. Two plus two is really five, if the party says it is. which he calls collective solipsism. There are no limits.

This is what the rule of theorists ultimately means. So let me lay my cards on the table. To the extent that a group of intellectuals comes to resemble an intelligentsia, to that extent is totalitarianism on the horizon.

should that group gain power. That, not Swedish-style social democracy, is what I see happening here. I foresee, in years rather than decades, first a Putin-style managed democracy, and soon after, a Stalinist state. Or rather, one beyond Stalinism, since Stalin did not have access to today's monitoring technology.

My scientist friends tell me we are on the verge of reading people's thoughts. from the outside. That would make 1984 a libertarian paradise.

And now for the pessimistic part of my paper. Part 5 is called Equality. So far as I know, the only 19th century thinker to foresee totalitarianism was Dostoevsky. The reason he could, I think, is that he deeply understood the mentality of the intelligentsia and what it would do with power.

Unlike Tolstoy, he had been a radical intelligent and recognized what he himself might have been willing to do. In one article, he refuted the idea common among conservatives that young radicals are simply idle and undeveloped people, as one journal put it. On the contrary, Dostoevsky declares, quote, I am myself an old Nechayevist.

I myself stood on the scaffold condemned to death, and I assure you that I stood in the company of educated people. And therein, he says, lies the real horror that in Russia one can commit the foulest and most villainous act without being in the least a villain. The possibility of considering oneself, and sometimes even being, in fact, an honorable person while committing obvious and undeniable villainy, that is our whole affliction, unquote. And I might add, it's ours today.

The villain in Dostoevsky's novel The Possessed, Pyotr Stepanovich, who was modeled loosely on the terrorist Nechayev, outlines his plans, which come amazingly close to what actually happened either in Russia, China, or Cambodia. He endorses the theory of one Shigaliov who famously declares, it may be the most famous line from the novel, quote, I am perplexed by my own data and my conclusion is a direct contradiction of the original idea with which I start. Starting from unlimited... freedom, I arrive at absolute despotism.

I will add, however, that there can be no solution of the social problem but mine. Unquote. It is thinking we recognize. Deny any limit on individual, especially sexual morality, and then repress anyone who thinks differently.

Far from being incompatible, the two go hand in hand. Shigulyov demands, quote, the division of mankind into two unequal parts. One-tenth enjoys unbounded power over the other nine-tenths. The others have to give up all individuality and become, so to speak, a herd, and through boundless submission will, by a series of regenerations, attain primeval innocence.

They'll have to work, however, unquote. Another revolutionary objects that it would be better to take the nine-tenths and, quote, blow them up into the air instead of putting them into paradise. I'd only leave a handful of educated people who would live happily ever after on scientific principles, unquote. At last, Protas-Tapanovich endorses a proposal to cut off, quote, a hundred million heads. At the time, that sounded like sheer absurdity.

But if you know Stepan Kortois'anthology of experts, The Black Book of Communism, that estimates, rather conservatively, that very total for communist killings worldwide. Is it any wonder Russian writers are considered prophets? Pyotr Stepanovich promises, quote, a system of spying.

Every member of society spies on every other, and it's his duty to inform against them, end quote. Just as Stalin was to require. The boy Pavel Morozov was made a national Soviet hero for turning in his parents. We already have campuses where students are encouraged, sometimes required, if they have an honor code, to turn each other in if they hear expressions of bias. Pyotr Stepanovich's new society's key principle is to be absolute equality, which requires a complete suppression of individuality or great talent.

Quote, Cicero will have his tongue cut out, Copernicus will have his eyes put out, Shakespeare will be stoned, unquote. Did Pol Pot know this novel? Even before achieving power, the intelligentsia offended great writers because it restricted art to political propaganda, assuming art should exist at all.

Quote, boots are more important than Shakespeare, became a slogan. Art was suspect because it claimed to reveal the human soul, but the very idea of the soul was retrograde. Everyone knew the materialist saying that the brain secretes thought the way the liver secretes bile. In the early 1860s, the physiologist Ivan Sechenov, that was Pavlov's mentor, by the way, published his influential book, Reflexes of the Brain, which outlines a neurological explanation of consciousness.

