Last year I listened to an interview with Russian Literature Professor Gary Saul Morson that prompted me to read Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1878) for the first time. I won’t say how long it took me to finish this massive 700+ page book, but let’s just say it was less than the two years I spent reading Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. (When it comes to Russian novels, don’t rush me!) It turned out to be time well spent, and Anna Karenina has now earned a place at the top of my list of favorite novels of all time.
What caught my attention in the interview—it was on one of my favorite podcasts, Albert Mohler’s “Thinking in Public”—was how Professor Morson described the abiding relevance of Russian literature. His course on the Russian novel is the largest class at Northwestern University; when asked about its popularity, he responded,
The Russian writers were not shy about addressing what they called the ‘accursed questions’; the ultimate questions. You don’t get too many English or French writers thinking they can address questions about the very meaning of life or the basis of morality directly, but the Russians take these questions by the throat. Their characters wonder about them and go through different alternatives to them. These are the same questions that students realize are going to shape their own lives at this point. Some of these questions concern things that they are thinking about every moment, like the nature of love, for instance…The reason they take these classes [is that] they get to talk about things that really touch their lives, that you don’t have to persuade them are important.
For many of these students, especially those who attended public school and never went to church, these novels were their first encounters with serious discussions of life’s ultimate questions.
Russian literature also sheds light on our current cultural conflicts. Professor Morson observes,
Russian history tends to the extremes, and in the 20th century, that produced an entirely new form of society, to which we gave the name totalitarian. That was the product of the thought and actions of a particular group of intellectuals. The Russians coined the term intelligentsia for that group, and they didn’t mean what we would think of as intellectuals. They meant politically committed radical socialist-atheist intellectuals. Those people took over in 1917, but their opponents had been the great Russian writers—Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov—who kept warning that their way of thinking would lead to no good and formulated alternatives. You can see Russian history, from about 1860 on, as the argument between these two groups. Since the intelligentsia tended to the extreme, the opponents tended to come up with all sorts of interesting ideas, from which we could benefit…if we’re going to avoid the outcome that was present in the Soviet Union and some other societies since.
I realize I haven’t actually said anything about what Anna Karenina is about, but summaries can be easily found through a quick internet search. My main point is simply to encourage you to pick up one of those hefty old novels by Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. These are not mere relics of a bygone age; they are as theologically, psychologically, and culturally relevant as when they were first published, and time spent with them is a personal and cultural investment that pays off richly.
(If you’re looking for a copy of Anna Karenina to buy, check out the edition by Yale University Press, to which Professor Morson contributed the introduction.)
