The Lute and the Scars

NOTES TO THE ORIGINAL EDITION

Original Notes

These explanatory notes, a kind of critical apparatus for the individual stories in this collection, were written and first published by Mirjana Miočinović. The vast majority of them have been translated from the first edition of Lauta i ožiljci (published in 1994 by BIGZ in Beograd). There are four exceptions to this attribution. The last sentence in the entry for “The Lute and the Scars” and the final three paragraphs of the entry for “The Poet” are additions taken from the 1995 edition of Skladište. In the notes to “The Debt,” the comparative material on Eugène Ionesco is also from Skladište. The entire entry for “The Marathon Runner and the Race Official,” like the beginning and end of the story itself, was taken from the subsequently published French and German editions of the story, since I have not yet seen a Serbian edition. — JKC

General Remarks

The stories from Kiš’s literary estate entitled “The Stateless One,” “Jurij Golec,” “The Lute and the Scars,” “The Poet,” and “The Debt,” all of which we are bringing out in this volume, originated in the years between 1980 and 1986, connected more or less directly with the book The Encyclopedia of the Dead. We have supplemented these with the short two-part prose piece “A and B,” which in manuscript form had no title. Although it does not seem to fit the definition of “short fiction,” it does function in a metaphoric (and metonymic) way in relation to the larger body of Kiš’s work in prose: hence its place in this collection, and its position at the end, as a sort of “lyric epilogue.”

The stories “Jurij Golec” and “The Poet” are being published here for the first time. The others have already been published in this order: “A and B” in the book Život, literatura (Svjetlost, Sarajevo, 1990); “The Stateless One” in Srpski književni glasnik (1992, vol. 1); “The Debt” in Književne novine (1992, pp. 850–851); and “The Lute and the Scars” in Nedeljna borba (April 30–May 5, 1993).

In giving to this book the title The Lute and the Scars, we were guided by the fact that Kiš named two of his three collections of stories after one of the collected tales themselves; he did so less because of the story’s privileged position in its collection than because of the ability of the title itself to bring thematic unity to the other stories. It seemed to us that we could accomplish something similar with this title, in addition to enjoying its inherently paradoxical quality.

The Stateless One

The story “The Stateless One,” which comes down to us in “in-complete and imperfect” form, was inspired by the life of Ödön von Horváth. It will not be difficult for the reader to comprehend the reasons for Kiš’s interest in this “Central European fate” that ended in such a bizarre manner on the Champs-Élysées on the eve of the Second World War: Ödön von Horváth died on June 1, 1938, during a storm that descended abruptly on Paris, obliterating trees and sweeping away everything in its path. A heavy branch took Ödön von Horváth’s life, right in front of the doors to the Théâtre Marigny. He had arrived in Paris after an encounter with a “premium fortune-teller” in Amsterdam, who had prophesied that an event awaited him in the French capital that would fundamentally alter his life! (It is also easy to recognize the figure of an unnamed poet who plays an indirect but important role in this story: Endre Ady, whose life and literary fate was intertwined in similar ways with those of both Horváth and Kiš. In this sense, “The Stateless One” is in some of its passages a condensed replica of parts of Kiš’s story “An Excursion to Paris,” which dates from 1959 and was dedicated to Ady.)

Kiš first obtained translations of some of Horváth’s plays in 1970. These were the French versions that Gallimard published in 1967 (namely Italian Night, Don Juan Comes Back from the War, and Tales from the Vienna Woods), prepared with an introduction that provided French readers with basic information about the life of this writer who had been utterly unknown up to that point. At this point Horváth began appearing in Kiš’s “warehouse” of emblematic figures and “themes for novels, topics for stories, parallels. ” But ten years would have to pass (this was the decade in which he wrote Hourglass, A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, and The Anatomy Lesson) before the fate of this stateless man, which was attractive for reasons far exceeding mere literary interest, would again come to the front of Kiš’s mind. For it was in 1979 that Kiš began his ten-year long “Joycean exile,” at the end of which, as was the case with Horváth as well, came death in Paris. A further, external stimulus came from a recently published doctoral dissertation concerning history and fiction in Horváth’s dramas (Jean-Claude François, Histoire et fiction dans le théâtre d’Ödön von Horváth, Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 1978). On an unnumbered page of the manuscript of “The Stateless One,” we find the following:

