Danilo Kis' 'Encyclopedia of the Dead' [Volume: 7(1988), pp. 337-349]

340
PREDRAG MATVEJEVIC
(especially Pescanik) and the ideas of the Russian Formalists (especially
Sklovskij and Eichenbaum) about their close similarity or kinship (HP,
236-237), and so it is not necessary to reiterate this here. The meaning
of the phenomena and works which characterized the Russian literary
scene in the 1920s and were cruelly repressed in the 1930s did not fail
to influence Yugoslav literature following the break with the Soviet
Union in 1948. Kis is one of the best examples in this respect, albeit not
the only one.
Respect for "literature as such," if it is to be consistent, must also
face up to the question of "reality as such" (HP, 190), not allowing, of
course, for one to be reduced into becoming the other. This realization
led the author toward a more direct, open encounter with history:
Grobnica za Borisa Davidovica-sedam poglavlja jedne zajedniCke povesti
("A Tomb for Boris Davidovich-Seven Chapters of a Single Story"). From
the third person singular, the author changed to the third person plural:
he and it became they. They!
Grobnica is related to Pescanik, but the "objectivization" in it is
different-it is more direct, more political. Attempting to escape from
prevailing conditions in Central Europe (and not only there), Kis' protagonists-the children of the revolution, the knights of the left from the
time when the left had so many knights, among whom there was an imposing number of Jews-at the end of the 1930s, in the "first socialist
country," become victims of the Stalinist purges.
Jewishness has a double (literary) meaning in Grobnica za Borisa
Davidovica. On the one hand, thanks to my earlier books, it creates
a necessary link and widens the mythologems with which I operate
(and in this manner, through the problem of the Jews, provides me
with the license to approach a particular theme, if one in fact needs
a license). On the other hand, Jewishness here, as in my earlier books,
is only an effect of defamiliarization. Whoever fails to understand
this understands nothing of the mechanism of literary transposition
(A, 49).
The book is "based on historical reality" (A, 43), and cites documents
which confirm this reality. The documents themselves serve (that is to say
they are subordinated) to "produce a deeper authenticity" (A, 95).
Nothing is more fantastic than reality, affirms KiS, following
Dostoevsky. I do not know whether anyone before him has tackled the
theme of the Gulag in such modem literary forms, making use of the tools
available to modem prose. Modem narrative and novel-wriring techniques,
use of documents, variation of fact and fiction, defamiliarization of what
is known and seen have helped the author to carry out his job in a more
sound and thorough manner.3