Danilo Kiš

THE DEATH OF Danilo Kiš on October 15, 1989, at the age of fifty-four, wrenchingly cut short one of the most important journeys in literature made by any writer during the second half of the twentieth century. Born on the rim of the Yugoslav cauldron (in Subotica, near the frontier with Hungary) a few years before World War II to a Hungarian Jewish father (Kiš is a Hungarian name) who perished in Auschwitz and a Serb Orthodox mother from rural Montenegro, raised mostly in Hungary and in Montenegro, a graduate in literature of the university in Belgrade, where he made his debut as a writer, eventually a part-time expatriate, doing some teaching in France, and finally a full-time one, in Paris, where he lived his last ten years, Kiš had a life span that matched, from start to finish, what might have been thought the worst the century had to offer his part of Europe: Nazi conquest and the genocide of the Jews, followed by Soviet takeover.

Nineteen eighty-nine, the year Kiš died of cancer, was, of course, the annus mirabilis in which Soviet-style totalitarian rule ended in Central Europe. By mid-October, the collapse of what had seemed immutable was clearly under way; three weeks later, the Berlin Wall was torn down. It is comforting to think that he died knowing only the good news. Happily—it is the only thing about his premature death which gives some consolation—he didn’t live to see the collapse of the multi-confessional, multi-ethnic state of which he was a citizen (his “mixed” origin made Kiš very much a Yugoslav), and the return, on European soil, in his own country, of concentration camps and genocide. An ardent foe of nationalist vanities, he would have loathed Serb ethnic fascism even more than he loathed the neo-Bolshevik official culture of the Second Yugoslavia it has replaced. It is hard to imagine that, if he were still alive, he could have borne the destruction of Bosnia.

The amount of history, or horror, a writer is obliged to endure does not make him or her a great writer. But geography is destiny. For Kiš there was no retreating from an exalted sense of the writer’s place and of the writer’s responsibility that, literally, came with the territory. Kiš was from a small country where writers are for better and for worse important, with the most gifted becoming moral, and sometimes even political, legislators. Perhaps more often for worse: it was eminent Belgrade writers who provided the ideological underpinning of the Serbian genocidal project known as ethnic cleansing. The complicity of most Serb writers and artists not in exile in the current triumph of Greater Serbian imperialism suggests that the anti-nationalist voices, of which Kiš was the bravest and most eloquent, have always been in the minority. Much as by temperament and exquisitely cosmopolitan literary culture he would have preferred a less embattled course, in which literature was kept separate from politics, Kiš was always under attack and therefore, necessarily, on the attack. The first fight was against provincialism. This was the provincialism not so much of a small literature (for the former Yugoslavia produced at least two world-class prose writers, Ivo Andri and Miroslav Krleža) as of a state-supported, state-rewarded literature. It could be fought simply by his being the utterly independent, artistically ambitious writer he was, almost from the beginning. But worse attacks were to come.

One of those writers who are first of all readers, who prefer dawdling and grazing and blissing out in the Great Library and surrender to their vocation only when the urge to write becomes unbearable, Kiš was not what would be called prolific. In his lifetime he published nine books, seven of them in the fourteen years between 1962, when he was twenty-seven, and 1976, when he was forty-one. First came a pair of short novels, The Attic and Psalm 44 (published in 1962; not yet translated into English). The second book, Garden, Ashes (1965), was a novel. The third, Early Sorrows (1968), was a book of stories. The fourth, Hourglass (1972), was a novel. The fifth and sixth were two collections of essays, Po-etika (1972) and Po-etika II (1974). The seventh, A Tomb for Boris Davidovich (1976), was a collection of thematically linked stories that his publishers chose to call a novel. He wrote it while an instructor in Serbo-Croatian at the University of Bordeaux, as he’d written Garden, Ashes when he taught at Strasbourg.

By this time, Kiš was spending more and more time abroad, though he did not consider himself to be in exile, any more than he would have said he was a “dissident writer”: it was too clear to him that writing worthy of the name of literature had to be unofficial. With this seventh book, a suite of fictional case histories of the Stalinist Terror, Kiš’s work finally attracted the international attention it deserved. A Tomb for Boris Davidovich also attracted a seven-month-long campaign of negative attention back home in Belgrade. The campaign, which reeked of anti-Semitism, centered on an accusation—that the book was a web of plagiarisms from an arcane bibliography—to which Kiš had no choice but to respond. The result was his eighth book, The Anatomy Lesson (1978). Defending A Tomb for Boris Davidovich against these scurrilous charges, Kiš mounted a full-scale exposition of his literary genealogy (that is, his literary tastes), a post- or protomodernist poetics of the novel, and a portrait of what a writer’s honor could be. During the next ten years, he published only one more book, The Encyclopedia of the Dead (1984), a collection of unlinked stories.

