REVIEWS

Being Cultured obsessiveness"—a mindset dismis­

sive of all activity other than rad­
by Rowan Williams ical activism. It nurtured a cult of
personal sacrifice, to the point of
suicidal risk, and it displayed a de­
WONDER CONFRONTS liberate indifference to any short­
certainty: Russian writers term improvement of the lives of
ON THE TIMELESS QUESTIONS
the suffering and despairing. It was
AND WHY THEIR ANSWERS
MATTER widely recognized as a kind of re­
by Gary Saul Morson ligious cult: a secular form of ISIS,
HARVARD UNIVERSITY, we might now say, with its apoca­
512 PAGES, $37 95 lyptic dramas, its casual unconcern
for innocent life, and its detach­
ment from actual outcomes in the
immediate future.
N 1909 the academic econ­ Bulgakov's analysis is worth read­
omist and former Marxist ing alongside Gary Saul Morson's
at the expense of productive labor:
Heroes don't collect the garbage,
drive buses, or nurse sick children.
He contrasts this "heroic" culture
with the classical virtues of the mo­
nastic life—a life of doing what is
necessary for the well-being of the
community, as the direct expression
of one's service to God. The spiritual
journey is all about embracing the
bus-driving, child-nursing, rubbish­
collecting side of life: making
things work for human persons. As
Bulgakov renders it, the spiritual
journey strongly resembles what fig­
ures like Dorothy Day in New York
and Madeleine Delbrel in Paris were

