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Old 05-09-2009, 01:06 PM   #1
affewheillMapew

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Default Danilo Kis: A Tomb For Boris Davidovich
The story that I am about to tell, a story born in doubt and perplexity, has only the misfortune (some call it the fortune) of being true: it was recorded by the hands of honorable people and reliable witnesses. But to be true in the way its author dreams about, it would have to be told in Romanian, Hungarian, Ukrainian, or Yiddish; or, rather, in a mixture of all these languages. Then, by the logic of chance and of murky, deep, unconscious happenings, through the consciousness of the narrator, there would flash also a Russian word or two, now a tender one like telyatina, now a hard one like kinjal. If the narrator, therefore, could reach the unattainable, terrifying moment of Babel, the humble pleadings and awful beseechings of Hanna Krzyzewska would resound in Romanian, in Polish, in Ukrainian (as if her death were only the consequence of some great and fatal misunderstanding), and then just before the death rattle and final calm her incoherence would turn into the prayer for the dead, spoken in Hebrew, the language of being and dying.



Danilo Kis’s A Tomb for Boris Davidovich is composed of seven sections, all but one of which chronicles the dark fates of several minor characters swallowed up by the Communist experiment of the 20th century – an attempt by the author, perhaps, to reclaim from obscurity a few of the millions whose names and histories were eradicated in the inferno of their times (though it is unclear how much of Kis’s book, or if any of it, is true). Written in mostly in the detached style of straight reportage – adding further frost to the chilling scenes it presents – the book is spare, baleful, and as brutal as Hanna Krzyzewska’s executioner in the book’s first segment, “The Knife With the Rosewood Handle,” a twelve-page marvel of such grim magnificence that it’s unsurprising that none of the other stories quite manage to pack as much force.

Kis largely remains removed from the affair, though he'll slip in a little commentary at crucial moments. “The Mechanical Lions,” in which Soviet officials scramble to concoct a religious ceremony in order to demonstrate to a visiting French Socialist leader that there is no persecution of priests in the Soviet Union, is written as if it were cobbled together from police reports (until Kis lets slip one of his little sets of parentheses):



“The service began a few minutes after seven,” writes Chelyustnikov, who actually gives us a detailed account of the ceremony. (But a certain creative need to add to the living document some possibly unnecessary color, sound, and smell – this decadent Holy Trinity of the moderns – urges me to imagine what is not in Chelyustnikov’s text: the flickering and crackling of the candles in silver candelabras brought from the treasury of the Kiev museum – and here again, the document becomes intertwined with our imagined picture; the reflection of the flames on the saints’ ghostly faces in the arched apse, on the folds of the long robe of the Virgin Mother in the mosaic…)




What comes across in the author’s episodes, despite the detached tone, is a sense of sympathy for all those plowed into the ground beneath the machine. Serbs, Russians, Poles, Germans, and even an Irishman (the doomed Gould Verschoyle of “The Sow That Eats Her Farrow”) – many of them Jews - are all given voice in Kis’s Babel. The odd duck in this collection is the second-to-last, “Dogs and Books,” which isn’t about Communism at all (though it retains the theme of persecution that runs like a vein through the book) – it is, strangely, set in the year 1330. Only in a postscript is the tie that binds it to the rest of the work revealed, a “sudden accidental discovery,” claims Kis, of similarities to the previous story, “A Tomb For Boris Davidovich,” in which “I see the identical motives, dates, and names as God’s part in creation, la part de Dieu, or the devil’s, la part du diable”:



The consistency of moral beliefs; the spilling of the sacrificial blood; the similarity in names (Boris Davidovich Novsky; Baruch David Neumann); the coincidence in dates of the arrests of Novsky and Neumann (on the same day in the fatal month of December, but with a span of six centuries: 1330-1930) – all this suddenly appeared in my consciousness as an enlarged metaphor of the classical doctrine of the cyclical movement of time: “He who has seen the present has seen everything, that which happens in the most distant past and that which will happen in the future” (Marcus Aurelius,
Meditations, Book VI, 37).



Kis equates the Marcus Aurelius quote to Borges’s (an author Kis owes an unconcealed stylistic debt to) formulation: “From time to time the world is destroyed by the flame that creates it, and then is born again to experience the same history. Again the same molecular particles fuse, again they give form to stones, trees, people...Again each sword and each hero, again each trivial sleepless night.” Borges's ficciones are considered peaks of twentieth century literature, but I admire them without feeling much love for them. Too often they feel clever but hollow, beautiful but unmoving. Kis’s fictions reflect the disasters and despairs of the century, his characters have blood and reality in them, rather than being mere ciphers around which to spin elaborate concoctions – and so, to my mind, have more potency than those of the Argentine master.
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Old 05-09-2009, 10:40 PM   #2
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Danilo Kis is a writer I have been meaning to read for a LONG long time. I even had Garden, Ashes and TFBD in my old library 30 yrs ago. The copies since got destroyed in storage and I now have new ones along with his The Hourglass and Encyclopedia of the Dead.. Have you read any of these?

