The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Norman Mailer in the Light of Russian Literature: Difference between revisions

{{Byline|last=Peppard|first=Victor |abstract=Norman Mailer, if not a Russian writer, is an author in the light of Russian literature. Mailer’s literary dialogue is most highly developed with Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, but he also has noteworthy connections with some twentieth-century writers, including Mikhail Bulgakov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. On the broadest level, Mailer shares a passion with his Russian predecessors for engaged fiction that is morally, philosophically purposeful, and which tackles the large, eternal questions of life, often in striking, disarming, or blasphemous ways. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Mailer each has his own distinctive concerns and techniques, yet all three of them examine questions such as the nature of good and evil, the nature of God and the Devil, and how we should live this life. |url=https://prmlr.us/mr03pep}}

Mailer in connection with a number of different literary and cultural traditions, including especially the American and the Jewish.  What I propose to do here is to examine Norman Mailer, if not quite as a Russian

writer, then as a writer in the light of Russian literature. I am, of course,