Editor's Pick ·
Dostoevsky’s Explanation of Hamas’s Sadistic, Infanticidal, Frenzy
Ivan Karamazov in Gaza.
Gary Saul Morson
Gary Saul Morson is the Lawrence B. Dumas professor of the arts and humanities at Northwestern University and the author of, among other books, Anna Karenina in Our Time (Yale).
Latest Content
Response ·
Watch Gary Saul Morson and Jacob Howland Discuss the Dostoevsky Problem
By Gary Saul Morson, Jacob Howland, Jonathan SilverIn this month’s feature Mosaic essay , the literary scholar Gary Saul Morson argues that the great Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky presents a conundrum: On the one hand, he was the great writer of...
Editor's Pick ·
Dostoevsky’s Religious Imagination
Are there moral crimes, or just violations of arbitrary rules?
Editor's Pick ·
Ayn Rand, Russian Jewish Writer and Pioneer of “Capitalist Realism”
Atlas shlepped.
Editor's Pick ·
The Religious Impulse in Russian Literature
Christian novels by Jewish atheists.
Response ·
The Jews Who Guard Dostoevsky
By Gary Saul MorsonOne reason I love writing for Mosaic is the quality of responses, and both Adam Kirsch’s and Marat Grinberg’s are especially interesting. They invite real dialogue. Kirsch, in fact, mentions the Ru...
Monthly Essay ·
Why Dostoevsky Loved Humanity and Hated the Jews
By Gary Saul MorsonThe case of the literary master helps explain why people who devote themselves to compassion for all so often make an exception for Jews.
Editor's Pick ·
How Russian History, and Literature, Can Explain Western Sympathy for Hamas
Useful idiots.
Editor's Pick ·
How Accusations of Russophobia Devolve into Complaints about Jews
“When all else fails, one can usually unite Russians against Jewish influence.”
Observation ·
How the Jews of Russia Were Made Into the Jews of the Soviet Union
By Gary Saul MorsonCommitted to developing and supporting the intellectual, religious, and political leaders of the Jewish people and the Jewish state.
Editor's Pick ·
Was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn an Anti-Semite? A Proto-Putinist? Or Something Else Entirely?
The author The Gulag Archipelago and his critics.
Observation ·
Isaac Babel’s Odessa Tricksters
By Gary Saul MorsonCommitted to developing and supporting the intellectual, religious, and political leaders of the Jewish people and the Jewish state.
Monthly Essay ·
Isaac Babel’s Guide to Life and Death
By Gary Saul MorsonThe great Russian Jewish writer was caught between revolution and daily life, Bolsheviks and Jews, a desire to kill and an inability to pull the trigger. Did he ever choose?
Editor's Pick ·
Osip Mandelstam Reclaimed His Jewish Heritage When He Rediscovered His Poetic Voice and Turned against Soviet Tyranny
But a new biography argues that the poet wasn’t very Jewish or even very anti-Soviet.
Observation ·
Hunger Dreams in the USSR
By Gary Saul MorsonCommitted to developing and supporting the intellectual, religious, and political leaders of the Jewish people and the Jewish state.
Observation ·
The Best Books of 2020, Chosen by Mosaic Authors (Part III)
By Gary Saul Morson, Yehoshua Pfeffer, Daniel Polisar, Neil Rogachevsky, Michael WeingradCommitted to developing and supporting the intellectual, religious, and political leaders of the Jewish people and the Jewish state.
Observation ·
The Trouble at Northwestern
By Gary Saul MorsonCommitted to developing and supporting the intellectual, religious, and political leaders of the Jewish people and the Jewish state.
Observation ·
In Russia, Anti-Semitism Has Long Been the Opiate of the Intellectuals
By Gary Saul MorsonCommitted to developing and supporting the intellectual, religious, and political leaders of the Jewish people and the Jewish state.
Observation ·
Podcast: Gary Saul Morson on the New “Leninthink”
By Tikvah Podcast at Mosaic, Gary Saul MorsonCommitted to developing and supporting the intellectual, religious, and political leaders of the Jewish people and the Jewish state.
Observation ·
Two Russian-Jewish Women of Distinction, and Their Distinctive Diaries
By Gary Saul MorsonCommitted to developing and supporting the intellectual, religious, and political leaders of the Jewish people and the Jewish state.
Editor's Pick ·
In His Two Great Novels, Vasily Grossman Exposed the Similarities between Nazism and Communism, and Their Shared Consequences for the Jews
Stalingrad.
Editor's Pick ·
God and Man in the Gulag
The (fictional) Jewish prisoner who brought about Solzhenitsyn’s conversion.
Editor's Pick ·
The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism, and the Realities of Jewish Bolsheviks
Refuting an anti-Semitic libel need not involve papering over Soviet crimes.
Editor's Pick ·
Atheism Lay at the Core of Soviet Ideology, and Helps Explain Its Moral Monstrosity
Among the unbelievers.
Editor's Pick ·
Isaac Babel: Anthropologist of the Human Soul and of Human Cruelty
“Can it be that ours is the century in which the Jews perish?”