Dmitri Karamazov paraphrases the theory, what people used to call the soul is really so many neurons with their tails quivering. With the smallest change in wording, that theory is, of course, prevalent today. But I'm sorry to lose God, Dmitri concludes. Part six is called The Pursuit of Happiness. The Russian novel is known, above all, for psychology.

What is less often appreciated is that in showing the complexity of the psyche, the novelists were making a polemical point. The intelligentsia denied that people were complex at all. Human complexity was an idea hindering radical action. action.

Like Jeremy Bentham and mainstream economists today, Chernyshevsky insisted in his novel What Is To Be Done, a book that became the intelligentsia's bible, that everyone always does and should act according to their greatest advantage. Dostoevsky's notes from underground parodies Chernyshevsky's book by re-narrating its incidents as they might actually happen to people with real psychology. The underground man appeals to empiricism, which presumably a scientist should respect.

No one actually observing human behavior could presume it is simple or rational. What is more, people, unlike molecules, can know the laws that supposedly govern their behavior and act to thwart them, a possibility that forever rules out a Newtonian account of human beings. What a person values most of all is that her action should be her own, that she is not just a piano key or an organ stop played upon by impersonal laws, that her choices could have been different and therefore matter. Rather than give up that sense of self, the underground man insists, people will act spitefully, meaning against their self-interest, just to prove that they are not piano keys or organ stops. If a rationalist utopia could ever be achieved, if everything were provided for one without effort, and if the laws of nature and society could show the future in advance, then life would become pointless.

As Dostoevsky himself observed, in one of his articles, quote, people would see then that they had no more life left, that they had no freedom of spirit, no will, no personality. People would realize that there is no happiness in inactivity, that it is not possible to love one's neighbor without sacrificing something to him of one's labor, and that happiness lies not in happiness, but only in the attempt to achieve it, unquote. Part 7 is called The Surplus of Humanness.

All the great realists, not just Russians, were master psychologists. From Jane Austen to Henry James, the genre of the realist novel depicts people as individuals who cannot be reduced to abstract categories. I begin where all categories, social or even psychological, that could account for me end. Mikhail Bakhtin, who argued that genres embody implicit philosophical assumptions, concluded that realist novels presuppose the irreducibility of individuals to abstractions.

People have what he called a surplus of humanness, and here's the famous quotation. An individual cannot be completely incarnated into the flesh of existing socio-historical categories. There is no mere form that would be able to contain once and forever all his human possibilities.

No form that he could fill to the very brim and yet at the same time not spill over the brim. There always remains an unrealized surplus of humanness. The difference between Russian and European novels is that Russian novels make this assumption explicit. Russians regard novels as another and superior form of philosophy. Westerners typically regard novelists as illustrating truths learned from some philosopher or social scientist.

And so Proust is read as applied Bergson, Stern as enlivened Locke, and Jane Austen as illustrated Thomas Reed. But all one has to do is compare the philosopher's psychological theory with the great novelistic heroine, and it is plain that George Eliot must have known something no philosopher ever did. Otherwise, philosophers would have produced portraits of people as believable as Dorothea Brooke.

But no philosopher or social scientist has ever come close. When this failure becomes obvious, Westerners typically resort to the idea Freud uses in his essay on Dostoevsky. With condescending indulgence to a brilliant, if sloppy, mind, he presented the author of Karamazov as grasping merely intuitively deep truths that only superior thinkers like Freud himself could articulate explicitly.

But this is even more absurd. Dostoevsky's characters, not just the bookish underground man, but even the brawling Dmitri Karamazov, deliver long speeches about the mind, so that one could more readily fault Dostoevsky for too much explicit articulation. Russians view their novelists not as illustrators, but as discoverers, with the philosophers lagging after to provide what Bakhtin called a partial but always inadequate transcription.

of novelistic wisdom. For Bakhtin, that is the proper role of the critic, which is one reason so many philosophers, including Bakhtin himself, presented their ideas as explications of great writers. Bakhtin understood that the ideas he transcribed from Dostoevsky continued his argument with intelligentsia ideologues, now, in Bakhtin's time, represented by the Bolshevik regime. Part 8 is called Jones. So here is one lesson of Russian literature.