A story about the apatride or the Man Without a Country has been an obsession of mine for years. Actually from the time I read a short note in a magazine about his life and his tragic end. At first I had in mind writing some kind of retrospective or scholarly study about him. I wrote down a few observations, some of those naïve notes in which you conceal your own thoughts behind your characters. That was all really just appeasing my conscience and the creation of an illusion that notes like that are the beginnings of stories, their nuclei, the load-bearing beams of a future prose construction. But of course I got no further than that. And then one day I came across (by accident?) a PhD thesis that dealt with my stateless man. His character came back to life for me at once. And what did I find in this dissertation that related to my hero? A mass of useful information, dates, facts; but my story, my imaginary story atomized. The secret and mysterious atmosphere enveloping the life and death of my “hero” dissipated abruptly. But I nonetheless resolved to persevere, to try to bring back the atmosphere of secrets and the unknown. To write according to my own lights the bare-bones framework of facts, similar to a net of squares made of intersecting words.

(This passage, unchanged, could have formed part of a Postscript to The Encyclopedia of the Dead. It was probably written with that goal in mind.)

In manuscript form among Kiš’s papers were preserved seven tables of contents of a book of stories that would be published in 1983 under the title The Encyclopedia of the Dead. The first two, which we can trace without difficulty to the year 1980, included the title “Ödön von Horváth,” with a notation of the number of pages envisioned (ten in the first table of contents, and eight in the second). Both of the tables were written out by hand on half-sheets of typewriter paper. A remnant of cellophane tape attests to the fact that the list of titles (as if it were some literary duty) had been hung up in plain view somewhere. No tale involving Ödön von Horváth under any title, however, is to be found on the other five tables of contents, all of which were typed and which contain the titles of finished stories. We did, however, find forty-seven typed pages in Kiš’s papers belonging to a “topic for a story” about the life and death of an apatride. One of them bears the title “APATRIDE/MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY,” typed in all capitals, and below that, in parentheses, “OUR HOMELAND IS THE MIND.” We used the first, underlined word as the title of the story, regarding the other two titles as variants. Among the forty-seven mostly uncorrected pages, we were able to discern two entities; their relationship to each other was one of first and second versions. The first consists of fourteen numbered pages, with traces of corrections, apparently carried out in one sitting, with a fine-point black pen. The story of the stateless man, now bearing the name Egon von Németh (the exchange of the surname Horváth for Németh, aside from purely literary concerns, which lie outside the scope of these notes, is interesting in its own right: one common family name used to designate Hungarians living along the borders to Croatian areas has been traded for an equally common family name for Hungarians from border areas next to German-speaking territory), flows continuously in this version, without any kind of breaks, even among sections that are chronologically very far apart. In the text, however, there are fragments, designated by numbers and circled in the same black pen, that later, with almost no changes, appear in the second version of eight pages.

This second version comprises fifteen numbered sections. There is no title on the first page, something that could mean that this version served above all as an investigation of the suitability of the form: the fragment as a structural unit is being put to the test. The question of structure is again of the greatest importance: the sequence of sections (“the texture of events”), their dimensions, the relationship between their relative lengths, interruption in the course of the narrative, and the nature of their graphic representations (characteristic here is the absence of long passages: every section has the semantic density of a stanza of poetry). At the top of the first and second sections there are, in addition, typed sentences taken word for word from scientific texts. A possible function of these quotes: the contribution to a sense of compression; but they have another, more important function: it is as if the author of A Tomb for Boris Davidovich wanted, through them, to say the following: “Look, ladies and gentlemen, what my starting point is, and look what it gives rise to, no matter how ‘carefully’ I exercise my ‘creativity.’”

What about the contents of the remaining twenty-five pages? For the most part unpaginated, they are largely variants of the passages included in the two versions already mentioned. But there are those that show “first-hand” traces of events from the life of the apatride that encompass his entire history. We took it upon ourselves, not without trepidation, to piece the story together (the fragmentary character of the second version made our work easier). We found justification in our desire to defy the irreversible.

Textual Notes:

entirely vague and pointless: Sentence incomplete.

And so forth: A passage for which we could unfortunately find no place in the unified and recomposed “variant,” given its similarity to this section/fragment, but could no more dispense with, on account of its function in the course of the narrative, is reproduced in its entirety here:

Here, in Amsterdam, in an isolated street a stone’s throw from a canal, our stateless man would suddenly find himself among his characters, a word that he used, not without attendant irony, every time his eye was drawn to those human creatures who bore on their faces or their bodies signs of rack and ruin, either patent or hidden. When night had begun its descent onto the streets, around the corner there would suddenly appear women, all dolled up, leaning against the wall in their tight, clingy dresses.

