Danilo Kis, A Tomb For Boris Davidovich: A Literary Scandal

Danilo Kiš’s international fame came partially as the result of the arcane, but fierce battle fought for six years among the Yugoslav literati over his novel, A Tomb for Boris Davidovich. Yet the details of this “literary cause célèbre” ( Shishkoff 341), as Serge Shishkoff characterizes it in his account of the affair, “Košava in a Coffee Pot,” are for the most part unknown.In order to understand the scandal which, if talent wouldn’t have done it anyway, made Kiš famous, one must picture the Yugoslav literary clime in the late 1970’s.

Yugoslavia’s position was highly particularized; it was a communist country in Eastern Europe, but it was not a part of the USSR; it was a nation, but its nationhood was not based on language, or ethnicity, or religion, but around support for its leader, Joseph Tito. Communist nationhood in Yugoslavia, following the break between Tito and Stalin in 1948, was, to a large degree, defined negatively: Yugoslavs were the kind of communists that Stalinists were not.

After Stalin died in 1953,  Khrushchev’s “thaw” seemed to promise greater freedom for Soviet artists. But, in practice, the direct government-control over culture that Andrei Zhdanov established in 1946 (and which, of course, had its antecedents in earlier Russian censors) remained throughout the Soviet period. The control of culture in Yugoslavia, was, more or less, based on a rejection of the Soviet’s authoritarian approach. In Yugoslavia, self-censorship reigned. There were no official censors, but a work could only by published after the author found two official “sponsors.” The two sponsors shared “the responsibility for the ideological purity of the work” with the author. Naturally, this made them “quite cautious” (Shishkoff 343). After publication, a book, its author and its sponsors could always all be taken to court. The consequences were less dire than in the USSR, but “such punishment as the loss of a job, of the opportunity to publish or undertake other artistic pursuits c[ould] be meted out” (Shishkoff 343). And, although the structure of the Yugoslav system seemed to promise writers a relative degree of freedom, the literary institutions—journals, committees to award prizes, departments at the universities—were populated by an entrenched group of literati who towed the party line. Additionally, some in the government and especially among the cultural bureaucrats might have secretly thought straightforward censorship and Stalinism preferable to the messy debate necessary to pull an ideologically impure work from the shelves. What the “Kiš affair” became, then, was an unexpected unmasking of the unmerited success and ugly self-interest of the elites that ran these institutions. Especially as the scandal became prolonged, ruining the careers and reputations of more than one career cultural bureaucrat, one can imagine how these loyal state servants might have wished the state would step in, supporting its people, silencing the blasphemous outsiders. No such thing was to occur.

A Tomb for Boris Davidovich was published in June, 1976 to praise-filled reviews. About a month after publication, rumors began to circulate that the book had been plagiarized. “Some said that a Russian émigré who died in Paris in the 30’s wrote it, others said that another Russian émigré, who died some other time and not in Paris, was the author, but then […] names […]began to be mentioned” (Shishkoff 346). Put into articles, the rumors spread; waves of new articles denounced the rumors, spreading them further and introducing new rumors. The publication of an article entitled “A Tomb for Danilo Kiš” was projected, but then the next issue came out without any article of that name. As it turns out, the article was excised after the editorial board hired two experts, who found the article “not only without merit, but even ‘dangerous’” (Shishkoff 346). After several months of anticipation, the article was renamed “A Necklace of Stolen Pearls” and published in November ina different journal, Oko. The author of the article, Dragoljub Golubvić, was an ex-reporter with no training or experience in literary criticism. His article, an attempt at literary polemic, was, as Shishkoff has it, correspondingly poor.

