Books: 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...