No more and no less so than other people. If he had been told this earlier, two or three years ago, he would not have paid any attention to it: These two sentences were omitted from the first publication of the story (Srpski književni glasnik, 1, 1992).

Jurij Golec

In the last three of the seven tables of contents for The Encyclopedia of the Dead, the titles “Jurij Golec” and “The Lute and the Scars” both appear, in this order. In the seventh table of contents, both titles are crossed out by hand. Why were both removed, even though they dovetail with the basic theme of the book (both find their “metaphysical bearings” in love and death)? The reason (the only reason for which material evidence can be adduced) should perhaps be sought in the radical shift in style that comes from adjusting to their autobiographical, non-fictional character. In their stead “Red Stamps with Lenin’s Picture” appeared at the last minute. We say “last minute” because the title of this other story is not found in any of the tables of contents, something that indicates that it was added to the manuscript just before it was turned over to the publisher. This piece of “fantasy” combines the worlds of the two stories while hewing more closely to the style of the whole Encyclopedia. Whether or not the inclusion of “Stamps” necessitated the exclusion of the other two stories for purely literary reasons is a question of another order, and one that does not lie within the scope of these notes.

The story “Jurij Golec” is preserved in manuscript form in four versions (not counting the layers of “palimpsests” created by revisions in the author’s hand), totaling one hundred and nineteen typed pages, to which should be added fifty-five additional pieces of paper with variations on individual passages or notes and sketches. The sequence of the versions can be established with little difficulty. The first comprises twenty-six pages and has the title “The Actor”; the second, untitled version is forty pages long. Both of these versions contain only the first half of the story. The third version, and the fourth, definitive one, both bearing the title “Jurij Golec,” are of almost equal length (27 and 26 pp.). The fundamental differences between the four versions are the visible reduction in text and the replacement of real personal names with fictitious names or initials. The basic technical issue, which is the main reason that multiple versions exist, is how to depict dialogue without narrative lulls or awkwardness. The customary forms “she said,” “he said,” or “I said,” and so forth, are reduced to an absolute minimum (and in the final text are only used when needed for rhythm or comprehension). The basic events, characters, and situations, however, remained unchanged.

In view of the fact that this story was planned to be a part of The Encyclopedia of the Dead, Kiš wrote a note that was supposed to be included in a general postscript, which we have appended to the story in this volume, rather than place here among the notes. It was our view that the subsequent revelation of the hero’s identity retrospectively underscored the nonfictional nature of the story, whereas the typical novelistic feature of a “note” would broaden to too great a degree the world of the basic narrative. In terms of form, we find this is justified by the fact that the story “The Short Biography of A.A. Darmolatov” (in A Tomb for Boris Davidovich) concludes with an italicized postscript.

The Lute and the Scars

“The Lute and the Scars” was also conceived as part of The Encyclopedia of the Dead. We have already made mention (see previous note) of some of our hypotheses about the reasons this story, as was the case with “Jurij Golec,” did not make it into the collection. Two versions are preserved in manuscript form: the first, without a title, contains seventeen typed pages (fifteen of which are sequentially paginated, though among them are inserted two pages with the designations “2a” and “6a”); the second, entitled “The Lute and the Scars,” consists of fourteen unfilled pages. Versions of the introductory section of the story make up most of the content of another sixteen pages. And, again, it is to the story itself that we attached the “note” that was foreseen as a general postscript. In this case we acted with much greater hesitation than with “Jurij Golec.” The reasons were that this note has primarily a theoretical and meta-textual function: it specifies the genre (creative nonfiction), with an additional reference to the story “Jurij Golec.” The gulf between Kiš’s narration and his commentary is much wider here. The fact is, however, that the word “note” itself seems intended to strengthen, even to guarantee, the truthfulness of the story (even, if nothing else, by comparison with the foregoing story, in which the inclusion of the fictional was a kind of obligation).