I
Sergei Bulgakov, a priest's son admirable survey of the Russian saying half a century later. Delbrel
who had recently and very cultural world before and after the puts it with her usual wit, saying
publicly returned to Chris­ 1917 revolution. Morson's chapter on that your "spiritual director" is the
the intelligentsia painstakingly fills
tian faith, published a long essay on phone that has to be answered, the
out Bulgakov's more abstract and
the crisis of Russian culture and the unwelcome visit that can't be post­
mentality of the Russian intelligen­ polemical discussion, which anat­ poned, the weather, the delayed bus
tsia. It is important to recognize that omized in detail the controlling on the way to work ... In the mon­
this distinctive mid-nineteenth ­ moral and spiritual mythology that astery, says Bulgakov, everything is
century Russian coinage, intelligen- pervaded intelligentsia life. Morson "obedience," from silent contem­
tsiya, meant for Bulgakov and his notes (citing another essay from the plation to washing up. He uses the
contemporaries something more same collection in which Bulgakov's Russian word podvizhnichestvo to
specific than it might today. It is not study appeared) that a true intelligent express this, a word quite impossi­
a shorthand for the chattering class­ would despise his or her job, if he or ble to translate but referring to the
es; it refers to a distinct group of ex­ she had one; the idea of enabling or commitment to podvig, spiritual
treme radical activists, determined sustaining a viable economic life acceptance and effort, in every in­
§ to destroy the structures of existing for the mass of the population was teraction with the world and others.
g society. This group's "maximalism" alien to the intelligentsia's ethos. Only something like podvizhnich­
□ encouraged random violence and Bulgakov interprets this ethos estvo ultimately produces societies
« what Bulgakov called "political in terms of a passion for "heroism" that work for everyone, Bulgakov
proposes. To adapt a phrase from
Rowan Williams is a former Archbishop of Canterbury. William Blake, we need to love our
neighbors in the “minute particu­
lars" of shared life, asking at every
turn what makes life possible, liv­
able, for the other for whom we are
responsible. Bulgakov had been ex­
perimenting with a form of Chris­
tian socialism in the years before he
wrote his essay, much influenced
by Dostoevsky's understanding of
mutual responsibility; and though
he would have some harsh things
to say about socialism as it played
itself out in the politics of his day,
he never abandoned this profound
sense of mutuality at the heart of
social reality.
As Morson makes plain, mutual­
ity was what the conscientious in­
telligent would most passionately
repudiate. The grotesque tragedy
Morson traces is a story of two­
fold betrayal. First, it is the shame­
ful failure of those liberals whose
armchair radicalism was given a
spice of dangerous drama by the
"heroics" of the activists. Morson
gives an unsparing account of the
atrocities committed by some of
these activists and of the refusal of
bien-pensant progressives to con­
demn their tactics. Dostoevsky's
fictional representations of all this
in The Possessed and The Brothers
Karamazov turn out to be anything
but exaggerations. Second, intelli­
gentsia heroics could be and were
manipulated by the Bolsheviks,
who institutionalized terror and
indiscriminate butchery as a con­
scious means of social control, "au­
thority untrammeled by any laws"
(a phrase of Lenin's, which Morson
quotes). Authority of this kind could
systematically set out to "put an end
once and for all of [sic] the papist-
Quaker babble about the sanctity
of human life" (Trotsky this time).
The result was the corporate insan­
ity of Stalinism: the ceaseless purg­
ing of every rank of public service
to secure an environment of fear
in the face of unpredictable force;
and the pathos of dedicated revo­
lutionaries embracing their own
arbitrary extermination as a form
of revolutionary self-sacrifice, the of imagination; the strange trans­
reductio ad absurdum of "heroism." mutations of language itself; the
alienness and the familiarity of the
orson expertly steers past (individual as much as collec­
M us through the complex­ tive); perhaps ultimately—though
ities of the maximalist Morson does not go this far—the
mindset, including its fascination
difference of God and the world,
with mechanistic models of hu­ the ultimate gap between what is
man behavior, and the concomitant conditioned and what is uncondi­
disparaging of the life of the imag­ tioned. The title of Morson's book in
ination. The goal, wrote the Soviet effect puts before us the diverse re­
author and industrial commissar sponses we can make to difference:
Aleksei Gastev (executed by Stalin in the wonder that accepts limita­
1939), should be "the mechanization, tion, and the hunger for a world in
not only of gestures, not only of which we are never out of control,
production methods, but of every­ never at a loss, never discovering,
day thinking." It has often been said retelling, or rethinking. This ten­
sion runs through the whole story
Morson tells, from the beginnings
of Russian radicalism in the mid­
nineteenth century to the night­
mares of Stalinism, from the battles
of Herzen, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky
against antihuman theorizing to
the more recent work of writers in
the same tradition, such as Svetlana
Alexievich and Eugene Vodolazkin.
Morson starkly juxtaposes the end­
lessly inviting exploration of human
complexity by such writers with the
feverish and monomaniacal obses­
sions of nihilists and apocalyptic
radicals of all shades.
Unsurprisingly, one of his great­
est heroes (in a benign sense of the
word) is Chekhov, that unchallenged
that certain kinds of revolutionary master of deflationary realism,
rhetoric base their appeal on the si­ gentle irony, and unsentimental
multaneous celebration of total an­ compassion. He quotes Chekhov's
archy and total determinism—the letter to his brother defining what
complete abandonment of a condi­ it means to be "cultured"—a series
tioning history, combined with the of characterizations that goes well
acceptance of an inevitable trajecto­ beyond what we might associate
ry toward a new social order. Each with that word. Self-respect, a
flatters the ego in its own way: We sense of proper obligation to oth­
are encouraged to think of ourselves ers, generous sympathy, a sense of
as existing completely without con­ proportion, a profound antipathy to
straint on our wills, and as somehow lying and posturing, and a willing­
ennobled by being in tune with the ness quite simply to work. All these
arc of reality's evolution. things belong with genuine culture,
What holds so much of the in­ putting into perspective any "cul­
telligentsia mindset together is a tural" ambition that does not attend
dread of real, embodied difference: to immediate material reality. This
the impenetrability of another con­ definition is remarkably in tune
sciousness; the uncontrollability with Bulgakov's affirmation of the
prosaic "obedience" of the monk as
a model for social virtue.
