Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Will do. Another thought I had on the question of how is this not quite a Russian novel though it’s in the Russian language. If I think of Tolstoy a lot in Russian culture — he even says this about Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Scriabin — it’s fanatical of different sorts. Obviously, Bolsheviks were fanatical, and this novel is extremely anti-fanatical. It’s like Montaigne in France. It’s like Chekhov is his model for how to be an anti-fanatic. So part of what he’s doing, I think, is trying to retell Tolstoy, but from a humanist, anti-fanatical point of view. I feel a certain fanaticism about, certainly, Solzhenitsyn, certainly about Dostoevsky. I can think of a few things that are fanatical about Tolstoy. What comes to mind?…

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