Golubvić began his vicious article by attacking artists who paint reproductions of masterpieces and asserting that their analogues in literature do a great harm to a nation’s culture. Having thus set himself up as the defender of the public interest, of national cultural purity and integrity, he goes on to vent his grievances against Kiš. His main assertion is that Kiš is an outrageous, shameless and clumsy plagiarist who purloined the “spiritual property” of Joyce, Medvedev, Réau, Borges, Haupt, Štajner, and, possibly, others. He also has some other complaints. The stories are exclusively about rebellious Jews, the names of the characters are invented, some of the “documents” are fictitious etc., but since his article is long and badly written, his style meandering, his reasoning muddled, and since he seems deliberately vague and evasive in making these accusations, it is difficult to pin him down and say with certainty what it is he objects to—except for the charge of plagiarism, of course. (Shishkoff 347)

But, without poor Golubvić’s knowledge, Oko had sent the article to Kiš in advance. They published his response in the very same issue as Golubvić’s attack. Kiš’ carefully structured response presented twelve quotations from Golubvić’s article, then proceeded to adroitly disable each convoluted claim of the bumbling diatribe with clear, clipped derision. Indeed, Kiš’s reply was openly hostile; he coins an offensive nickname based on Golubvić’s real nickname, compares him to a Nazi in two ways, and suggests that, as Golubvić usually writes as a journalist and knows nothing about literary matters, he is merely a pawn, doing a favor for Kiš’s powerful opponents in an attempt to curry favor with these cultural bureaucrats. “Those who hired you,” Kiš gloats, “have done their part of the job much more successfully—orally and anonymously. So you’ve been had!” (Shishkoff 350)

In the next issue of Oko, there appeared no less than four articles addressing the debate. Two scholarly articles supported Kiš’s right to draw on sources and Golubvić’s response, “Arguments and Motives: Why I Can’t Polemicize with Danilo Kiš,” was published along with Kiš’s response to that response, “Clay Pigeons.” This was enough for Golubvić. Thoroughly trounced in this battle of wits, he gave up publishing articles against Kiš and filed a suit for criminal libel, alleging that Kiš had harmed his honor and reputation.

At this point, the cast of characters changed. Predrag Matvejević, a translator, essayist, professor of French literature, and perpetual polemicist, took it upon himself to stoke the flames of the scandal by stepping into the role of Kiš’s defender, publishing an article in another issue of Oko, entitled “Under the Sign of the Ram, in the Shadow of Nero.” Matvejević delighted in this work; he probably hoped to publish a collection of polemic essays sometime in the future. Kiš, rather mysteriously, absented himself from the print arena as Matvejević stood squarely in his corner. In his response to Golubvić, Kiš had only alluded to the possibility that the čaršija (The Serbian word for a hoi polloi or clique of self-interested philistines. Kiš later came to call this group the “Cosa Nostra,” an appellation that added the nuance of chauvinistic nationalism to the already insulting name) had been behind the attempt to dishonor him. Matvejević went a step further: he named names. Specifically he called out B. Sćepanović, M. Bulatović, and Dragoljub M. Jeremić. Jeremić, “probably the most powerful man in Yugoslav literature” (Shishkoff 352), he accused of using influence upon private juries, in the months before the scandal’s eruption in the press, to cause Kiš not to receive the prestigious Andrić and October prizes. In the case of the October Prize, Jeremić himself was the winning nominee.

From then on, the fuss was self-perpetuating. Each time Matvejević accused or critiqued the Cosa Nostra, Jeremić wrote a response. Though he consistently claimed he was above taking part in such a degraded discourse, he continued to provide his critics with a steady stream of statements that, with Matvejević’s persistent acerbity, were easily found to contain damning evidence that Jeremić was every kind of fraud and villain: a self-interested apparatchik, a chauvinistic nationalist undermining Yugoslav unity, an anti-Semite, a Stalinist, a bad Marxist, a terrible writer, and a bully who kept the talented out by exercising the power he’d garnered by toeing the party line.

In his initial defensive response, “Low Blows with Someone Else’s Hand,” Jeremić seemed to hedge his bets, both defending his right to have kept the prize from Kiš and denying that he did any such thing. He goes on to repeat Golubvić’s charges of plagiary, and, finally, to insinuate that “Matvejević, Kiš and unnamed others had formed a conspiracy, a clan” (Shishkoff 353). As Shishkoff notes, Jeremić never contended anything but that whatever crime his enemy had falsely imputed to him was actually true of his enemy. And, certainly, it was just a little ridiculous for the most influential man in Yugoslav letters, who effectively led most of the organizations that distributed appointments, promotions, opprobrium and acclaim, to say that there was a conspiracy against him.

