Tomb for Boris Davidovich

Afterword

About twenty years ago, the bookstore which I frequented in Bloomington, Indiana, began to carry the Penguin "Writers from the Other Europe" series. Every title was chosen with care, translated with felicity, and intelligently introduced (the Joseph Brodsky introduction to the volume now in your hands being in my opinion the most impressive of an excellent lot). How can I describe the impression that these books made on me? I was a lonely, homely teenager who felt as stifled by the heartland as ever did any Trotsky or Emma Bovary. Although Bloomington was a college town, Indiana remained a typically American bastion of complacent parochialism, of brutal commercialism, indeed of anti-intellectuaiism and jingoism. Not far away, the Ku Klux Klan still paraded in Martinsville. The John Burch Society for its part helpfully spotlighted anti-American subversion. I was beaten up on the school bus two or three times by big, tall, stinking boys who called themselves “grits,” They explained that it disgusted them to see somebody like me, who wore glasses and was always reading a book (this four-letter word, of course, being the worst of the obscenities they threw my way). I hasten to add that on the whole my high school years in Indiana were not unpleasant, thanks to the native friendliness of most Midwesterners. If I had to choose, I'd rather associate with kind people than with interesting or intellectual people who were not kind. Most Hoosiers, after all, were decent enough. And some of my friends had a kindred curiosity about the larger world; I’ve kept my ties with them to this day. As for the others, if I can understand why Greenland Eskimos or Quebecois Francophones want to preserve their own ways of life, how could I fault my own fellow citizens for not being cosmopolitan? It’s just that many, many things lay beyond the pale in Indiana. The bigotry and the hypocrisy were far less unnerving to me than the proud and cheerful ignorance-an all-American trait which continues to appall me to this day. Our government’s military adventurism and capricious acts of repression around the world, our own disproportionate responsibility as American consumers for the degradation of the global environment, the murderous corruption of our “war on drugs,” the ongoing domestic war against freedom of speech, and all the other rather unremarkable failings of a given nation at a given time-well, not many Americans waste much thought on them. I did not have the experience to comprehend all this twenty years ago. But I knew that I was missing something. There had to be more than this.

The books in the “Writers from the Other Europe” series were thrilling and shocking incitements not only to my political development but also to my creative purpose (for which again I’d like to thank the various translators). What can be said after a first reading of Borowski’s concentration camp short stories? These exquisitely detailed vignettes of routine human interaction going on literally in sight of other human beings getting hurled into burning trenches raise the profoundest questions about what human nature is, or means. In my work as a journalist of war I've kept Borowski in mind. People in extreme situations are still, for better and for worse, people. Their doings become magnified. To share a scrap of bread is a heroic act. And to obey the law and denounce a Jew to the Gestapo, well, think of what that one simple act makes somebody!

I could go on at much greater length about Borowski, or about the unearthly beauty of Bruno Schulz’s sentences, the spirit of doomed tenderness which shines like a magnesium flare in Jerzy Andrzejewski's Ashes and Diamond the moral dilemma of Hrbal's Closely Watched Trains, the extraordinarily effective study of how memory is tainted by atrocity in Konwicki's A Dreambook for Our Time, the despairingly ironic “jests" of Kundera's short stories. Suffice it to say that the "Other Europe" of the series is a sad, cold, terrorized, yet strangely mystical place. By the shadow of Soviet repression and by the gravitational pull of Planet Auschwitz, these other Europeans are compelled to consider the most fundamental questions of human existence. Of course it would be offensive to glamorize the situations in which the characters find themselves. But we can be grateful to the authors who brought them to life. Not only do their hard-learned lessons, or failures to learn, illuminate our own capabilities and limitations as moral and spiritual beings, but the tellings of the tales sometimes become great art.

Such is the case with A Tomb for Boris Davidovich.

Why has this book in particular been always on my desk or at my shelf for twenty years? As I said, growing up in a society whose historical memory and political perceptiveness are attenuated in direct proportion to its commercialism, I knew that I was missing something. I vaguely understood that something was amiss in my surroundings, but I remained unable to possess even the falsely glamorized conception of Communism which leads Dr. Taube in “The Magic Card Dealing" to "join the workers". (Nor, therefore, was I in any particular danger of suffering his fate,) In the end I became somebody a little more like Gould Verschoyle in “The Sow That Eats Her Farrow". Verschoyle’s character has been formed at least in part by his home city of Dublin, with its “carnivalesque cohort" of “nobly disappointed, aggressive bohemians, professors in redingotes, superfluous prostitutes, infamous drunkards, tattered prophets, etcetera. And so he goes to fight on the side of the left-wing angels in Spain. I myself became a hack journalist.