Morson is, of course, concerned
to remind us that obsessional cer­
tainty, political tunnel vision, and
what he calls "theoretism,” the pre­
ferring of theory to tangible reality,
are not the preserve of the political
left alone. Dostoevsky may be the
finest critic in European literature of
determinist and reductive doctrines
of the human, and of the ease with
which good people are lured into ap­
palling evils by utopian fantasy; but
he has his own flirtations with theo­
cratic ideals, and (to put it mildly)
some problems with the "difference”
of other nations, not least the Jews.
Solzhenitsyn, nearer our own times,
is both a lucid, moving witness to
the horrors of the Soviet camps and
a fierce anti-Western polemicist,
stubbornly wedded to a kind of Rus­
sian exceptionalism whose legacy is
more and more disturbing. We do
not need much reminding of this
shadow side, faced as we are with
the brutality of a resurgent Russian
messianism and a callous indiffer­
ence to random slaughter worthy of
the most devoted intelligent.
ITHOUT RECYCLING
W clichés about the Russian
soul, Morson helps us to
grasp how diverse forms of maxi­
malism crop up across the literature.
He touches on the pervasiveness of
interrelated types—the "pilgrim” or
holy wanderer, who refuses stability
and security, alongside the (usually
but not always youthful) idealist,
and the straightforward nihilist.
He does not discuss in detail the
recurrent ideal of the "holy fool,"
although this archetype stands be­
hind many literary representations
of all three of his models. The no­
tion of yurodstvo, "foolishness for
Christ's sake,” helps to make sense
of the landscape: Holy folly is a
way of declaring the radical gulf
between the values of the gospel—
poverty, self-forgetfulness, un­
conditional compassion—and the
values of human societies, includ­
ing Christian societies.
But unmoored from its doctrinal
anchorage, yurodstvo drifts inexo­
rably toward contrarian anarchy,
a dissolution of all value and so
of any sense of the nonnegotiable
dignity of the embodied human.
The revolutionary hero is—and
Bulgakov follows Dostoevsky in
diagnosing this—a secular messiah,
and the promise he (it is normally a
"he”) offers is an apocalyptic trans­
valuation of values, a terminally
violent catharsis through destruc­
tion. George Steiner argued that
the appalling, seductive, hopeless
figure of Stavrogin in Dostoevsky's
The Possessed is subtly presented as
a kind of ersatz Christ, no less than
is the deceptively benign figure of
Myshkin in The Idiot. We should
never imagine that "secular" proj­
ects are necessarily without mythol­
ogy, and Morson is good at alerting
us to the wafer-thin character of the
secular carapace in so much of the
Russian revolutionary agenda.
It is hard to do justice to Morson's
book in a brief space. Its importance
is not only in its analysis of the Rus­
sian imagination from the nine­
teenth to the twenty-first century,
though much in these pages will
illuminate those aspects of modern
geopolitics that are resistant to "ra­
tional" accounts of national identity
or diplomatic advantage. There are
more general points to be digested.
As I have noted, it is dangerously
easy to conclude that the "revo­
lutionary” mind is the exclusive
home of the nightmare pathologies
expressed and explored in the liter­
ature Morson reads with us. Abso­
lutism, mechanistic social models,
inflated accounts of individual will
or creativity, the reduction of all
difference to a kind of primordial
all-consuming warfare, and the con­
sequent search for heroes will all be
found across the political spectrum.
Messianic cults of leadership are
generated by both right and left—
these days, more by the right than
otherwise, it seems. The reluctance
to acknowledge that human societ­
ies have learned and changed—in
other words, the reluctance to take
history seriously—is evident in the
barbarizing of much modern "con­
servatism" in conspiracist rhetoric
and nationalist paranoia, and the
shapelessness of a progressive vision
that has no fundamental doctrine
of human dignity beyond the sum
total of identitarian claims. And,
as Morson reminds us, a would-
be "liberal” ethos that lets itself be
captured by the romance of the ab­
solute individual will is at risk of
colluding with a profound destruc­
tiveness—whether it is allied to un­
qualified identitarian activism or to
economic laissez-faire.
Chekhov's humane, pragmatic ac­
count of what it is to be "cultured”
should stand alongside the bitter
dramas of Dostoevsky or Pasternak
or Grossman as a lesson to be pon­
dered. We talk glibly, angrily, and
endlessly about culture wars; it
wouldn't hurt to talk about what
counts as culture in the first place,
and about what it might mean to
inhabit a culture. What skills do we
need in order to maintain a critical
and appreciative memory of the
past, amid an irreducibly diverse
contemporary reality in which the
stranger is not simply going to disap­
pear, and with a keen awareness of
human crises and tragedies that can
be properly confronted only when
we recognize that we share them
with our enemies as well as our
friends? Ultimately we are brought
back to Dostoevsky's and Bulgakov's
(and Christ's and St Paul's) challenge:
How shall we live together in full
accountability for one another's life
and hope? Morson is right to make
us think through the ways in which
these issues have been meditated on
(and lived out) in the rich, conflict­
ed, extreme, fertile soil of modern
Russian civilization. Any possible
political renewal in our present wil­
derness must be nourished by rsa
that landscape. lu
 License and Permissible Use Notice

These materials are provided to you by the American Theological Library Association, operating as Atla,
in accordance with the terms of Atla's agreements with the copyright holder or authorized distributor of
the materials, as applicable. In some cases, Atla may be the copyright holder of these materials.

You may do wnlo ad, print, and share these materials for your individual use as may be permitted by the
applicable agreements among the copyright holder, distributors, licensors, licensees, and users of these
materials (including, for example, any agreements entered into by the institution or other organization
from which you obtained these materials) and in accordance with the fair use principles of United States
and international copyright and other applicable laws. You may no t, for example, copy or email these
materials to multiple web sites or publicly po st, distribute for commercial purposes, modify, or create
derivative works of these materials without the copyright holder's express prior written permission.

Please contact the copyright holder if you would like to request permission to use these materials, or
any part of these materials, in any manner or for any use not permitted by the agreements described
above or the fair use provisions o f United States and international copyright and other applicable laws.
For information regarding the identity of the copyright holder, refer to the copyright information in
these materials, if available, or contact Atla using the Co ntact Us link at www.atla.com.

Except as otherwise specified, Copyright © 2024 Atla.