Boston marathon bombing: how it connects Tolstoy, David Foster Wallace

“Quart and chert and schist and chrondite iron scabs in granite. Very old land. Look around you. The horizon trembling, shapeless. We are all of us brothers.”

He is seemingly describing Midwestern American soil but in the burst of short and abruptly ancient sentences that follows, it’s clear that he is talking about Earth before there were countries. That last and unexpected observance – “We are all of us brothers” – takes the reader by surprise. It is nakedly sentimental, curiously so for a writer who had a terror of being sentimental, but also tellingly so, for a writer who fought against the tedium of fresh-faced irony.

In the wake of the Marathon bombing in which two terribly misguided young men wounded their adopted country and, in their uncle Ruslan Tsarni’s anguished words, brought shame on their family and community, it also has an inconsolable pathos. 

"Hadji Murad" was Tolstoy’s last novel and one close to his heart. He understood why the Chechens, oppressed for years by Russian czars, hated his countrymen and called them dogs and swine and poisonous spiders, but he also did not underplay the ruthless violence they unleashed on the ordinary Russian soldier. The only time Wallace appears to have made a direct reference to Chechnya was in his essay on John McCain’s first presidential campaign. The senator, he wrote, got all kinds of questions including those by “Talmudically bearded guys asking about Chechnya.”

Although Wallace often spoke passionately about his admiration for the other great Russian, Dostoevsky – whom he called a writer with “balls” –  he once declared in an interview that “I'm the only ‘postmodernist’ you’ll ever meet who absolutely worships Leo Tolstoy.” After poking fun at Tolstoy’s “wacko, fundamentalist Russian Orthodox Christian” world view, Wallace said that  if one “edited out the heavenly Christian stuff," he agreed with Tolstoy that “the purpose of art was to communicate the idea of Christian brotherhood from man to man and to pass along some sort of message.”

It is the spirit of late Tolstoy – the late Talmudically bearded Tolstoy – that passes over that tragically childlike thought expressed in a flannel field: “We are all of us brothers.”

Nina Martyris is a Monitor contributor.

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