The Novel Truth

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