BiblioFiles #76: Literature as Life in the Russian Tradition

The Russians famously believe that instead of literature being fodder for life, life is fodder for literature. Isn’t that giving too high a place to art? The CenterForLit team turns to Gary Saul Morson as he demonstrates this idea and the overall centrality of literature to Russian culture in his New Criterion article entitled “How the great truth dawned.” In this episode of BiblioFiles, we kick around some of the arguments in this article and talks about what they might mean for the study of literature in general.

Referenced Works;

– “How the great truth dawned” by Gary Saul Morson in the September 2019 issue of The New Criterion

– The Gulag Archipelago and The Red Wheel by Aleksandr Solzhenitzyn

– Anna Karenina and War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

– Historical Consciousness by John Lukacs

– Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech

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