The Western European, and eventually North American, acclaim for A Tomb for Boris Davidovich—typically confining it within the literature of dissidence from “the other Europe”—had brought about translations of the earlier books into the major foreign languages, and Kiš started to be invited to first-rank literary conferences, to win prizes, and to seem a plausible Nobel candidate. Becoming an internationally famous writer meant becoming a much interviewed writer. Asked to pronounce on literary matters and, invariably, to comment on the infamies back home, he did so with grave, always incisive combativeness—he gave splendidly substantive interviews. He was also asked to contribute short pieces to newspapers and magazines—treating no literary solicitation as ever less than an occasion for intensity. Recalling that Kiš published only one book of fiction in the last decade of his life, one can’t but regret that he gave as many interviews, wrote as many essays and prefaces, as he did. A poet in prose as well as a prince of indignation, Kiš surely was not best employed in these discursive forms. No great writer of fiction is. And unlike Italo Calvino and Thomas Bernhard, who were also lost to literature in the late 1980s, Kiš had probably not yet done the best of what he was capable in fiction. But the novels and stories he did write still assure him a place alongside these two somewhat older, far more prolific contemporaries—which is to say that Kiš is one of the handful of incontestably major writers of the second half of the century.

Kiš had a complicated literary genealogy, which he was undoubtedly simplifying when he declared himself, as he often did, a child of Borges and of Bruno Schulz. But to marry the cosmopolitan Argentine to the immured small-town Polish Jew sounds the right note. Most obviously, he was claiming foreign relatives over his descendance from his native Serbo-Croatian literary family. Specifically, by yoking together the serenely, speculatively erudite Borges and the inward-looking, hyperdescriptive Schulz, he was pointing to the principal double strand in his own work. Odd mixtures were very much to Kiš’s taste. His “mixed” literary methods—most fully realized in Hourglass (historical fiction) and A Tomb for Boris Davidovich (fictional history)—gave him exactly the right freedoms to advance the cause of both truth and art. Finally: one can, in literature, choose one’s own parents. But nobody obliges a writer to declare his or her parentage. Kiš, however, had to proclaim his. Like every writer who is a great reader, he was an inveterate enthusiast about the work of others. His talent for admiration also made him an extremely collegial writer, which he expressed best in his numerous translations of contemporary writers he undertook from French, Hungarian, Russian, and English into Serbo-Croatian. In expatriation he was still really back home, in his head and in all his work—despite his lived estrangement from the literary world of his native country. He had never forsaken them, though they had betrayed him.

When Kiš died in Paris in 1989, the Belgrade press went into national mourning. The renegade star of Yugoslav literature had been extinguished. Safely dead, he could be eulogized by the mediocrities who had always envied him and had engineered his literary excommunication, and who would then proceed—as Yugoslavia fell apart—to become official writers of the new post-communist, national chauvinist order. Kiš is, of course, admired by everyone who genuinely cares about literature, in Belgrade as elsewhere. The place in the former Yugoslavia where he was and is perhaps most ardently admired is Sarajevo. Literary people there did not exactly ply me with questions about American literature when I went to Sarajevo for the first time in April 1993, but they were extremely impressed that I’d had the privilege of being a friend of Danilo Kiš. In besieged Sarajevo people think a lot about Kiš. His fervent screed against nationalism, incorporated into The Anatomy Lesson, is one of the two prophetic texts—the other is a story by Andri, “A Letter from 1920”—that one hears most often cited. As secular, multi-ethnic Bosnia—Yugoslavia’s Yugoslavia—is crushed under the new imperative of one ethnicity/one state, Kiš is more present than ever. He deserves to be a hero in Sarajevo, whose struggle to survive embodies the honor of Europe.

Unfortunately, the honor of Europe has been lost at Sarajevo. Kiš and like-minded writers who spoke up against nationalism and fomented-from-the-top ethnic hatreds could not save Europe’s honor, Europe’s better idea. But it is not true that, to paraphrase Auden, a great writer does not make anything happen. At the end of the century, which is the end of many things, literature, too, is besieged. The work of Danilo Kiš preserves the honor of literature.

[1994]