Gary Saul Morson

Russians take positions to the extreme. As a result, Russian intellectual history shows us where ideas may lead—and in Russia’s case, really did. The English prided themselves on moderation and suspicion of radical abstractions, but Russians regarded anything short of ultimate positions as . . . . Continue Reading »

No doctrine was more fundamental to the Bolsheviks than atheism. They professed absolute certainty that nothing exists beyond the chain of cause and effect described by the sciences. From day one they gleefully arrested priests, defaced icons, and subjected believers to mockery or worse. . . . . Continue Reading »

In this unexpectedly timely collection of essays, the journalist David Satter recalls an adventure that informed all his subsequent writing about Russia and the ­Soviet Union. In 1977, having met some Lithuanian dissidents, Satter set off to visit their Estonian counterparts. Eluding the police . . . . Continue Reading »

Even at the height of the Cold War, no one thought of banning Russian literature, art, or music. Continue Reading »

In his speech “The Strenuous Life,” Theodore Roosevelt identified “the American character” with “the life of toil and effort, of labor and strife.” “The man who does not shrink from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil,” Roosevelt asserted, “wins the ultimate . . . . Continue Reading »

When Dostoevsky wrote his last and greatest novel, The Brothers Karamazov, the ­revolutionary movement that would lead to Bolshevism was well ­underway. The terrorist organization People’s Will—one of the first such organizations in the world—performed daring assassinations and . . . . Continue Reading »

The sort of conflicts that have occurred at other colleges and universities at last came to Northwestern. Continue Reading »

No writer understood loneliness better than Chekhov. People long for understanding, and try to confide their feelings, but more often than not, others are too self-absorbed to care. In Chekhov’s plays, unlike those of his predecessors, characters speak past each other. Often enough, they talk in . . . . Continue Reading »

Between 1900 and 1917, waves of unprecedented terror struck Russia. Several parties professing incompatible ideologies competed (and cooperated) in causing havoc. Between 1905 and 1907, nearly 4,500 government officials and about as many private individuals were killed or injured. Between 1908 and . . . . Continue Reading »

The Aviator by eugene vodolazkin translated by lisa c. hayden oneworld, 400 pages, $26.99 In one of the greatest memoirs of the Stalin years, Nadezhda Mandelstam wrote, “We have to get over our loss of memory.” Beginning with Gorbachev’s glasnost, and especially after the fall of communism, . . . . Continue Reading »