Tomb for Boris Davidovich

Introduction

When, after great difficulties, this book was first published in 1976, in Zagreb, Yugoslavia, it was immediately assaulted in the press by the conservative "Stalinist” elements at the top echelon of the Yugoslav literary hierarchy. The war cry emanating from the top was picked up at the bottom by Serbo-Croatian nationalists, who are traditionally pro-Russian and traditionally anti-Semitic, for the bulk of Danilo Kis characters are Jews, as is the author himself. Yugoslavia is a small country, and the politics in a small country are always big, literary politics especially. Due to this proportion, an attack against a writer becomes extremely focused. It was focused sharply enough to send Danilo Kis into “nervous shock”.

There are several topics an author may deal with which can jeopardize his well-being, and history is one of them. Depending on its proximity to the present, history provides a writer with background, content, cast of characters, and sometimes, as in the case of Kis, with the writer’s actual context. The very fact of describing historical events is regarded by history as an attempt to demote it into the past and is resisted vehemently. An historical novel becomes therefore a vehicle of time, an instrument that purports to outline the boundaries between past and present by means of estrangement from its subject, A narrative reduces history to a story and creates, by being conducted from a certain "'outside", a new time category, heretofore unknown.

Apart from the general "cause-and-effect" principle, history claims the present through its most viable extension; through ideology. Having failed to triumph at the moment of its emergence, an ideology rapidly develops what one may call a utopian complex and gravitates to timelessness. Correspondingly, a portrayal of ideology or of its carriers is considered by the latter as an attempt to pin it down, to compromise its purity, and to rob it of its future.

In the case of A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, history's claim on the present may seem all the more valid because the epoch with which this book deals isn’t really so ancient. Its author, a Yugoslav writer, Danilo Кis, describes events that took place in the first half of this century and their impact on the lives of his seven characters. For all seven the impact turned out to be the same: deadly.

Ostensibly, since the dead, by definition, belong to the past, the sheer numbers of that epoch's victims should have removed the described period, along with the ideology that animated it, deep into annals. What usually slows the passage of time and by the same token causes an ideology to linger, however, is not so much that the murderers often outlive the murdered as that the living mistakenly regard the dead in the same way as a majority regards a minority.

Apart from general geopolitical reasons, ideology plays an important role in the life of Yugoslavia, for this small country is a federal republic in more ways than one. It harbors a dozen nationalities along with a corresponding number of creeds, groups of ethnic affiliations, and an array of variously impotent political parties, with the Union of Yugoslavian Communists in charge. Needless to say, all these national groups have a lot of old and new scores to settle. Every ideological stance is therefore considerably tinged with nationalism, and vice versa. A charge of distorting the historical truth may conceal a pan-Slavic nostalgia, an anti-Semitic remark turns out to be a muffled way to voice a secessionist dream, and sometimes the only way for a Macedonian to express his disgust with a Montenegrin is to accuse the latter of revisionism. In other words, every formal charge is but the tip of a very substantial iceberg of real hatred.

From the outside the storm over A Tomb for Boris Davidovich seems all the more peculiar because this book has literally nothing to do with Yugoslavia and its internal situation. None of its characters are Yugoslav: They are Poles, Russians, Rumanians, Irish, Hungarians; most of them are of Jewish origin. None of them ever set foot in Yugoslavia. Basically, A Tomb for Boris Davidovich is an abbreviated fictionalized account of the self-destruction of that berserk Trojan horse called Comintern. The only thing that its passengers — the heroes of Danilo Kis's novel- have in common with this small country is the ideology that this country professes today and in the name of which they were murdered yesterday. Apparently, that was enough to infuriate the faithful.

So in the absence of familiar turf and being unable to argue over the book's substance (for fear of calling too much public attention to it), those faithful, led by the then chairman of the Yugoslav Union of Writers, went on assaulting. this book on literary grounds and accused its author of plagiarism. The list of allegedly plagiarized authors was impressive and included Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, James Joyce, Nadezhda Mandelstam, Jorge Luis Borges, the Medvedev brothers, and others.