Let us now shift our attention to the thematic uniqueness of this story in the context of Kiš’s literary oeuvre: this is the only piece that one could label a “Belgrade story.” The piece was written at the start of 1983, as a late look back at his own younger years, with a double distancing from the objects he is describing: in terms of space, since at that time Kiš was living in Paris, and likewise at a chronological remove (the story takes place during the 1950s, with one episode from the end of the 1960s). Everything in the piece is tied up with a quintessential story of emigration, the roots of which reach back to the Russian Revolution. And it is precisely this aspect of the story that links it, along with “The Book of Kings and Fools” (from The Encyclopedia of the Dead), to the world of A Tomb for Boris Davidovich. The reference to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is not simply part and parcel of Kiš’s memories of his youth (and an indirect reference to two treatments of the subject that Kiš penned much earlier, both published in the newspaper Ovdje (Here): “On Céline” from April 1971 and “Anti-Semitism as a Way of Looking at the World” from June of the same year), but also a representation of the subtle affinities between these two stories. (For example, the profession of the hero of “The Book of Kings and Fools,” Belogortsev — a forestry engineer — along with a few other details that the attentive reader will unearth.)

The Poet

Although the title “The Poet” is not mentioned in any of the tables of contents for The Encyclopedia of the Dead, one handwritten fragment, found among texts that can with certainty be linked to that book, shows us to be justified in placing the story into this context. This is the fragment:

A story about a professor who writes a

sonnet against Tito and the Party.

After years of a sentence of hard labor,

this sonnet has been reworked into

a paean.

They bring Ranković to see him, etc.

Two sonnets.

On the back of one page of notes to “Jurij Golec” we find the following written by hand:

For the story:

1. The mayor destroys the park.

2. Sonnet (of a reactionary)

The manuscript of “The Poet” consists of thirteen continuously paginated typed pages. Corrections were made in three rounds: with a pencil and with fine blue and black ballpoint pens. There are no other related papers: the story came into existence in one sitting, with only superficial changes.

The appearance of this story among Kiš’s short fiction is not, however, accidental. Traces of his reflections on the postwar years are to be seen in his notes, in his sketches of imaginative literary subjects, and in fragmentary autobiographical notes relating to the Cetinje period of the author’s life. From among the large number of such notes we will reproduce here a few that correspond to this story:

“[P]arty spirit” in literature; the revolution isn’t for young ladies; terror in school: tight pants (“knickerbockers”), haircut, etc. morale; Lenin-Stalin in physics, history, math, etc; language: the manner of speech of politicians and peasants; warehouses belonging to government ministries.

In addition, we include a short character sketch:

Cetinje: secret policeman/tennis player: he has an odd way of walking, not peasantlike, or clumsy, not at all, but rather a gait that you couldn’t help but watch (even though a gait cannot be viewed or seen): it was, how shall I say, the walk of a peasant who is walking as if he were middle class, who thinks he is walking as if he were a middle-class person who plays tennis.

Subsequent to the first publication of this story in the initial edition of the collection The Lute and the Scars, we found amid some newspaper clippings a bundle of Kiš’s papers that contained several relevant items, including a bibliography that the author undoubtedly composed in the course of preparing his collected works. On one sheet from this bundle we found the following note that indicates the “sources” of this story, its nonfictional background:

People told me a story about a man somewhere who was arrested after the war on account of some subversive poetry. They threw him into prison and forgot about him. Then someone remembered he was there and ordered him the opportunity to clean up the mess himself: in place of his subversive poem (semiliterate slapdash work) he must write a poem with the opposite content. The man accepted the offer. They gave him a distant, very distant deadline, provided him with paper and a pencil: and said write, and erase, until it is first-rate. From time to time they summoned him and he read aloud his panegyric. “It could be better, more sincere!” they told him. People from the most prominent circles of the police force visited him and read through his variations. After ten years someone told him: “Well, see, now it is first-rate. The poem is sincere.” And — they let him go.

(So much for needing to research the relationship between an anecdote and a piece of fiction.)

The Debt

The story “The Debt” is preserved among Kiš’s manuscript papers on a total of seventeen typewritten pages. The complete manuscript of the version we provide here contains twelve numbered pages; in the middle of the first is the typed title “The Debt.” Four of the additional pages present what is in all likelihood a second version of the beginning of the story, in this case with no title indicated. On a separate page, on which the title is also to be found, there are simply five lines, which can be regarded as another variant of the start of the story.

Corrections on the twelve-page manuscript were carried out with a pencil throughout the entire text, with the majority of these occurring in the introductory section that precedes the enumeration of the “debts.” These corrections, judging by their apparent uniformity, were carried out in a single reading of the manuscript. The other corrections, decidedly fewer in number, were made in fine blue ballpoint pen (the story therefore seems most likely to have gone through only two revisions). The unfinished nature of certain sentences, which we encounter from the first pages of the story, along with superficial corrections that seem to be “final touches”—these all demonstrate that Kiš’s opinion of the introductory section was that it was only a temporary resolution. In the portion of the story where the enumerations occur, there are virtually no corrections of any kind, which shows that the frame-narrative was what caused the most problems for Kiš; once the list begins, the only narrative events are those concerned with the debts, and the underlying concept that life is passing before the protagonist’s eyes by means of this inventory, all of which was drafted without the least difficulty or deficiency (the process of enumeration that was so dear to Kiš). To judge by the large number of sentences beginning on one page and concluding on the next, we could even say that the story was produced in one session.