But what made the affair blow-up into a scandal was an incredible faux-pas of Jeremić’s. In one of his responses, he remarked that “people who live 400 kilometers away should not stick their noses into Belgrade’s business” (Shishkoff 353). Matvejević was a professor in Zagreb, Jeremić in Belgrade. To say that Matvejević had no business commenting on the literary events occurring in Belgrade (Jeremić’s turf, so to speak) was to introduce the age-old antagonism, quieted under Tito’s unifying influence, between Serbs and Croats. Kiš had already expressed anti-nationalist views in interviews, and it is possible that Golubvić’s appeal to “those who care for about the character of national cultures” (Shishkoff 349) was a nationalistic attack on the “cosmopolitan” influence of Kiš, whose work displays his deep identification and belief in a non-ideological outsider status, conferred upon him by his mixed Montenegrin and Jewish ancestry and embraced as a part of his literary impulse. Regardless of Kiš’s views, divisive nationalism was incredibly politically correct in Yugoslavia in the 1970s. A perfect frenzy of articles appeared denouncing the divisive spirit of Jeremić’s article. Matvejević took advantage of this moment not only to denounce Jeremić’s nationalism, but also to review his new, award-winning book and closely scrutinize its (veritable) lack of merit. Through the end of 1977, Jeremić continued to denounce the mud-slingers, miring himself further and further in his own indignant, contemptible blather, but still holding on to his influential position.

Then, in the spring of 1978, after months of relative quiet, Kiš, who’d long ago absented himself from the debate about himself, published Lesson in Anatomy. The publisher had managed to keep the book’s publication a secret—maybe because of worries that someone might attempt to censor it, maybe just to preserve the element of surprise—and it made a great splash when released. The essays in Lesson in Anatomy described Kiš’s personal literary theoretics, and addressed the diatribes against him collectively, subsuming all their petty points in an eloquent explanation, litered with quotations and erudite references, of why he writes the way he does. In order to give a sense of Kiš’s powerful method, I will quote extensively from the book’s introduction.

The unprecedented witch-hunt surrounding A Tomb for Boris Davidovich and its author has died down like a provincial carnival: the windows are dark, the curtains drawn, the dogs quiet, the marketplace strewn with newsprint, the last evidence of that Walpurgis Night, that (literary) witches’ sabbath. […]

Yet, were it not for the yellow press and the failed writers-turned-reporters who set the tone, I might never have written this book; I might have had no need to write it because I would have been able to say all I had to say—or most of it—in the newspapers. In fact, I did write some articles at the time (exposing a few misunderstandings and unclear points), but was unable to have them published because of the alleged objectivity of our literary and non-literary press (whose editors held that as an interested party I had no right to speak out on matters of the utmost concern to me), or withdrew them myself, realizing that papers with a large circulation would have selected only the most sensational items (as they had done with some earlier pieces of mine), thus stripping the whole of all logic and argumentative power.

The witch-hunt was at its height for a period of seven months (from September 1976 to March 1977—now in the open, now behind the scenes), and the polemical bonfire that burst forth on the pages of our newspapers lit up the face of our provincial literary scene. But only for a moment. Once the flames threatened to singe the troublemakers intriguing in the darkness, they pulled back and his behind their institutions and their lies, denying the public, semi-public, and secret allegations of the hour before, happy to escape with second-degree burns. I, however, unable to speak at the time, vowed to follow their writings, subject them to a “close reading,” as they say in English, and clear things up—that is, demonstrate on the basis of cogent, instructive examples that they were ill equipped both morally and literarily to pass judgment on books of any kind. I reserve this fun and games for the second part of the book; in the first I shall touch on A Tomb for Boris Davidovich itself—its genesis, its sources, and certain theoretical assumptions on which it is based. As the use of paraliterary and documentary materials for literary purposes is a well-known device in modern literature—it has been one of the dominant devices since Flaubert—I shall for pedagogical reasons cite a number of instructive texts.

