A Tomb for Boris Davidovich.

Decades ago I got a copy of the old Penguin edition of A Tomb for Boris Davidovich by Danilo Kiš for $2.95, probably at the Strand (the currently available edition is selling for $61.54 at Amazon); the other day my eye lit on it and, in the mysterious way these things happen, I thought “Why don’t I finally read that?” So I did, and while I enjoyed it, I wish I’d read it back in the ’90s, when I was deeply interested in the Balkans and reading people like Ivo Andrić and would probably have appreciated it more.

The problem… well, let me quote the first paragraph of Dubravka Juraga and M. Keith Booker’s “Literature, Power, and Oppression in Stalinist Russia and Catholic Ireland: Danilo Kiš’s Use of Joyce in A Tomb for Boris Davidovich” (South Atlantic Review 58.4 [Nov. 1993]: 39-58):

Danilo Kiš belongs to a group of modern innovative writers who emerged in Yugoslavia during the sixties and seventies after a long period during which socialist realism had been the dominant mode of writing. His book A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, published in 1976, is a good example of the changes, both thematic and stylistic, produced by the new wave of literary experimentation in Yugoslavia at that time. A Tomb consists of seven stories so closely related that the book is rightly considered a novel-and indeed the Serbo-Croatian original bears a subtitle that translates as “Seven Chapters of the Same Narrative.” These “chapters” feature a variety of characters, most of whom are linked by their involvement with the Russian Revolution and its Stalinist aftermath, an involvement which, for most of them, leads to dire consequences. Indeed, A Tomb is largely an attack on Stalinism. However, it is also a technically innovative work that explores a number of fundamental aesthetic issues. For example, the book is highly allusive, with frequent references to a variety of literary sources, including James Joyce, the brothers Medvedev, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, medieval French texts, and many others.

The thing is that back when I bought the book I didn’t know much about that stuff; now, after many years of immersion in the history and literature of the Russian and Soviet 20th century, I’m more familiar with Stalinism than I’d really like to be, and Kiš’s lively and ironized fictitious biographies seem a bit artificial and stale to me after reading Solzhenitsyn, Shalamov, and other direct witnesses, not to mention a novel that is quite comparable in many ways but (to me) considerably more powerful, Victor Serge’s The Case of Comrade Tulayev (see this 2011 post).

That said, his writing is quite lively, and I’ll close with an excerpt I particularly enjoyed, from the title (and longest) chapter:

After an obvious gap in our sources (with which we don’t want to burden the reader, so he can retain a pleasant but false satisfaction in believing that this is a story like any other, which, fortunately for the author, is usually equated with the power of his imagination), we find him in an insane asylum in Malinovsk, among severely disturbed and dangerous lunatics, from which, disguised as a high school student, he escaped on a bicycle to Batum. Undoubtedly he faked his madness, its certification by two eminent doctors notwithstanding; even the police were aware of this, retaining the two doctors as sympathizers of the Revolution. His later whereabouts are more or less known: one early September morning in 1913, just before dawn, Novsky boarded a ship and, hidden among tons of eggs, headed for Paris via Constantinople. There, during the day we find him in the Russian Library on the Avenue des Gobelins and in the Musée Guimet, where he studied the philosophy of history and religion; and in the evening, in La Rotonde in Montparnasse with a glass of beer, wearing “the most elegant hat to be found in all Paris.” (Bruce Lockhart’s allusion to Novsky’s hat is not, however, without its political implications: it is common knowledge that Novsky was a functionary of the powerful union of Jewish hatmakers in France.)

(There doesn’t appear to be such a town as Malinovsk, and the Bibliothèque russe was located from WWI through 1937 at 9, rue du Val-de-Grâce and from 1938 until the Germans destroyed it during WWII at 13, rue de la Bûcherie; I haven’t found any corroboration that it was ever on the Avenue des Gobelins.) I’ll probably go on to read The Encyclopedia of the Dead, which I’ve owned for almost as long; if I do, I’ll report back.