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Dostoevsky, or Tolstoy?
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20607 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1992 |
2,626 Words |
| Author
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Lee Congdon
Lee Congdon writes regularly on modern literature. He teaches
eastern European history at James Madison University. |
On March 1, 1881, young Russian terrorists murdered their country's "Little Father," Czar Alexander II. The assassination came only weeks after the death of Fyodor Dostoevsky, who in works of shattering profoundity translated the experience of nineteenth-century Russia's revolutionary and spirituality orphaned young people into universal dramas of generational conflict and--more important--religious decision. Although he himself had chosen Christ, Dostoevsky resisted the temptation to stack the deck against his fictional unbelievers. Indeed, many readers of The Brothers Karamazov (completed in1880), a novel that revolves around the crime of parricide, have found utterly convincing the argument advanced by the atheist murdered Ivan, that because innocent children often suffer one must reject God and the world He had made. But whether they came down on the side of belief or unbelief, most who have taken the existential risk of entering the Karamazov's world have agreed with what Ivan tells his brother Alyosha: "It may be different for other people, but we in our green youth have to settle the eternal questions first."
David James Duncan has placed these words at the head of a pivotal chapter in The Brothers K, his distinguished second novel, for like Dostoevsky he wished to explore the inner history of a rebellious generation, in his case that which was coming of age in America during the 1960s, as a means by which to ask and answer the eternal questions. That history, he clearly believes, reveals the same logic that in Dostoevsky's Russia led from social conscience to nihilism, from Aleksandr Herzen to Sergey Nechayev (on whom, incidentally, Dostoevsky modeled Peter Verkhovensky in The Possessed).
Too respectful of the Russian genius literary and philosophic mastery to attempt a pare rewrite of The Brothers Karamazov, Duncan has constructed his work on a similarly grandiose scale and focused his story on brothers who, like the Karamazovs, age alienated from their parents and in search of life's meaning. Unlike the Karamazovs, however, the brothers Chance provide us with some comic relief, often produced by the kind of preternatural wisdom dispensed by J.D.Salinger's fictional children. Moreover, in The Brothers Karamazov, the father, Fyodor, is a depraved drunk and seducer, while in The Brothers K, "Papa" Hugh Chance is a man of fundamental decency.
A left-handed pitcher good enough to attract the attention of major-league scouts, he loses the thumb on his throwing hand in an accident at the paper mill where he reluctantly signed on after developing arm trouble. The career-ending tragedy leaves him feeling bitter and defeated,
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