The Brothers Incandenza: translating ideology in Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest.(Critical essay)

 
  Should I find it depressing that the young Dostoevsky was just like 
  young U.S. writers today, or kind of a relief? Does anything ever 
  change?--David Foster Wallace ("Feodor's Guide," 28 n. 21). 

I. Ideology, Belief, and Translations

In his Understanding David Foster Wallace (2003), Marshall Boswell contends that the contemporary American novelist David Foster Wallace, in his novel Infinite Jest, makes "overt" the theme of

 
  artistic patricide through the novel's intricate allusions to two 
  primary texts of patrimonial anxiety, Shakespeare's Hamlet and 
  Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. The Hamlet references are 
  ubiquitous, beginning with the novel's (and film's) title ... while 
  the Dostoevsky references are a bit more muted and hence less 
  important. (1) 

I disagree with Boswell simply based on the poor logic of the claim that the Dostoevsky allusion is insignificant because it is the more subtly embedded of the primary intertextual allusions. Second, I contend that Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov is much more important to Wallace's overall aesthetic agenda than the more obvious Shakespeare allusion. Wallace has patterned Infinite Jest so meticulously after Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov (1880) that in many significant ways, Infinite Jest is a rewriting or figurative translation of The Brothers Karamazov into the contemporary American idiom and context. (2) First, it is clear from Wallace's essay, "Feodor's Guide"--a review article of Stanford scholar Joseph Frank's multivolume biography of Dostoevsky--published in the Village Voice Literary Supplement (1996) just three months after the release of Infinite Jest (January 1996), that Wallace aligns himself with the Dostoevskyean tradition. (3) Next, there is a real similarity between the fiction of Dostoevsky and Wallace, in terms of plot, themes, stylistics, and in the correspondence between both artists' unflinching eschatological depiction of debased and despairing human nature toward a redemptive end. (4)

In "Feodor's Guide" Wallace comments on the "excruciatingly Victorianish translations" of Constance Garnett (26 n. 5) and also critiques the then-recent translation of Crime and Punishment by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky by quoting from their translation:

 
  "'Now is the Kingdom of reason and light and ... and will and 
  strength ... and now we shall see! Now we shall cross swords!' he 
  added presumptuously, as if addressing some dark force and challenging 
  it." Umm, why not just "as if addressing some dark force"? Umm, can 
  you challenge a dark force without addressing it? Or is there, in the 
  Russian, something that keeps the above from being redundant, stilted, 
  bad? If so, why not recognize that in English it's bad, and clean it 
  up in an acclaimed new Knopf translation? I just don't get it. (26 n. 
  5, author's emphasis)