In the wake of Russia’s murderous invasion of Ukraine in 2022, there was no shortage of people (not least in Ukraine) who began to ask forcefully whether we should or could go on reading the classics of Russian literature – or at any rate read them as we had been accustomed to. How could we now read Dostoevsky as if his texts were not manifestly part of a poisonous legacy of violent national messianism and religious absolutism? How could we focus on the supposed moral subtlety, the polyphonic richness, the psychological insights when the overall effect of his world view was the bombing of hospitals and the butchery of prisoners of war?

But understanding Russia is not an optional extra in our world. And understanding the history of a culture is not a matter of deciding whether to award it a definitive certificate of goodness or badness. We’ve been here before with collective guilt, and it doesn’t help. As some have stressed, the moral resources and imaginative uneasiness of works like Dostoevsky’s novels can give us the perspective we need to challenge other bits of the legacy. Most great thinkers and artists sit in judgement on the stupider and nastier aspects of their own work – whether they know it or not.

Gary Saul Morson is one of the leading North American scholars of Russian literature. His recent book Wonder Confronts Certainty is a long and impassioned study of radicalism in 19th-century Russia, chronicled through both fiction and reportage. He spells out how a certain kind of ethical maximalism took hold of