2024

Established in 1983, the Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize, sponsored by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) and the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies at Stanford University, is awarded annually for the most important contribution to Russian, Eurasian, and East European studies in any discipline of the humanities or social sciences published in English in the United States in the previous calendar year. 

Honorable Mention: Gary Saul Morson, Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter (Harvard University Press, 2023)

Gary Saul Morson’s new book is a tour de force. Beautifully written, elegantly argued, and quietly revisionist, it reconsiders the canon of nineteenth-century Russian literature and seeks answers to big, challenging, inescapable questions often taken up by Russian writers: Does life have a purpose? What can a person do when in the face of systemic violence and injustice? Is counterterrorism the only response to state terrorism? Do our choices or mere chance determine the course of events? What does morality mean in an age of science and radical uncertainty? By putting Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, and other writers in dialogue with one another and with some of their twentieth century successors, Morson does not just offer new readings of classic texts; instead, he discovers in these writers an enduring humanism and profound empathy. But Morson also detects a fascination with violence and a dangerous tendency to take ideas to their extremes, and in this way helps us understand terrorism and radical imaginaries, with implications for the twenty-first century. Most importantly, however, this book eloquently affirms the power of dialogue, conversation, and toleration—values and practices that are pivotal for the age of extremes in which we live. 

Winner: Egor Lazarev

Prize Committee: Robert Nemes (chair), Tomila Lankina, Ana Hedberg Olenina, and Douglas Rogers