“Ward № 6” – the Epitome of the Russian Intelligentsia’s Tragedy (original) (raw)

Russian Review, 2023

Over a career of almost forty years, Gary Saul Morson has written, co-written, or edited more than a dozen books on Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Bakhtin, and literary theory, countless scholarly essays, and many reviews for a broader reading public. The preeminent Slavist of his generation, Morson is also a legendary teacher: his lectures on the Russian novel at Northwestern University, where he has taught since 1986, typically attract hundreds of students. He is also one of our profession's few public intellectuals, a prominent critic of critical theory and of how the humanities, and especially literature, are taught in U.S. colleges and universities today. A strong advocate for the humanities in general education, in recent years Morson has argued for their importance in public policy as well. 1 His latest book, Wonder Confronts Certainty, is a polemical survey of modern Russian literature, history, and culture that brings together the various strains of his work. The title refers to two profoundly different ways of perceiving the world, and to the real-world consequences of each. On one side are those who wonder at the irreducible complexities of the world, see the future as unpredictable and open to unexpected possibilities, and insist on individuals' personal responsibility. On the other are those who "know" that the future is already determined by laws of History that have been discovered by modern social science. Morson's point is that, if the future is already determined and can be known, traditional notions of freedom, ethics, morality, and personal responsibility for one's actions are all rendered meaningless. Although there is nothing new about this argument, certainly not to readers of Dostoevsky, rarely, if ever, has it been argued by a literary critic or historian so fiercely and with such gusto. For Morson, literature is the source of the wisdom that allows us to live the good, that is, the ethical, life. Unimpressed by the stylistic innovations of literary modernism, appalled by its penchant for revolution, and horrified by the relativism of post-modernism, Morson has spent a lifetime reading, teaching, and writing about Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, whose novels he considers the high point of the genre. His position has long been that to read great literature is to join with the greatest thinkers of the past in a timeless dialogue concerning the eternal questions: What is the purpose of life? The nature of evil? How should we live? What is to be done? By allowing readers to spend significant amounts of time inside the heads of fully realized and thickly described characters, he argues, realist novels provide invaluable training and practice in navigating the personal, political, and moral dilemmas of everyday life. More than philosophy, theology, psychology, sociology, anthropology, or any other professional discourse, realist novels provide practical insights into these issues. Hence the importance he places on how literature is taught in colleges and universities.

The Tools and Functions of Humour in Chekhov’s Short Prose Fiction

Siyasi, Sosyal ve Kültürel Yönleriyle Türkiye ve Rusya 3, 2019

Chekhov's short stories are replete with various messages that may make the reader laugh and at the same time cry as they convey life's inner secrets hidden in the mind of every individual. Chekhov's short stories bring forth human beings' naked tendencies, desires, fears, happiness, and worries because the author's aim is to portray a human being as he/she is in reality. This study analyses Chekhov's short stories – “The Death of an Official”, “Joy”, “Kashtanka”, “A Chameleon”, “Unter Prishibeyev”, “Rothschild's Fiddle”, “Ionitch”, “Gooseberries”, and “The Man in a Case” – in terms of the tools and functions of humour. The tools of humour in his prose fiction are irony, caricature, and defamiliarisation. As regards the functions of humour, they are satirising materialism and the demise of genuine communication between people in modern age, questioning the strict adherence to social norms and blind submission to authority, and showing the sharp discrepancy between people's expectations and reality.