The title “The Debt” does not figure in any of the seven extant tables of contents for The Encyclopedia of the Dead, which would seem to indicate that the story was written after 1983. The reader will probably recognize the great Bosnian author Ivo Andrić in the character of “the debtor.” And this identification, among other things, leads us to take 1986 as the year of origin for the story: at that time Kiš was writing the foreword to the French edition of Andrić’s The Woman from Sarajevo. Although arising in connection with this special occasion, Kiš’s repeated focus on Andrić could also have been the stimulus for the production of this type of homage to that other writer, one of the closest relatives in Kiš’s “literary family tree.” Even the fact that the story remained unfinished validates our view that its genesis should be associated with the aforementioned year, before the end of which Kiš’s illness had manifested itself.

Nearly all the persons mentioned in this story are connected with Andrić’s early life (his schooling, his start as a writer, his first years in the diplomatic service) and Kiš located information about them in Miroslav Karaulac’s book Rani Andrić (The Early Andrić, Prosveta/Svjetlost, 1980), which he even mentions right at the beginning of the French foreword. Singling them out from the abundance of persons who come up in Karaulac’s study, he transformed them into character-paradigms via a process of extreme fictional compression, that essential hallmark of his prose. “Andrić is undoubtedly a moralist,” Kiš would go on to write, assessing the former’s literary works (“A Foreword to The Woman from Sarajevo,” in Život, literatura, Svjetlost, 1990); thus both his selection of facts and his formulation of statements (often in the form of maxims) are made according to principles that might be ascribed to a writer-moralist. The story, however, functions as a double portrait (the portrait and the vase), for Kiš is also taking moral stock of his own experiences and inclinations (the delicate terrain of good deeds and gratitude). And we believe that readers will have an easy time identifying points of contact between the characters in this “double exposition.” (The last will and testament of Eugène Ionesco, published in Le Figaro littéraire after that writer’s death, was written in the form of a life reviewed as a balance sheet of debts; when compared with the story “The Debt,” which was written nearly a decade earlier, Ionesco’s will can serve as evidence that even literature knows something about wondrous coincidences and the affinities of kinship.)

Textual Notes:

They served as a kind of rosary: The following sentences were crossed out: “He needed to distribute his two hun- dred crowns fairly, the amount his stipend brought him, and not remain in debt to anyone. Because at this mo- ment he knew, with the lucidity that comes with the hour before death [.].”

The idea came to him, struck a part of his consciousness: This seems to bear little direct connection to what pre- ceded it, even considering the cancelled lines mentioned above. It’s difficult to say why this gap emerged, though the reasons for the deletion of the missing sentences are clear enough: the prematurely delivered exposition and the stylistic rawness of the second, unfinished sentence.

. it made him chuckle to himself: Left out of the first publication (Književne novine, October 15, 1992).

for all human endeavors. in silence: From Andrić’s letter to Tugomir Alaupović of July 6, 1920. Cited in Miroslav Kara- ulac, Rani Andrić (Beograd: Prosveta, 1980), 154–55.

over the course of his life: Written by hand on the margin was this (possible) addition to the sentence: “Jelena, for instance (and he tossed the thought away as from the deck of a ship. for it was too painful).”

the eyes of posterity: Written in pencil in the margin and on the back of the third page of the manuscript. In the text itself, following the colon (“. in bundles: poems, journals, notes. ”), is a section that is circled in pencil and that contains only incomplete sentences. The circling might be understood as the designation of the spot to which the text from the margin and back of the page should be inserted (possibly as a substitution). This al- lows us to replace the incomplete passage from the main text and preserve it here. It reads: “love letters that, wrapped in the old-fashioned way with purple ribbon, he kept his whole life (and in which was.) politically com- promising. A will written down. ”

proving a fool to be a fool amounts to compromising oneself: Incomplete.