There can never be a social science, if by that term we mean a discipline modeled on the hard sciences. The Russian writers were reviving a tradition in eclipse since the 17th century, when the idea took hold that any respectable discipline must resemble Euclidean geometry or, after Newton, physics. For the great rationalists and their heirs, real knowledge was theoretical, ideally mathematical, and all specific events were the mere consequence of the laws theory discovers. To the extent you need a narrative rather than laws to explain things, to that extent you fall short of scientific status. Real sciences don't tell stories.

By the 19th century, this moral Newtonian, as Elie Halevy famously called it, became a mania, and not just with Marxists and social Darwinists. Before August Comte coined the term sociology, he planned to call his new discipline social physics. And Leon Walrus, a founder of modern economics, based his idea of equilibrium on the stability of the solar system. He even sought the endorsement of the day's greatest mathematician, Henri Poincaré.

Even Freud found himself adopting hydraulic metaphors of the mind and claiming not just that some acts of forgetting are intentional, but that all are, since what sort of natural law admits of exceptions? But there is another tradition of thought, extending from Aristotle to Montaigne and Tolstoy. which holds that reality demands two types of reasoning. In addition to theoretical reasoning, Aristotle's episteme, we need practical reasoning, what he called phronesis. Like geometry, theory offers truths that are universal, precise, without exception, and timeless.

One reasons from the theory down to the specific examples it subsumes. For the alternative tradition, some questions demand reasoning up from particular cases. Aristotle cites clinical disciplines like medicine.

One does not want a physician whose only interest in one's illness is its potential contributions to science. No good doctor is ever just an applied biologist. He uses everything he knows, theory and untheorized experience, to devise a treatment for this patient and at this moment. Kindliness matters, except of course in the Department of Veterans Affairs, as it doesn't in geometry.

The same holds true for ethical issues. If one reasons down from general rules, one will often wind up with monstrous answers, Aristotle notes, because rules are formulated with a paradigm case in mind, but real situations may differ in significant ways that cannot be foreseen. Then one must use judgment, which by definition cannot be formalized.

Good judgment grows out of experience, mistakes, and reflection upon mistakes. A process yielding not theoretical knowledge, but practical wisdom. That is why, as Aristotle observes, young men can be good mathematicians, but not good ethicists, which requires long experience. Practical wisdom yields answers that are, to use Aristotle's favorite phrase, true on the whole and for the most part.

Now, anyone who described the Pythagorean theorem as true on the whole and for the most part... would demonstrate he did not grasp what mathematical reasoning is. But by the same token, anyone who sought quasi-mathematical solutions to ethical problems would be just as wrong-headed.

Marx's enemy, the Russian socialist Alexander Herzl, argued that there are no definitive solutions to social problems, that history has no aim, and that, quote, as he put it, there is no libretto. In history, all is improvisation. All is extemporary.

The answers given by practical reasoning are always tentative, open to revision, depending on circumstances. That is why one never gives all power to anyone committed to a single answer, but allows for critics to point out failures. If not at Yale, then at least at the University of Chicago. In ethics, the tradition reasoning up... from cases is called casuistry, and the fact that the term is now pejorative suggests how thoroughly the theoretical view triumphed.

Casuists use rules in the sense of rules of thumb, which serve as mere reminders of particular sorts of cases, the beginning but not the end of an argument. When the theoretical tradition triumphed, casuistry was banished from philosophy, but it found a home in the novel. Daniel Defoe began his career writing casuistical advice columns, you know, Dear Abby sort of things, and the cases he invented gradually grew in length to become novels like Mole Flanders.

As a genre, the realist novel is casuistical. It teaches how to derive wisdom from careful consideration of particular, richly described cases. Philosophers still present ethical problems.

by briefly sketching a dilemma that occurs to Jones, who was given no biography, lives in no society, and chooses at no particular time. Contrast that with the dilemmas facing Anna Karenina or Dorothea Brooke. Take this as a novelistic dictum. No one is ever Jones. Not even Jones.

Again, the... The difference between the Russians and other realist novelists is that the Russians, especially Tolstoy, make the genre's casuistical assumptions explicit. At the end of Anna Karenina, Levin learns to make wise ethical choices not by applying rules, but by acquiring wisdom from particular cases sensitively observed.