Both Dr. Taube and Verschoyle are romantics in the best and worst senses of the word. Both not only wish to do good, but also operate under the half-conscious thrall of aesthetic feelings. Was Dr. Taube's desire to become a Communist based entirely on an aversion to "the exploitation of man by man," or did his own town’s “quarters of murderous light and damp, moldy shade resembling darkness" (the passage has already been quoted at greater length in Brodsky's introduction) have anything to do with it? In other words, did he, like me, feel alone in a place whose harshly, hopelessly reactionary ethos he took or mistook to be something other than the natural human condition? For if there was truly no getting away from the daily round in which husbands beat their wives, unemployed workers freeze to death in the streets and children get taught lies in school (or watch television), how unutterably terrible life would be! Buddha, we're told, was similarly horrified when he discovered the existence of sickness, old age and death. He rejected things as they were. Much of the unending debate between revolutionaries and conservatives has to do with whether the beaten wives, perished workers and misled children ought to be classified under the same rubric of unavoidable, essential existence, or whether their tragedies, being the results of human agency, may be redressed through a massive change in social structures. What sort of changes? To imagine that in other contexts Dr Taube and Verschoyle might have chosen to be, say, Mexican nationalists or American animal-rights activists is in no way to trivialize them. A Tomb for Boris Davidovich is not about Communism- as-ideology. Dr, Taube and Verschoyle are as real-"round" characters beyond ideology — as is, say, Pierre in War and Peace. Pierre wants to be good and do good. In the course of his frequently blundering development, he tries many roles: an admirer of Napoleon, loyal if unloving husband, a Freemason, a Napoleon-hater, and finally a happy family man. In the twentieth century he undoubtedly would have flirted with Communism.

Why is the phrase "do-gooder" synonymous with "naive innocent”? One twentieth-century sourpuss said that only a callow or hard-hearted soul isn’t a Marxist at age twenty, and only a fool remains a Marxist at age forty. In the twenty-first century, Marxism will be replaced by an equally fiery — ism. The best thing which can happen to do-gooders between twenty and forty is that they retain and even deepen their desire to benefit the world, while at the same time developing a realistic understanding of the ethics of ends and means. The end does not justify the means and never will. Moreover, some ends and some means, however laudable, are impractical. What to do? "Join the workers” in a fashion that will do the workers some good without unjustly hurting anybody else.

It is debatable how far on this maturing path Dr, Taube and Verschoyle are able to travel before they come to their separate bad ends. Verschoyle perhaps learns more, for he figures out enough to report to his commanding officer in Spain that “coded messages are getting into the wrong hands.” Dr. Taube eventually realizes that he is being kept in isolation from the Russian people whose progressiveness he idolizes, but by then it's already too late. Regardless of how we might otherwise judge either of these men, it seems that they are both brave, warmhearted, benevolent and perhaps even useful to the cause they serve. Under almost any other circumstances, these traits would have ensured their status as instruments of good.

The circumstances which prevailed, however, might be summed up in a single proper name: J. V. Stalin.

A case could be made that the murderousness of Leninism should have been warning enough to steer clear of Stalinism. In spite of all the obstacles to learning the truth- or maybe because of them-Solzhenitsyn was able to denounce the revolution's earliest epoch in the first volume of his Gulag Archipelago. To many of us who believed that Lenin was not all that bad, those chapters were shocking. The recent unsealing of old murder files, particularly of the horrifying documents in the “secret archive", presented in translation by Richard Pipes, makes clear the cruelty of Marxist praxis in Russia from, at latest, the civil war onward. But in the epoch of Verschoyle and Dr. Taube, a true believer could have plausibly entertained the idea that the excesses of the Reds in the Russian civil war has been counterbalanced or even caused by the crimes of the Whites, and, moreover, that you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs. Shortly before he was pickaxed to death by a Stalinist assassin in 1940, Trotsky appealed to his readers to give the revolutionary experiment more time. Three decades, he insisted, were hardly enough for the bloody dust to settle. The people of the USSR gave Communism more than seven decades and it never ceased to fail them. By the time I first discovered A Tomb for Boris Davidovich,the Trotskyites had had to fall back on the pathetic slogan: "Defend bureaucratically deformed workers' states!" In other words, the Communist system stank, but it was still the best around. Millions of people decided otherwise.

