snowbound scholarship

A snowstorm can be devastating, or beautiful—much depends on where you find yourself. Finding oneself snowbound at home, with all the modern comforts intact, tends to the beautiful. What to do with the time?

I spent a large part of it with Gary Saul Morson’s nearly 500-page tome, Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions & Why Their Answers Matter (Belknap, 2023).

With perfect timing, in the calm before the storm, I was introduced to Morson by Heather King via one of her Substack posts.

I was intrigued, and wanted more, hence the book. I was able to get to the bookstore and home before the snow began to fall.

My exposure to Russian literature is little; Brothers Karamazov years ago, and more recently Chekhov’s short stories, but Morson has me hooked, and for a reason that surprises me: as I read his book, right from the get-go, I couldn’t help but notice the many parallels of Russian writers and literature with that of Jack Kerouac’s life and work, especially notes of wandering, suffering, faith, and conversion.

Morson documents the quixotic people and spiritual wanderers that populate Russian literature, how suffering in the Russian Orthodox tradition developed in Russian literature, how suffering can lead to faith, how several Russian writers experienced life-changing conversions, and much more.

There are timeless questions that both Russian writers and Kerouac attempted to answer with pen and paper.

By the way, Anton Chekhov wrote a short story titled On the Road.

ваше здоровье! Cheers!