Bakhtin's early treatises on ethics also explore the ethical limitations of what he called theoretism. Part 9 is called A Good Night's Sleep. Tolstoy's heroes begin believing in theory, but then learn its limitations.

In War and Peace, Prince Andrei at first admires the German generals who have purportedly discovered a hard science of warfare, which in this novel stands for any conceivable social science. Before Austerlitz, the generals claim that it is a mathematical certainty that Napoleon will be defeated and that, quote, every contingency has been foreseen, unquote. But when the generals lose, as they do so spectacularly at Austerlitz, they explain that their instructions were not properly carried out, which in battle is always the case.

They behave just like economists today, who when predictions fail, say either that the recommendations were applied too cautiously, or that even though they were proven wrong, they have at least now adjusted their theory so that it now accounts for what happened. Like Paul Krugman, they are never wrong. Of course, even astrologers can adjust a theory after the fact to predict what already happened.

Prince Andrei learns that a science of human affairs is impossible. He asks, this is a quotation, what science can there be in a matter, as in every practical matter, where nothing can be determined and everything depends on innumerable... conditions, the significance of which becomes manifest at a particular moment and no one can tell when that moment will come. We face tomorrow, he says, a hundred million chances which will be determined on the instant by whether we run or they run, whether this man or that man is killed, unquote.

Irreducible chance matters. No one can tell whether a bullet will hit a brave man or a coward capable of infecting others with his cowardice. And timeliness matters.

Things are decided on the instant, an instant that is not just the automatic derivative of earlier instance. And what is true of battle is true, quote, of every practical matter. Tolstoy's wise general, Kutuzov, who falls asleep in the Council of War before Austerlitz, at last calls a halt to the discussion. Gentlemen, he says, the disposition for tomorrow cannot be changed, and the most important thing before a battle is, he paused, a good night's sleep, unquote. Why a good night's sleep?

Because in a world of radical contingency, where unforeseeable situations arise, rise, and opportunities must be seized instantly or lost. What matters is not theoretical knowledge, but alertness. The last part is called prosaics and indoor socialism.

What Andrei fails to learn, but his friend Pierre does, is the insight for which a quarter of a century ago I coined the term prosaics, an idea central to numerous writers, most obviously Tolstoy and Chekhov. Radicals and romantics picture life in terms of dramatic events. The ordinary incidents between crises are viewed as trivial or despised as bourgeois.

Tolstoy and Chekhov believed the opposite. Life is lived at ordinary moments, and what is most real is what is barely noticeable, like the tiniest movements of consciousness. Tolstoy observes, the painter Bryulov once corrected a student's sketch. Why, you only touched it a tiny bit, the student remarked, but it is quite a different thing. Brulov replied, art begins where that tiny bit begins.

Tolstoy concludes, that saying is strikingly true not only of art, but of all of life. One may say that true life begins where the tiny bit begins, where what seem to us minute and infinitesimally small alterations take place. True life is not lived where great external changes take place, where people move about. Clash, fight, and slay one another.

It is lived only where these tiny, tiny, infinitesimally small changes occur, unquote. Tolsoi's novels describe the infinitesimal movements of consciousness, our smallest choices, and the mistakes we instantaneously forget, but which the novel records. And that is one reason his novels are so long.

In our brief lives, every instant matters. The Russian novel is so long because life is so short. Tolstoy's wisest heroes learn to see the richness right in front of them, hidden in plain view.

Learning this truth, Pierre comes to resemble, I quote the key passage, a man who after straining his eyes to peer into the remote distance finds what he is seeking at his very feet. In everything near and comprehensible, he had seen only what was limited, petty, and meaningless. But now he discarded the mental telescope through which he had been gazing over the heads of men and joyfully surveyed the ever-changing, eternally great, unfathomable, and infinite life around him.

In Chekhov, ignoring ordinary experiences is what wastes lives, and such waste is his constant theme. In Uncle Vanya, one character observes, Ivan Petrovich, you are an educated man, and I would think you would understand that the world is being destroyed not by crime and fire, but by all these petty squabbles. Shockingly, Chekhov praised what no intellectual is supposed to respect, bourgeois virtues like cleanliness, ordinary decency, and even paying one's debts.