For one thing, an author capable of aping writers so diverse within the space of a 135-page novel deserves every kind of commendation. Also, unsound as it is, this list reveals something important about the accusers themselves: their between-the-chairs non aligned cultural stance, a kind of missing-Iink position between East and West. However, precisely because of their provincialism, with its weakness for generalization and for treating all remote objects as concepts or symbols, this list deserves more than simple mockery.

It is understandable, for instance, why they mention Joyce: One of Kis's characters is Irish, and even for a Yugoslav party official, Joyce today is a synonym for Ireland as well as for Western culture's decadence. The presence of Borges is of a Iess obvious nature and is intended to compromise the book stylistically by trying to reduce the vignette technique that Kis employs in his cautionary tales to a mannerism borrowed from a remarkable Argentinian, but this is utter nonsense. Kis is a great stylist, and the fabric of his writing has more in common with Franz Kafka or Bruno Schulz or with the writers of the French roman nouveau than with anyone in the Third World. Besides, to attack Danilo Kis's prose in A Tomb for Boris Davidovich is a kind of delayed reaction: If any thing, his writing here is a lot more Sparse than in his Garden, Ashes, a veritable gem of lyrical prose, the best book produced on the Continent in the postwar period. The more pertinent names on that list, in other words, are the Russian ones, yet again for reasons that have nothing to do with the book's texture and all to do with its core.

At first glance A Tomb for Boris Davidovich may indeed seem like a spin-off from The First Circle, The Gulag Archipelago (as yet unpublished in Yugoslavia), Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope against Hope, and the Medvedev broth- ers' various writings. The point is that the bulk of the novel has to do with the fate of several people who perished during the Great Terror of the late 1930s. For an account of that the sources are unfortunately mostly Russian. With sixty million dead in the civil war, collectivization, the Great Terror, and things in between, Russia in this century has produced enough history to keep the literati all over the world busy for several generations. The aforesaid authors already belong to the second generation. The first was Arthur Koestler's, and several chapters of the Kis book bear a general resemblance to Darkness at Noon, although surpassing it in both horrifying detail and narrative skill.

The process of transforming Russian history of this period into the new mythology of our civilization is well under way in A Tomb for Boris Davidovich. What simplifies its author's task is that apart from being chronologically modern, this history also displays signs of a considerable modernism, manifested by the distinct surrealism of its metamorphoses and the utterly antiheroic nature of its archetypes. Due to the numbers involved, it is safe to say that there was hardly ever an epoch in human history when fear and duplicity were so pervasive and voluminous.

Although it is arguable that this history has delivered a new religion (as so many claim), it inflicted upon the human race and human psyche a destruction of a mythological scope, and on these grounds alone this history qualifies for a new creed. Sooner or later, every upheaval ends up in a work of fiction. The most disturbing thing about this particular book, however, is the unbearable and, because of that, paradoxically appropriate excellence of Kis's prose, which provides his moribund metamorphoses with additional beauty.

By virtue of his place and time alone, Danilo Kis is able to avoid the faults of urgency which considerably marred the works of his listed and unlisted predecessors. Unlike them, he can afford to treat tragedy as a genre, and his art is more devastating than statistics. Kis writes in an extremely condensed and therefore highly allusive fashion. Since he deals in biographies, the last bastions of realism, each of his vignettes sounds like a miniaturized Bildungsroman accomplished by a movie-like montage of shrewdly chosen details that allude both to the actual and to the literary experiences of his reader. Here is a typical passage describing the early years of one of his heroes, a Hungarian German, Karl Taube, a would-be member of the Comintern:

… the provincial bleakness of the Middle European towns at the turn of the century emerges clearly from the depths of time: the gray, one-story houses with back yards that the sun in its slow journey divides with a clear line of demarcation into quarters of murderous light and damp, moldy shade resembling darkness; the rows of black locust trees which at the beginning of spring exude, like chick cough syrups and cough drops, the musky smell of childhood diseases; the cold, baroque gleam of the pharmacy where the Gothic of the white porcelain vessels glitters; the gloomy high school with the paved yard (green, peeling benches, broken swings resembling gallows, and whitewashed wooden outhouses); the municipal building painted Maria-Theresa yellow, the color of the dead leaves and autumn roses from ballads played at dusk by the gypsy band in the open-air restaurant of the Grand Hotel.

