Books: Atheist's Funeral March

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THE TARTAR STEPPE (214 pp.)—D/no Buzzafi—Farrar, Straus & Young ($3).

Two of the pioneers who staked out the new boundaries of modern literature were Novelists Feodor Dostoevsky and Franz Kafka. Dostoevsky made a pre-Freudian exploration of the grand canyon that separates a man's public acts from his private thoughts—the split in the human atom. But in Dostoevsky's day the social frame within which his split men operated was still all of a piece, held together by principles of law & order and morality. By the time Kafka came on the scene, early in the 20th century, the frame itself was split. The rules and principles of Dostoevsky's day had been shattered into a myriad of questions and conundrums to which only saints or heroes could find the effective answer. For the man-in-the-street, life was getting to be like an endless series of nightmare income-tax forms on which he was obliged to make out honest returns although he couldn't understand a word of them.

In two famous novels, The Trial and The Castle, Kafka described the workings of this nightmare. Since then, Kafka's visions of the bemusement of modern life have lurked in the background of many contemporary novels. But Italy's Dino Buzzati, best known in the U.S. for his children's story, The Bears' Famous Invasion in Sicily, is one of the few who have come close to rewriting a whole Kafka parable. The Tartar Steppe follows the style, mood and architecture of Kafka's Castle, the story of man struggling hopelessly to enter a stronghold in whose depths, could he but fathom them, lay faith and stability. The difference is that Buzzati's hero struggles from within the stronghold itself.

Dedicated Sentinel. Novelist Buzzati's fortress, which symbolizes the abode of brave souls, stands on a lonely mountaintop. It commands a view of a misty steppe to the north, from where it may at any moment be attacked. In Dostoevsky's day the invaders were known as "Nihilists" ; today, Buzzati calls them "Tartars." But their name is unimportant; what matters is that they represent the forces of spiritual despair and destruction.

Young Lieut. Drogo is posted to the fort. Like any man in a lonely outpost, physical or spiritual, Drogo is awed by the terrible solitude, but strengthened by the thought that he is a dedicated sentinel. In weak moments he is appalled to think that he has renounced all the normal benefits and joys of life; in others, he feels so proud of his role as defender-of-the-faith that he scorns the city as a place of "streets in the rain . . . plaster statues . . . damp barracks, tuneless bells, tired and misshapen faces, endless afternoons, dirty dusty ceilings."