Faith and Russian Literature

The great Russian writers professed the opposite of such certainty. God’s world is too intricate and mysterious for people to understand perfectly, they believed. Whereas intelligents proclaimed the simplicity of things, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov revealed their complexity. They were people of wonder who deepened our understanding of questions without providing final answers. They despised the radical intelligentsia. In 1909 the influential critic Mikhail Gershenzon famously observed that the surest gauge of the greatness of a Russian writer was the degree of his hatred for the intelligentsia.