Like so many provincial children, the pharmacist's son, Karl Taube, dreamed about that happy day when, through the thick lenses of his glasses, he would see his town from the bird’s-eye view of departure and for the last time, as one looks through a magnifying glass at dried — our and absurd yellow butterflies from one's school collection: with sadness and disgust.

In the autumn of 1920, at Budapest's Eastern Station he boarded the first-class car of the Budapest-Vienna Express. The moment the train pulled out, the young Karl Taube waved once mote to his father (who was disappearing like a dark blot in the distance, waving his silk handkerchief), then quickly carried his leather suitcase into the third-class car and sat down among the workers.

The blend of nostalgia and doom in this passage, wryly entitled "Pictures from the Album,” gives a fairly good idea of Danilo Kis's writing technique. If the symbolism of the pharmacist's son abandoning his seat in order to join the workers is a purely prosaic device to indicate this revolutionary-to-be’s predicament, the perception of the father "disappearing like a dark blot in the distance” is outright poetry. With his emphasis on imagery and detail, combined with ironic detachment, Danilo Kis*s obviously poetic prose puts his horrid subject matter into the most adequate perspective by alerting the reader to this prose’s own intelligence. Thus, the reader’s ethical evaluation of the phenomena described ceases to be merely a matter of his distraught sentiment and comes out as a judgment made by his profoundly offended supreme human faculties. It is not that the thought is felt but, rather, that the feeling is thought.

Unlike prose, poetry doesn't so much express an emotion as absorb it linguistically. In this sense, Kis's writing is essentially a poetic type of operation, and the vignettes of which the chapters of his book consist could be read and appreciated separately as short poems. Some passages could be simply memorized. What prevents one from regarding this book as a prose poem, however, is neither its subject matter (which is still out of reach no matter how avant-garde as poetry) nor its typically prosaic coherence; it is mostly Danilo Kis's own undercutting technique, to which he resorts when a vignette approaches real sublimity. All the same, A Tomb for Boris Davidovich is built like a long dramatic poem crowned with that really monstrous, terrifying "rhyme” of cabalistic coincidence in "Dogs and Books," which achieves what the best poetry usually achieves; the metaphysical impact of the last lines that gape, along with their reader's mind, into pure chronos — which is presumably a formula for equating art to human reality.

The standard perception of tragedy, as distinct from a regular existence, is that it is a violation of time. In the case of A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, whose superb prose nearly overshadows the story itself, tragedy almost gets redefined as an occasion for time's high eloquence. A hero-or, more precisely, a victim-suddenly emerges from the reticence of ordinary life as a spokesman of time’s arbitrary opposition to human presence in it. Since the usual incongruity between living matter and the matter of time (normally manifested by death) can be elucidated only by the latter, the description of the tools time employs for such an undertaking (historical events, ideologies, etc.) requires an appropriately lucid condensation of the language. It is a fairly disquieting thought that in Danilo Kis we have a writer whose skills are adequate to those of time itself.

Perhaps the only service a real tragedy renders in leaving its survivors as speechless as its victims is that of furthering its commentators' language. The least that can be said about A Tomb for Boris Davidovich is that it achieves aesthetic comprehension where ethics, fail. Of course, the mastery of language can hardly pass for a safeguard in our enterprising century; but at least it creates a possibility of response, without which people are bound to remain slaves of their experience. By having written this book, Danilo Kis simply suggests that literature is the only available tool for the cognition of phenomena whose size otherwise numbs your senses and eludes human grasp.

A Tomb for Boris Davidovich is a very dark book, and its only happy end is that it was published and now so splendidly translated into English by Duska Mikic-Mitchel. It is surely a strange realm for an English reader to enter, but so it was for the millions and millions who found themselves inside it. Unlike them, an English reader can leave it whenever he likes by closing this book, finished or unfinished. Only the names here are fictitious. The story, unfortunately, is absolutely true; one would wish it were the other way around.

Joseph Brodsky