In this spirit, Svetlana Alexeyevich's books orchestrate the voices of countless ordinary people responding microscopically to events historians treat macroscopically. She seeks to capture what she describes as, quote, the history of domestic indoor socialism. the history of how it played out in the human soul.

I am drawn to that small space called a human being, a single individual. In reality, that is where everything happens, unquote. She is keenly aware of her debt to the great novelists and their dislike of grand theoretical systems.

I quote from her again, it always troubled me that the truth doesn't fit into one mind. That truth is splintered. There is a lot of it.

It is varied and it is strewn about the world. Dostoevsky thought that humanity knows much, much more about itself than it is recorded in literature. So what is it that I do? I collect the everyday life of feelings, thoughts, and words. The everyday life of the soul, the thing that the big picture of history usually omits or disdains.

These novelistic insights, the existence of sheer contingency, true life as lived in the tiny bit. The openness of time, meaning that what we choose really matters, and the importance of the individual soul, all these insights are closely linked. The ideologues who look down on ordinary people as boors and rednecks, and who put their faith in the abstractions they alone master, will never understand them.

They see the world, if viewed through the right lens, as ultimately simple. Unlike Pierre, who comes to appreciate, quote, the endless variety of men's minds which prevents a truth from ever appearing exactly the same to any two persons, unquote. By the novel's end, quote, the legitimate individuality of each person's views now became the basis of the sympathy Pierre felt for other people and the interest he took in them, unquote. My conclusion is brief. We face a choice between the dangerous theory-based uniformity of the intelligentsia and the wise perspective on life espoused by Russian literature.

Pray for Chekhov. Thank you. I guess we have time for questions, David, is that right? I think the dichotomy that you drew between the Russian intelligentsia and the Russian novelist is an interesting one. Why in America do we tend to see the artists and the revolutionary on the same team?

That's a good question because the artists, second and third rate artists typically are on the same team. Because if you can get praise as an artist by simply providing a ready, readily consumed... package of a received idea. You'll be celebrated as an artist for a generation or less.

And those are the artists who, of course, will get the government grants and who will be taught in courses that one of my colleagues calls literature since Tuesday. But surely you would have to, you're not going to put Nathaniel Hawthorne or... Herman Melville into that category, are you? I mean, or God knows Henry James is not going to fit that, right? And those, of course, are the artists, you know, which are easiest to teach in.

The literature writers, let's say, are easiest to teach in high school, right? Because they have a very simple message. which is easy to get across and easy to master.

And, in fact, it raises the obvious question of why should the students read it at all? Why not just memorize the message? Which the students understand, and that's why I think...

literature classes now turn people off literature. They don't give any reason to read it. I mean, if the book is only a message and you can memorize the message without reading the book, why bother? People talk about the decline of the humanities, but I think, you know, the way literature is taught makes student lack of interest in the humanities a rational conclusion. I don't know if that answers your question.

Yes. Yeah, in the back there. My question concerns just an explanation for the potential irony of why the intelligentsia with the most elitist view of human affairs most often associate themselves with the most proletarian populist viewpoints, and why they...

find success in advocating those viewpoints for a population that they seem to clearly disdain? Well, I mean, the reason they do that is because they disdain them. That is, those people cannot speak for themselves in the assumption. Therefore, we have to speak for them. We represent.

They can't very well come out and say, you should believe us because we are advocating our self-interest. They have to say, we are not advocating our self-interest, but the class of the oppressed, we define who the oppressed are, of course, given our theory. And so, you have to be able to...

able to do that, right? If you do not despise those people, you would allow them to speak for themselves. But that means that if they speak for themselves, then who are you to speak for them?

The two go together, you see. They have to go together, right? If those people who you are speaking for suddenly find a way of speaking for themselves, I don't know, Twitter?

positively an insult. It's not just that they're not doing what they're supposed to. It's that they're challenging your role in the world. They're self-image. And that simply can't be allowed.

That's why it's really, you know, people get so angry at it. I think that's the connection. You have to describe the oppressed that way, or who you speak to.

Yeah, we're back. Just a slightly different angle, thinking of Anton Chekhov, a play like The Cherry Orchard, you've got the old aristocracy who he seems to be critiquing, but also a young revolutionary who he somewhat mocks as well. Are we to infer from that what Chekhov's own politics were, or was he being deliberately ambiguous both in art and in life?

