Gary Saul Morson is a prizewinning literary critic and the author of “Anna Karenina” in Our Time, Narrative and Freedom, and, most recently, Minds Wide Shut, cowritten with Morton Schapiro. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Morson has written for the New York Review of Books, American Scholar, New Criterion, and Wall Street Journal. He is Lawrence B. Dumas Professor of the Arts and Humanities at Northwestern University, where for three decades he has taught an iconic course on Tolstoy and Dostoevsky that is frequently the university’s most popular class.
An impeccable contribution to literary criticism, social philosophy, and philosophical anthropology. Against debilitating nihilism and secular and religious fundamentalism, it affirms dialogue, conversation, and the 'polyphonic' expression of rich and diverse personal points of view. Morson embodies the best insights of the Russian literary tradition he sets out to illuminate. -- Daniel J. Mahoney, author of <i>The Statesman as Thinker: Portraits of Greatness, Courage, and Moderation</i>