Danilo Kiš

Danilo Kiš (1935–1989), Yugoslavia, France.

Danilo Kiš was born in Subotica (in the north of Vojvodina), Yugoslavia. His mother was Montenegrin (and an Orthodox Christian), and his father from a Hungarian Jewish family, so Kiš is often counted as a Serbian writer. He referred to himself as a Yugoslav writer. Vojvodina was (and to a large extent still is) a very ethnically mixed region, which made for a great deal of violence during the second world war. After the war, in which Kiš’s father and several other family members died in Nszi concentration camps, he lived in Hungary and then Montenegro and eventually studied literature at the university in Belgrade: he was the person to graduate from there with a major in Comparative Literature. He spent much of the rest of his life in Paris, or teaching Serbo-Croatian language (plus some literature and culture) elsewhere in France, and died in Paris of cancer. Many of his works are lightly veiled autobiography, like the one we're reading, while others concentrate on wartime persecution of “small,” innocent people, often though not exclusively Jews. His best-known work in the west, A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, was written partly to illustrate the tragedies of Communism to left-wing French colleagues and acquaintances. Kiš’s fiction learns a great deal from Latin American literature of the 20th century (see the link on Kiš and Borges below), but he has a distinctive view of the bizarre, fantastic and tragic components of everyday reality and a distinctively dark sense of humor; he also mentioned Bruno Schultz and Kafka as formative influences.

Garden, Ashes (Bašta, pepeo, 1965), is partly fictionalized autobiography (with the names changed, but only slightly changed, and many other things left the same), partly an uneasy tribute to the author’s father and his tragic fate during the Second World War.

Course book: Garden, Ashes, translated by William J. Hannaher.

Questions for reading:

• When an author chooses to treat, or a reader to read about, such a heavy topic, we might presume that the writing itself was cathartic. How do you experience this aspect of the work? What sort of outcome do we expect, given the time and place, and how does does that influence our expectations and reactions?
• Compare this collection to the others we have read, whether novels bound together by coherent structure and a constant cast of characters or more shifting collections of texts. What makes this book distinctive?
• In this and other books, one might argue that Kiš’s own investment in the book allows him to take liberties with the material that another author might feel were questionable or in bad taste. How do you react to his black humor or the increasingly fantastic depictions of his father?
• In what ways does this book support or valorize tradition, particularly if read as a tribute to Eduard Scham? How does it carry out a son’s obligations to his dead father, and how does it subvert them?

Other books by Kiš:

• Peščanik, 1972. Hourglass, translated by Ralph Manheim, 1990, available in Tripod.
• Grobnica za Borisa Davidoviča, 1976. A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, translated by Duška Mikić-Mitchell, 1978, available in Tripod.
• Enciklopedija mrtvih, 1983. The Encyclopedia of the Dead, translated by Michael Henry Heim, 1989, available in Tripod.
• Homo Poeticus: Essays and Interviews, various translators listed in the back of the book, 1995, available in Tripod.

Works about Kiš:

A search in the MLA Bibliography turned up several dozen articles in a variety of languages.

Web links about Kiš:

http://www.kis.org.yu/

The site is in Serbian, but if you click around the site there are lots of great photos

http://www.centerforbookculture.org/interviews/interview_kis.html

An interview with Brendan Lemon

http://www.themodernword.com/Borges/borges_infl_kis.html

Milan M. Cirkovic on Kiš’s relationship to Borges

http://dannyreviews.com/h/Boris_Davidovich.html

A not-too-intimidating review of A Tomb for Boris Davidovich