I think a mistake would be to assume that what Chekhov is writing about is politics. He's writing about basic questions of human values, of... play about love, about the experience of time, about...

And the people who he's going to come out the worst in those plays are the people who see the world either... simplistically like the revolutionary, but not because they're revolutionary, because they see the world simplistically. Or, and this is his most common technique, people who view the world melodramatically. The key thing about all Chekhov's plays is that they are plays of inaction, which is a revolutionary thing to do. I mean, you know, one of the critics remarked that the only thing that happens in The Three Sisters is that Three Sisters do not go to Moscow.

and that really is right because in most dramas people who see the world melodramatically are in tune with the universe that the play represents But in Czechoslovakia, they're ridiculous. If you make grand speeches like Uncle Vanya, right? If you are one of those characters who says, you know, goes around like some yoni of the Three Sisters who says, hmm, hmm, people say I even look like Leventov.

You're absurd. It's the people who are in the background, who do their work, like Sonia and Uncle Vanya, and... Have basic sensitivity to others.

Don't waste human beings and resources. And don't view the world dramatically. So, I mean, I think he's...

That's the view he's trying to... It's not... Insofar as there's a politics implied by that, it's... It's the politics of, you know, assuming that the world is about dramatic action. But it's not directly political, I think.

So I don't... Again, you know, it's easy when you take... a great writer, to interpret the writer as a document of his times and find the social correlates of what's being talked about.

It's always true, of course, but it's never what makes the writer a great writer. Everybody is equally a document of their times. I mean, Dickens shows the conditions of the working class in England in his time, and of course he does, but a factory survey, as he reports, would probably do an even better job. What makes... make something great literature is what you don't need to know the historical context for.

That's what makes it readable for people who don't give a damn about Russian culture in 1900. And another way you kill literature is to take it as, well, this shows us the document of its time. Yeah, so does everything. Who needs it? I don't care about Russia in 1900. Why should I read it? It's a perfectly rational answer to make to that description.

but that it shows you something about how human beings experience time, death, change, this is not something limited to 19th century and that's what makes it worth reading ultimately unless you already believe like me or interested in 19th century I'm struck by how the literary canon of high school students has changed in my lifetime. When I was a teenager, Catcher in the Rye was banned in many places, and I would never have let my parents know I was reading it. Now it was required to read it. in my daughter's high school class at a Catholic school.

So this incredible sort of topsy-turvy turnaround of the canon, what's behind it? Are there certain ideas that are being put forward with this change, or is it just sort of accidental? that one group books out and another's in? No, I don't think it's accidental. Once you don't have the notion of great literature, you know, it's been the orthodoxy now for, I'm going to take a rough stab, I could probably calculate it, 40 years that there is no such thing as great literature.

That's a reactionary notion. Certainly. the only thing is there are works called great literature by hegemonic forces of oppression who want you to make a thing.

That is, if you said anything else in an English department, you would be shocked. People would be shocked right now. Once you, if you really believe that, of course the canon is going to change, right? I mean, there is, you teach books then that bring your message across best, that are easy to teach.

Any other, but not because... you think there are great books. By the way, this has never taken place in Russia, by the way.

I mean, everybody still knows Pushkin and Gogol and Tolstoy. It's just... Even in the Bolsheviks, that did not change. You interpreted them in a different way. But my God, the canon was the canon.

I remember a scholar brought up in the Soviet Union who happened to look at the required reading for the... our English PhD list at Northwestern at one point, remarking that such a thing would never have happened even in the worst days of Stalinism. You would never have gotten, for example, Melville off the list as this list did.

Emily Dickinson would never have been off the list in place of let's say Toni Morrison, Dreiser Uncle Tom's Cabin and so on but it follows from the notion that there is no such thing as great literature and again, once you if you tell students there's no such thing as great literature Why should they want to read it? I mean, why put in the effort for something that isn't that great? A lot of great literature isn't easy to read.

Try teaching Paradise Lost to somebody who's been told there's no such thing as great literature. literature. So, you know, I think the change in canon, there are other reasons, like it's easier to do it this way, and once you're freed from the necessity of doing great books, you can do whatever is most easily teachable.