Ever since I read a quote of his: "Bruno Schulz is my God", I knew I had to read him. Thanks for the excellent framing review, I will refer to it when I start this (hopefully soon).
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Old 05-12-2009, 04:40 AM   #3
Giselle

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Borges's ficciones are considered peaks of twentieth century literature, but I admire them without feeling much love for them. Too often they feel clever but hollow, beautiful but unmoving. Kis?s fictions reflect the disasters and despairs of the century, his characters have blood and reality in them, rather than being mere ciphers around which to spin elaborate concoctions ? and so, to my mind, have more potency than those of the Argentine master.
I haven't read Kis before and believe me, it truly sounds interesting to me, but saying those stories have more potencial than Ficciones is going too far.
Ficciones is ont only ciphers, there are ideas created and elaborated by one of the most brilliant minds in the XX century, those ideas based on the study of ancient philosohies and cultures, lots of them read on its original language (Borges learnt several languages with the only purpose of reading old manuscripts from different civilizations).
Now more than ever I want to read this books, because if you're right with your comparisons, it must be a fantastic piece of literature.
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Old 05-13-2009, 01:31 PM   #4
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It's not that I dislike Borges. A recent re-reading of the Ficciones has given me a new appreciation of them, and I'd be the last to deny their brilliance. But while I can appreciate them - even marvel at the best of them - on an intellectual level, they otherwise leave me completely cold. This is a matter of taste. I've never successfully plunged very far into Ulysses either, and I've given up wanting to.
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Old 05-14-2009, 03:49 AM   #5
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I was looking for Danilo Kis's works at amazon and I checked one that seemed really interesting to me called The Encyclopedia of the Dead.
Have you read this one? Can someone give me your thoughts please
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Old 05-14-2009, 12:20 PM   #6
affewheillMapew

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Encyclopedia of the Dead is a collection of short stories, and it's also Kis at his most Borgean (titular tale features a very Borgean volume discovered in a very Borgean library). It's the only other one of his works that I've read aside from Boris, and though it's been many years I don't recall it being nearly as fine (however, I'm never quite sure of things I read ten years ago and often find them to be far better - or, at times, worse - than I recall). I hear good things about Garden, Ashes.
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Old 05-21-2009, 12:36 AM   #7
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I've read Mansarda, which if I'm not mistaken was his first work, and found that quite confusing and unappealing. I didn't understand what it was about. Then I read Grobnica za Borisa Davidoviča and was overwhelmed. This book is crucial reading in my opinion and one of the gems of the rich yugo-slavonic literature.
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Old 09-04-2009, 01:51 AM   #8
Giselle

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After all this -better than Borges- controversy caused by this Liehtzu thread I ought to read this book and I finally did. My opinion is that no way this stories are better than Borges Fictions in any meaning. However this is a book that started very cold and started growing on me leaving me a very good mouth taste after I finished. In the prologue of my edition, written by Joseph Brodski he says the following:

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 situations. 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 foo tin Yugoslavia. Basically a Tomb for Boris Davidovich is an abbreviated fictionalized account of self destruction of that berserk Trojan horse called Comintern. The only thing that its passenger -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 It is very interesting how a book telling about other nations and old times were that controversial in Yugoslavia at the time. Of course the pressure by the USSR decaying but still in charge had to be an oppresive external force about it.
I have to say that not all the 7 stories work as good other, in which I have to remark the mastery of tales such as the one that titles the book A Tomb for Boris Davidovich (the best in my opinion), The Knife with the Rosewood Handle, The Magic Card Dealing and Dogs and Books.
It is true that this stories are more passionate, and have a way stronger content that Borges Ficciones, but I think that although they have some parts in common, they are very differente kind of works, starting they are based in such different realities. Kis's stories are based under the weight of Communism and everything under it and Borges Ficciones are that, fictions placed in a part of the universe but that gets together with different parallels like dreams, time suspended, etc.
Both of them in their style are managed with excellence.
As a note of the Dogs and Books story, Borges is quoted with the following paragraph:

From time to timee the world is destroyed by the flame that created it, and then is born again to experience the same history. Again the same molecular particles fuse, again they give form to stones, trees, people -even to virtues and days, because for the Greeks there is no noun without substance. Again each sword and each hero, again each trivial sleeples night Under that premise, we have to agree that Kis is that flame that brings together all the ashes left by a terrible epoch and helps to start everything all over again with a sad but a the time edifying structure of a time of tragedy and pain.
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