This is thinking in public, a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about

front-line theological and cultural issues with the people who are shaping them.

I'm Albert Mola, your host and president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville,

Kentucky.

It says something that the largest single class at Northwestern University is made up of several

hundred students taking a class in Russian literature. Gary Saul Morrison, the

professor in that class, is indeed an expert in Russian literature and he is a distinguished literary

critic.

Professor Morrison is the Lawrence B. Duma Professor of the Arts and Humanities in the Department

of Slavic Languages and Littitures at Northwestern University,

where his introduction to Russian literature course is that most popular of electives at the university.

His books and writings cover a wide range of issues, but his most important works have been

considerations of the great realist novels of Russian literature.

His most important recent book is entitled Anna Karinina in Our Time, Seeing More wisely, published

by Yale University Press.

Professor Morrison, welcome to thinking in public. Professor Morrison, you have made the argument that the knowledge of Russian literature

is really incredibly important for even modern Americans in 2018. Why is that so and why is

it particularly so related to Russian literature? Well there are a number of reasons for this. Partly, they grow out of the facts of Russian history.

Russian history tends to the extremes and in the 20th century that produced an entirely new form of society which to which we gave the name totalitarian.

And that was the product of the thought and actions of a particular group of intellectuals,

the Russians use it, coined the term intelligence here for that group, and they didn't mean

what we think of as intellectuals, they meant politically committed radical socialist atheist intellectuals and those people took

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