Given the present state of our literary criticism, a state that shows no promise of improvement, writers are duty-bound to speak out about their texts from a theoretical perspective. In the last analysis, everything that happens to writers—bad or good—forms a part of their literary destiny (and they have no other). Tout est à abouter à un livre, says Mallarmé. Everything in the world exists to be turned into a book (Kiš 9-11).

Shishkoff describes what is evident in the introduction: Kiš’s mastery of the techniques of polemical writing:

Kiš presents his point of view most convincingly, demonstrates the fallacy of Jeremić’s with utmost clarity, and he permeates the whole with sustained angry invective. But his anger, however real it may have been, is of a different nature than the elemental force with which he seared Golubvić: this time it is a carefully controlled anger, there is a distance between Kiš and his anger, it is now a literary device, and he ornaments it masterfully with humor, mockery, hyperbole and witty rhetoric. The effect is absolutely devastating: Jeremić’s shallowness, arrogance, pomposity and lack of talent as a writer and a philosopher stand out in bold relief, and as a result Jeremić soon became a spent force, losing, in rapid succession, most of his titles and functions. (Shishkoff 360)

This “carefully controlled anger” seems another manifestation of Kiš’s literary modus operandi. As Kiš makes clear in Lesson in Anatomy and elsewhere, he thinks literature should come from life, but should always use poetry to temper the pathos of that which is too horrific, too sad, and too pathetic to have a place in aesthetic discourse.

“Yes,” Kiš says in one of the interviews in Homo Poeticus, “there is a baroque dimension to what I write. Flamboyantly baroque, you might say. But something spare and severe as well. You might call it a conscious, controlled baroque. I’m not satisfied with ‘verisimilitude,’ for example; I need to give the reader authentic points of reference. I can’t write without both authentic data and literary devices” (Kiš 267).

There were a few surprises in Lesson in Anatomy. In the book’s first part, “About a Certain Scandalous (Literary) Affair, Subjectively,” Kiš retells the story of the scandal, creating a vivid cast of characters out of the mediocre bureaucrats that formed the Costa Nostra. Surprisingly, he includes his French translator, Jean Descat, with whom he’d had a falling out, in the list of enemies. He says that Descat, whom he’d told about the sources used (admittedly and transparently) in the novel had turned to the cultural bureaucrats, giving them evidence of Kiš’s “plagiarism.” Descat flew into a rage, claiming that “as a consequence of Kiš’s disrespectful treatment of him, Jean Descat, Franco-Yugoslav relations would suffer and a program of exchange of scholars would be jeopardized” (Shishkoff 358). Matvejević, of course, wrote a devastating article revealing Descat’s deluded sense of his own importance. In the two central sections of Lesson in Anatomy, Kiš defends his own work against Jeremić’s accusations and, turning the tables, carefully “close reads” the worthlessness of Jeremić’s work. Lesson in Anatomy concludes with a methodical analysis of The Death of Mr. Goluža, a novel by B. Sćepanović that had recently earned high honors under the auspices of Jeremić.

A frenzy of articles by the calumnied Cosa Nostra appeared in the months after Lesson in Anatomy was published. Jeremić, refusing to admit himself defeated, wrote an article in which he said something so horrifyingly insensitive that even Matvejević did not see fit to dignify it with a response. He said,” it is likewise clear that Kiš in this book [A Tomb . . .] has none of that marvelous optimism and faith in the future so present in the works of people who described their own sufferings in the concentration camps” (Shishkoff 363). Accusing Kiš of portraying victims of horrible suffering too pessimistically, Matvejević, who, of course, had also never been imprisoned, displays the appalling core of his reductive, lazily ideological view of history.

The scandal took years to peter out. With the help of a completely inept lawyer—Shishkoff makes a great joke of trying to translate the grammatically mangled disposition—Golubvić’s highly publicized libel suits against Kiš in both Zagreb and Belgrade failed. Jeremić published a book of little to no import in response to Lesson in Anatomy. But after the publication of Lesson in Anatomy, the cultural bureaucrats were unmasked, their credibility shot.

Sometimes, Kiš referred to the affair, usually as an example.