Atheist's Funeral March

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."

But what exactly, he asks himself, is he defending? What is his faith? He cannot say. Nor can any of the soldiers at the fort. Some of them are so disillusioned that they abandon the garrison at the first opportunity; many of them are duped into remaining against their will. All of them know that the fort's equipment is obsolete. But few of them worry. The invaders, say the skeptics, will come by a different route; probably they will not come at all. Only a handful of dedicated soldiers really believe in the threat of the North and yearn for the day when their fidelity will be put to the test. And even these rare men suspect that the only reason for their faith is that they want to "give life some significance."

Dreams to Dust. Except for a couple of brief, unsatisfactory leaves, Lieut. Drogo stays at the fort until he is an old man. And when, at last, the "Tartars" suddenly advance upon the fort, Drogo is so decrepit that he is kicked out to make room for stronger men. Back in the city, utterly disillusioned by his wasted life, he is promptly attacked by a new enemy--death. Mustering his last reserves of discipline and courage, Drogo meets this fatal enemy with a brave smile. As he sees it, in his last moments, death only means that "The worst is over and they [i.e., the facts of life] cannot cheat you any more."

This sounds like the Existentialist answer to the modern dilemma--an answer which assumes that all questions of faith are pointless and only man's pride and courage are of value. It is an answer that would have left Kafka as restless as before and convinced Dostoevsky that the Nihilists had won the day. But Author Buzzati, no Existentialist himself, presents it as a universal truth, a faith to die for; and so, though The Tartar Steppe suffers from being a copy of The Castle, it gains from the gravity and human sympathy with which it is written. Like many another modern novel, it reads like an atheist's funeral march--in which the composer (to say nothing of the corpse) is numbly resigned to the belief that man begins in dreams and ends in dust.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.