October 16, 2009
Remembering Danilo Kiš
Yesterday was the 20th anniversary of the untimely death of the Yugoslav writer Danilo Kiš (A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, Encyclopedia of the Dead). My friend Rich Byrne pays tribute to Kiš' "painfully comic vision of human beings careening through a universe of injustice and accident," and talks about how his work affected the Yugoslav/Serbian literary scene and how it anticipated the horrors to come:
One of the great ironies of Kiš' career is that "Boris Davidovich" set off a lengthy war within Yugoslavia’s -- and mainly Serbia’s -- literary establishment that turned not upon interpretations of Stalinism (the vexed question that forced both author Mihajlo Mihajlov and director Dušan Makavejev into dissidence and exile) but on questions of nationalism and literary cabalism....
The battle over "Boris Davidovich" presaged the violent breakup of Yugoslavia set in motion a decade later, and Kiš clearly articulated the vicious mentality that would later sweep through the nation as rooted in paranoia, banality, kitsch and ignorance.....