D-Day with the Fourth Division; he was in the 12th Infantry."(3) I think it is safe to say that Salinger read Brothers at least once. By 1951 he is able to say that he loves Dostoevsky, along with a number of other writers who have influenced him. (4) For Salinger to have been influenced by Dostoevsky in the writing of Catcher , one would expect him to have read Dostoevsky quite early - well before 1941, when he first began to compose actual chapters of the novel.(5) But one can certainly imagine the twenty-year-old Salinger, a member of Whit Burnett's writing class at Columbia University in 1939, deciding to read Dostoevsky's greatest novel.(6) In the discussion that follows I shall refer more often to parallels than direct influence, but the reader will understand that "influence" is usually meant. The most compelling parallel in the two novels is that between Holden Caulfield and Kolia Krasotkin. In fact, I will deal in this article almost exclusively with that portion of Brothers treating "the boys": several early chapters, Book 10, and the final chapter of the Epilogue - about 50,000 words in all. It is a nicely contained subplot, a novel within a novel that nevertheless carries all the major themes of the larger work. It is true that Catcher has about 85,000 words, but it is still not really a novel from the Russian point of view, but only a povest' , as the story of Kolia and the boys would also