In Dr. Taube's time, there was still hope. We must also remember that the encirclement of the Soviet Union by hostile capitalist states was a proven fact (no matter that Stalin made paranoid capital from it), that Communism had been brutally put down in Germany, and that the nightmare of Hitlerism now threatened everything that the Taubes and Verschoyles stood for. No wonder that to a believer in the nobility of socialism, Soviet Communism, even Stalina Communism, was the last best chance. It would have taken more suspiciousness than most do-gooders possess to fathom Stalin. And maybe, like some of my American friends, they wanted to remain ignorant. Maybe m politics, as in sexuality, a purity of passion exists only in the preconsummation state of half-blind surmises.[13]

It is part of Danilo Kiš's achievement to have created these two more or less sympathetic characters, who can be accused of no sins more serious than self-delusion. The Communist ideal is of course more fully realized in Boris Davidovich Novsky in the title story. Unlike Verschoyle and Dr. Taube, this man is hardheaded, competent, effective, trusted and even famous-a real hero. Precisely for that reason (such runs Stalinist logic), he has to get eliminated, for what if someday he got the idea of offering himself as an alternative? His Achilles’ heel is pride in his own rectitude. If the Communist Party is the most scientific and advanced vehicle for the salvation of humanity, and if, therefore, it must be considered "my Party, right or wrong", and if it needs me to do anything, no matter how loathsome, which it claims will accomplish the end, then I’d better do it. This is the argument which wins over Novsky’s counterpart, Comrade Rubashov, in Koestler’s famous Darkness at Noon. What wins Novsky over, on the contrary, is being forced to watch the murder of men who physically resemble himself immediately after each victim has been told: “If Novsky doesn’t confess, we’ll kill you?” And Novsky, with that failing-or virtue-which afflicts people who care about the world and long to improve it, feels responsible for these deaths. In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevsky at one point propounds the doctrine that our only hope of rescuing humankind from its own evil is through acknowledging our kinship with one another to such a degree that we experience guilt and repentance for violence committed by others. This magnificently crazed notion may well be appropriate for lone politician-saints such as Gandhi. For Novsky, it’s fatal. He "realised with horror that this repetition" of murders “was not accidental, but part of an infernal plan: each day of his life would be paid for with the life of another man; the perfection of his biography would be destroyed.” And so Novsky, like Verschoyle and Dr. Taube, gets duped precisely because he possesses empathy and compassionate impulses (no matter that it's masked by the pretense of cold vanity over his reputation). He agrees to confess.

The more pragmatic careerist Chelyustnikov in “The Mechanical Lions” fares slightly better than Novsky, for he has fewer ideals. He lives out his term in a prison camp. Whatever false confession he’s made to sign, we can be sure that it affects him less by wounding his trickster-conscience than by pricking his apprehensions about his own survival. Likewise, the envious, anti-Semitic murderer Miksha Hantescu in "The Knife With the Rosewood Handle" perishes in the Gulag only through the generalized neglect of his jailers, not through any decree of liquidation. And, indeed, survivors of the camps have often attested that criminals won more success there than politicals. (Miksha doubtless would have met a better fate had he not been a foreigner, hence an unreliable element.) Kiš's. warning in these series of parables is horrifically clear: In systems such as Stalin's, people are vulnerable to the ultimate degree of repression in direct proportion to their generosity of heart.

This is why I sympathize with Brodsky’s conclusion in the introduction that A Tomb for Boris Davidovich “achieves aesthetic comprehension where ethics fail". I sympathize with it, but I disagree with it. It is precisely in such situations as Kiš's characters find themselves that ethics is most desperately needed. One cannot blame the Chelyustnikovs overmuch; certainly one cannot blame them in comparison to the Stalins. But surely by that very token we ought to honor the Novskys who retain sufficient integrity to feel ethically cornered in a context far from entirely of their own making. Granted, Novsky's ethics in his cold prison darkness may he best described as a beacon of light without warmth. Granted, he's misled by them in the end-or is he? Maybe his choice to save the lives of his other doubles by confessing was really the best one. Who can say? At least he made a choice.

As representatives of the various human types and motives which can be marshaled by a given ideology, Kiš's characters are inexhaustibly memorable. Indeed, they’re universal. The steady man Chelyustnikov is of a piece with the Khmer Rouge general I once interviewed who joined that gang of Maoist murderers with open-eyed enthusiasm simply because he could see that Pol Pot would win. The poet Darmolatov can be found today in every culture and regime of the world. And Kiš reminds us of that fact with his parallel tale “Dogs and Books", set six centuries before the fall of Novsky.

I scarcely need repeal Brodsky's praises of the style, whose merit would have been apparent without them. The author's economy of language (which Brodsky rightly calls "a poetic type of operation"), combined with equal parts of lyricism and desperate irony, work together to make this one of the great books. Although firmly set in a specific time, it could be profitably read and reread when all the Marxist states have become as fabulously forgotten as the civilization of the Etruscans.

William T. Vollmann

2001