A Tomb for Boris Davidovich (Eastern European Studies) [Paperback]

he shall live no longer in monument than the bell rings and the widow weeps. Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing.

Danilo Kis was born in Serbia in 1935 to a Hungarian Jewish father and Montenegrin Serbian mother. His father perished in the Holocaust. Kis died of cancer in 1990 at age 55. As noted in an excellent introduction by the writer, poet and Nobel Prize winner Joseph Brodsky, publication of A Tomb for Boris Davidovich in Yugoslavia in 1976 created a firestorm in Belgrade similar to the controversies that flared up when Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was published in the USSR during Khrushchev's thaw. The book was savaged by the Yugoslav writer's union. As Brodsky notes in one memorable line, "there are several topics an author may deal with which can jeopardize his well-being, and history is one of them". The controversy, standing alone, may justify reading Tomb for Boris Davidovich. I am pleased to report that these stories are so well-constructed and laden with meaning that it would be worth reading even if its publication had been greeted with equanimity by the apparatchiks that manned the Yugoslav writers' union.

The seven stories that comprise Danilo Kis' A Tomb for Boris Davidovich have a few elements in common. Each involves a protagonist from a different country, Ireland, Hungary, Rumania, Poland, or Russia. In effect, each protagonist comes from a nation or a group that participated in the Comintern (the Soviet led Third International that coordinated the worldwide activities of various Communist organizations established by Lenin in 1919). Each gets swept up in the machinations that swirled around the Soviet Union's Great Terror of the 1930s. Each ends up either dead or in the Gulag.

With one exception each of the stories takes places in the 1930s. The one exception, "Dogs and Books" is set in 14th-century France at the time of the inquisition. Although that story seems out of place, when one compares the structure and fact-pattern of this story to the title story of the book one can only be struck by the obvious similarities between the methods and mind-set of the inquisitors and the methods and mind-sets of the interrogator in the story Tomb for Boris Davidovich.

The title story is also jarring because it contains many of the same themes set out in Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon. In the context of a short story, the brevity and terseness of Kis' language makes the telling of the story considerably more powerful in some respects than Koestler's novel length telling of a similar tale. Even if a reader feels that Kis' story does not quite match Koestler's, the fact that the comparison can be made with a straight face is high praise.

Last, Tomb for Boris Davidovich should be of great interest to anyone interested in the work of the great Argentine writer, Jorge Luis Borges. The structure and theme of Tomb for Boris Davidovich was intended by Kis to be part of a literary polemic between Kis and Borges, specifically concerning the title of Borge's Universal History of Infamy. Kis discusses this literary exchange in one of his essays. In it he asserted that the universal infamies related by Borges were those of gangsters, pirates and highwaymen. Kis argues that as far as infamy was concerned, "infamy is when in the name of the idea of a better world for which whole generations have perished, in the name of a humanistic idea, you build camps and destroy both people and their most intimate drams of a better world."

In many respects, Tomb for Boris Davidovich may be considered as an exquisitely crafted attempt to construct a literary monument to those who died (perhaps naively and foolishly) and for whom bells never rang and for whom the widows have long since stopped weeping.

L.Fleisig

One could almost draw paralleles, with fate of Danilo Kis and his novel, in former Yugoslavia, with every "free thinker" troughout the known history. Nobody, especially totalitarian regime, likes "the voice that yells in the desert". So it became that this book was putted on a certain kind of "index librorum prohibitorum". What makes it tragic, is the fact that that was happening in the upper half of twentieth century.

What was so incriminating in that book, that communist party simply had to make that move? When one starts to question revollution, when one starts to question necessity of one voice-one peolpe doctrine, when one sees in "fight of the oppressed" just a certain kind of tragedy, human misery that has been manifesting repeatedly through human existene, one must become "enemy of the state". And that has not changed up until today, nor it will. But that is the story for some other place and time.

There is much of J.L. Borges influence in this work, especially in the short stoy called "Dogs and books", but you mustn't think that this is Borgesian "collection" of stories. These work are much less artistic (whatever that means) and much more they resemble reality, life itself, than Borges work does.

By telling the story of seven individuals, the lived their life in a countries rich with political struggles, Danilo Kis draws excellent portrait oh human ability to endure, and even so, to somehow fail miserably and be forever gone from this world.

Why the four stars? I was hearing so much of this book, and when I finally read it, it somehow dissapointed me, probably was expecting to much, or maybe is just that, taht I have failed to grasp entire meaning of the novel. So, better to read it again :) If you looked for great writer from, Mid-Southern Europe, Kis is the one you could deffinitely start with.

No, I'm not so much speechless as I am aghast at the idea of speaking. Any speech can be tortured into a lie, yet not speaking is the biggest lie of all.

This short book is physically frightening, nightmare material, and its power is all the more awful because it is authentically universal. It's not merely another indictment of the police state, of the slaughters committed by Lenin and Stalin, of the archipelago of terror that was "the Other Europe" for most of the 20th Century. That becomes totally explicit in the chapter entitled 'Dogs and Books', which transcribes the documentary reports of a forced conversion of Jews to Christianity in France in 1330, a perfect parallel gulag tragedy of torture and murder in the name of righteous certainty. The moral is clear: believers make good killers.

"A Tomb for Boris Davidovitch" is an series of interlocking capsule biographies of "revolutionaries" who are almost all slaughtered in their own cause by other revolutionaries of their own 'faith.' It is written with phosphorus flare intensity and such authenticity that the reader can't be bothered to wonder where 'facts' end and imagination begins. For once, the acclaim for a book from the "other Europe" is completely justified. This little book will outlast its time and place, and all of us.

As I said above, the universality of Danilo Kis's portrayal of ideological inhumanity is what raises his work beyond that of Solzhenitzyn and others. What happens in the seven tales of this book is unimaginably hideous but obviously real. My amazon avatar, Giordano Bruno, could testify: he was kidnapped and imprisoned in a cold stone dungeon in Rome for seven years; then he was given a final mock trial, tortured, sentenced to death. His jaw was nailed shut to prevent him from speaking to the crowds, and he was burned alive in the Campo dei Fiori.

Besides the chapter Kis devotes to the Inquisition, he might have included another about the Reign of Terror. I'd rush to read such a book about Danton and Robespierre, and the true believers in their purity of doctrine. But there's NO need to reach back before 1976, the year "A Tomb" was published in Yugoslavia; the cascading events of the Reagan-through-Bush II governments -- the post-Cold War moral catastrophes that have pinnacled in Guantanamo -- need the perspicacity and courage of an American Danilo Kis to depict them. It's impossible to read this book without reconfiguring its events around the CIA. The portrait of "the Father of the Country" that hung in the Church of Saint Sophia worn the same smirk of certainty as Oliver North or Dick Cheney.