So it's not only that, but it's And one can suspect that, you know, the canon will continually shift of taught books based on the needs of the moment. And also because what the political criteria for acceptability are keep shifting quite rapidly. So that, you know, things that might have been considered liberatory, like, I don't know, every watch reruns of MASH.

I mean, which was considered quite liberal at the time. I mean, it's nothing but, you know, sexual harassment today. It is, by the way. You know, I thought so then.

But now it will be recognized as such. I was thinking about some of the general themes that you were talking about, and I was wondering, it seems like free speech is under assault a lot in our society right now. because, you know, can it offend somebody in the room next to me or, you know, it's just not worth, you know, it seems to be devalued.

I was wondering, is there any role in American novels, you think, currently to defend the right, you know, free speech? Free speech has to be defended because, you know, it's offensive either to a government or to somebody else. But that seems to be lost a lot.

You know, we're giving up free speech for other considerations. Well, the defense... free speech is not going to be done by novels. I mean, except insofar as novels show why whenever you think you have the truth with a capital T, you're wrong.

Which is what all realist novels will show. But it doesn't matter what the truth is in that case. But there, you know, even Henry James'political novels, Joseph Conrad's, anyone who thinks they know what the score is. and everybody else is just dumb, is going to discover that the world is more complex than that.

If that's the case, then you always want to hear other points of view. The way, you know, in a bare passage, which you can quote to that effect in Tolstoy, where the argument is somewhat different, it's that when Levin wants to reform agriculture on his estate, and he borrows all the theoretically progressive theories and it fails, as most reforms do. Well-intentioned, but the world isn't too complex.

What you want to do then is do what he does, find people who have other experiences and figure out why your reforms are failing so you can adjust. What you don't want to do is what most intellectuals and me do is completely discount the evidence and do it. But then the question is, this is how I put it to my students, you have a choice.

When you want to make social change for certain goals, if you want the goals to be reached, you invite criticism because you want them to work. And only if you hear... This is why John Stuart Mill said, you know...

who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. You need the criticism. You can adjust.

Ah, okay, this part has been tried before. Let's do it that way. If you believe in the goal, you invite criticism.

If you don't invite criticism, you don't believe in the goal, you be, you believe. believe in numbering yourself among the good people. And I tell my students, that is the choice you have to make.

Do you really care about the goal, or do you care about hanging out with the right people? And I think that's the argument that you can, you know... make and you know, it's a perfectly rational egotistic thing to want to hang out with the right people but At least then you'll know that that's what you're doing.

I Can't think of a better way of doing it, but This is going to be the last question I gather. Well, I'm certainly hearing the other side of the case today. But I have two questions for you, and I hope they're related.

One is, I think I heard you say... You refer early on to social justice, and I got the impression you're not a big fan of it. Could you just define what social justice, that term, is to you?

And the second question, and I think it's related, is what are some of the characteristics of your society that you would like to see? What's just and happy? What is a good society for you? Well, I'll answer the first question, but not the second question, because the second question presupposes that I think my views about what society should be are particularly good or enlightened or well-informed, and I don't. It's not what an expert, I don't know that sort of thing.

You know, that's why I won't directly write about whether we should keep Obamacare or not have a general election. I don't know that. I know... How you need to think about it.

How to entertain other views. How to think about the effect of theory on particular people. What questions you need to ask. I don't know the answer because I don't...

I really can't answer that one. By social justice, of course, everyone believes in social justice. There are no... Outside of Spider-Man comics, nobody goes home and says, Oh, are we going to commit evil? Isn't it wonderful?

Everybody believes in social justice. The question is what you call social justice. And when I was... was talking about is what is often called social justice, which is the typical things that happen on campus today, which excludes diversity of points of view, excludes legal protections in hearings, that kind of thing. Which I put in quotation marks because I don't know exactly what social justice is, but I know that it isn't that.

When I want to know a better idea of what it might really be and how to achieve it, then I read a report from the Heritage Foundation. Well, thank you. Thank you very much, Gary. Thank you.

Transcript for:Exploring Russian Literature's Modern Impact

Transcript for:
Exploring Russian Literature's Modern Impact