As for the spiritual debts. one’s homeland: The material in this paragraph up to this sentence was crossed out by two heavy diagonal lines. However, since the text that fol- lows represents a natural continuation of what was crossed out, and cannot be understood without it, we de- cided not to move it to a note.

two crowns: The amount of the debt was written in by hand, later, first spelled out (“dvije krune”) and then with a digit. Considering the second method to be temporary, and chosen by the author for simplicity’s sake, we have written out all numbers in this story.

. historical necessity: A portion of this sentence, some- what altered, comes from the story “Dogs and Books” in A Tomb for Boris Davidovich.

To Count Ivo Vojnović: This was proceeded in the manuscript by an incomplete entry: “To Mrs. Zdenka Marković. ”

Mrs. Vera Stojić: Andrić’s girlfriend from wartime bohe- mian circles in Zagreb, with whom the writer carried on a lively correspondence during his stay in Rome in the early 1920s. In one of these letters we find the following sentence, which could as well have been written by Kiš: “I write little, and with difficulty; nothing exists without our country; and I can live neither with it nor without it.” Ka- raulac’s book contains, however, no information at all about the character of Mrs. Stojić, who was obviously Andrić’s privileged interlocutor, which perhaps accounts for the brevity of her entry here.

A and B

We can date this short piece of prose with relative certainty to 1986, the year that Kiš’s illness was diagnosed; the work has no title and consists of two circled entries labeled “A” and “B,” each of which has a subtitle in English: The magical place and The worst rathole I visited? This text, comprising three typed pages, was found in Kiš’s literary papers already prepared for publication, with the author’s name in the upper left-hand corner of the first page. Aside from the issue of dating the text, we were vexed by the question of why Kiš would suddenly return to themes, places (which are here placed in sharp opposition to each other, as indicated by the titles of the constituent parts: magical place and worst rat-hole), and images from his “family cycle”; and we were inclined, trusting in the correctness of our intuition, to link this “homesickness” with forebodings of his own imminent end. Today, following closer studies of his literary oeuvre, and an inventory of its topics and motifs, made over nearly an entire decade (from 1978 to 1986), we realize that our assumption was more a matter of the “treacherous influence of biography.”

(Mme Pascal Delpeche recently mentioned to us that this text could be a response to a questionnaire about “most beautiful and ugliest places” received by the author. While this solution would remove all mystification as to Kiš’s motive, it would not alter the significance of the chosen places themselves.)

The Marathon Runner and the Race Official

The story “The Marathon Runner and the Race Official” was written in Belgrade in the summer of 1982. It was intended for the volume The Encyclopedia of the Dead, as attested by the fact that the title is mentioned in the first three tables of contents for that work. The manuscript includes six continuously paginated typed pages. In Kiš’s papers, however, we found only the second, third, fourth, and fifth. Due to the fragmentary nature of the text, which we considered final, we did not publish the story in the first edition of The Lute and the Scars. It was, together with other fragmentary texts, published in the book Skladište, which contains all of Kiš’s unpublished literary papers. A few days after that book appeared, as we were completing work on a bibliography (the date was March 4, 1995), we leafed through a number of folders of press clippings. In the first folder we picked up, we noticed, between two yellowed sheets of newspaper, the missing pages (pp. 1 and 6) for which we had been searching in vain for two years. We revel in this miracle, which needs no commentary!

On two other pages were found additional elements intended for the story, which ostensibly should have formed part of its postscript. It is a matter of a brief introductory comment and also the translation of an anecdote from Abram Tertz’s book A Voice from the Chorus, which formed the basis of the story. We reproduce both of them here in this summary annotation:

(At one time I thought that it would be interesting to include in The Encyclopedia of the Dead the following text by Tertz as an appendix, in the manner of a Borgesian et cetera.)

“Someone told us about a dream seen by a Latvian serving a 25-year sentence. In the dim and distant past, he had been an athlete, and he dreamed he was a young man again, taking part in a 25-kilometre marathon race. He had a feeling of great physical well-being, almost of intoxication. But just as he had run half the course, the umpire suddenly appeared out of the blue: “Enough! It’s time you took a rest.” The Latvian tried to refuse, saying he wasn’t a bit tired. The umpire gently but firmly insisted: “Take a rest!” His late wife was there too, and she joined in, saying: “That will do! Enough!” Next morning the former runner had no sooner told his dream to his friends than he dropped dead of heart failure. He had precisely 12 years and 6 months to go before the end of his sentence.” [from Kyril Fitzlyon’s and Max Hayward’s excellent translation of Tertz’s A Voice from the Chorus. (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1976), p. 75.]

Leonid Šejka died in November, 1970.