Gary Saul Morson

Socialist Realism and Literary Theory

FOR UNDERSTANDABLE REASONS, most discussions of socialist realism resemble elegies more than analyses. They usually lament the passing of the pre-revolutionary tradition, deplore the brutal methods by which literature has been emasculated and writers silenced, and condemn the government policies that have rewarded a Fadeev with a Stalin prize and removed Dostoevsky from the secondary school curriculum. Now, I also prefer Dostoevsky to Fadeev and think that literature in the Soviet Union is not fulfilling the social functions I would most like to see literature fulfill. That said, however, I also think that the elegiac is not the only mode for writing about socialist realism. There is, or should be, room for the sort of analysis that would treat socialist realism as a literary fact, not simply an unfortunate political consequence, without being accused of apologizing for it. The aim of this essay is to suggest some fruitful ways of looking at socialist realism and the socialist realist novel-fruitful, that is, for our understanding of the nature and function of literature as a whole. However poor socialist realism may be when judged by the standards usually employed in the West to praise Dostoevsky and Dickens, it can still serve as a useful test case for thinking about key problems in contemporary literary theory, literary history, and comparative literature.

Introduction: Peace by Means of Culture

It is often argued that a shared culture, or at least shared cultural references or practices, can help to foster peace and prevent war. This essay examines in detail and criticizes one such argument, made by Patrick Leigh Fermor, in the context of his discussing an incident during World War II, when he and a captured German general found a form of agreement, a ground for peace between them, in their both knowing Horace’s ode I.9 by heart in Latin. By way of introducing the sixth and final installment of the Common Knowledge symposium “Peace by Other Means,” this essay proposes that Leigh Fermor’s narrative be understood in terms of commerce, rather than consensus. It concludes by examining Ezra Pound’s use of the word commerce in his poem “A Pact” (“Let there be commerce between us”) to define his relationship with his “detested” and “pig-headed” poetic “father,” Walt Whitman.

WAR AND PEACE Meditations of a Tolstoy Scholar

Despite their professed multiculturalism, educated Americans find it hard to imagine that others do not share their liberal values. Does not everyone love their children and want peace? The author of the article, a Tolstoy scholar and student of Russian culture, discusses topics—war, revolution, and what one scholar has called “secular kenosis ”—that mark radical differences between Russians and Americans. He then describes a debate between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky over whether morality demands military intervention when a barbarous regime practices widespread torture and massacre. The two novelists pose the issues in ways that shed light on a question still relevant today.

Contingency, games, and wit

When we cannot explain away the fundamental disorder of the world by finding a science, constructing a supposed social science, or passing laws, we may create artificial worlds that we can be sure conform to our minds because we have made them. Games create such a world, whose rules cannot be violated because then we would not be playing the game at all. Various games have ways of confronting contingency: they may allow for statistically predictable chance events (roulette), statistically unpredictable chance events (a bad hop in baseball), challenges by the audience (improvisations), or challenges to rules that create a meta-game of changing the game (Lewis Carroll, Magic: The Gathering). Witticisms may be understood as a special sort of verbal gaming that asserts the ability of the mind to master the contingency of the social world. It involves presentness, turns social space into a salon, thrives on challenges, and becomes especially impressive in locales apparently farthest from a salon, such as the deathbed or gallows. But as the stories of Alexander and Diogenes show, it is possible to outwit the wit.

Dostoevsky and the Literature of Process: What Open Time Looks Like

This essay examines two images of time that have persisted in Western thought: one pictures time as closed, the other as open. Time is open if, at least at some moments, more than one event could take place. The essay looks especially at examples of intention and temporality in Dostoevsky’s writings, which represent time in an open and processual way.

Prosaics and Other Provocations : Empathy, Open Time, and the Novel

ion in thought experiments, 201-3 Accident. See Chance and accident Accursed questions, 2, 10 Acquired taste and distaste, 150 Active love, 141f Actors: and spectators, 238-39; vs. spectators, 67-8; See also Spectator Adages (Erasmus), 105, 115, 244 Adam and Eve, 127, 157 Addictive desires, 146 Advance preparation and wit, 242 “Adventitious happenings” (Malinowski), 63 “Adventure” (Whitehead), 80 Aesopian language, 82-84 Aesthetic: of expandability, 105; of necessity, 100-103; of