Tertz concluded the story of the unfortunate man from Latvia with this laconic comment (in this letter to his wife he still needed to save space for Providence and Gogol’s nose): “He had precisely 12 years and 6 months to go before the end of his sentence.” On the next page (p. 76) of the London edition, he added, in a separate context and yet somewhat paradoxically: “Sleep is the watering place of the soul to which it hastens at night to drink at the sources of life.”
Recently, while reading the book by Tertz, I remembered Šejka’s story. (I am more and more convinced that he had to have had a copy of the manuscript.) He narrated the course of events in his own way, referring frequently to Berdyaev, Dostoyevsky, and Beckett. He was lonely, sick, and Russian. And he knew how to bathe his story in the same mysterious light that emanated from his paintings.
TRANSLATOR’S AFTERWORD
Danilo Kiš (1935–1989) remains best known in his native Serbia and in the world of translation as a novelist. If one throws into his dossier the fact that his fiction was mildly (and bravely) postmodern and that the Holocaust was one of his main themes, we will have just about reached the end of our popular, journalistic understanding of the man and his works. Yet the refinement, even the reframing, of Kiš’s profile continues as we move well into the third decade following his premature death of lung cancer in Paris. Recent years have seen the publication of more and more scholarly articles about the methods and themes of his works, as well as the translations of some additional stories, an early novel, and a play; in Serbia there are even new primary sources coming to light, such as the two Kiš film scripts, published in late 2011 as Dva filmska scenarija, and the occasional rebroadcast of his 1989 collection of filmed interviews in Israel with “double victims” of fascism and (early) Yugoslav communism, Goli život (Bare Life). The new trends arising from this publishing activity — trends that supplement but in no way supplant the basic Western critical understanding of Kiš originating in his “family cycle” of novels and stories and in the carefully selected, cosmopolitan essays brought out in the English-language version of Homo Poeticus during the war-torn 1990s — could arguably be summed up as increased attention both to the Yugoslav milieu depicted in his writings and to his artistic and ethical aversion to Stalinism. There are a number of other jewels awaiting their turn to speak to audiences in translation, and Kiš’s life itself still awaits a great biography, in any language. The publication of this volume is, in my opinion, a bracing new chapter in Serbian and East European literature, and. one might add. it represents only a fraction of the excellent work that still remains inaccessible in English.
The seven stories contained in this version of The Lute and the Scars do not have an overarching common theme. They do, however, all very much bear the stamp of the author’s mind and touch. They are enjoyable, by turns intimate and politically obstreperous and sad and even funny, and their diversity will allow a fuller appreciation of Kiš’s thematic concerns and, possibly, his stylistic approaches. One of the stories, “The Stateless One,” reflects themes explored elsewhere in Kiš’s oeuvre — here, the difficult relationship of an artist to his work and skepticism about modern nationalism — though, even so, it is unique in choosing a (real) late Habsburg novelist as its protagonist. “Jurij Golec” is a touching and elegiac treatment of the last days and legacy of a Soviet refugee writer in Paris; it is without doubt one of this translator’s favorite stories in the volume, by dint of its alternating tones of sadness and levity, as well as its serving as a reminder of the existence of a little-known Holocaust novel, Piotr Rawicz’s Blood from the Sky, which ranks alongside key works by Aharon Appelfeld, David Grossman, Aleksandar Tišma, and Kiš himself among the indispensable fictional treatments of Nazi genocide. “Jurij Golec” is also the cosmopolitan equivalent of the very Yugoslav and very political account of a man of letters driven to desperation by ideological and physical brutalization at the hands of the secret police that we find in “The Poet.” Also rooted firmly in the Serbian context, and beautifully and humanely demonstrating Kiš’s respect for Nobel Prize-winner Ivo Andrić, for whom he had enormous but seldom discussed admiration, is “The Debt,” a stream-of-consciousness final will and testament of the great writer in his final days in the hospital. “A and B” is a short but challenging autobiographical essay that condenses many of Kiš’s unconventional views about the “brutality” of Central Europe and the nobility of the Balkans (an inversion of the typical epithets); this is also the thematic register of his great novels Garden, Ashes and Hourglass. Finally, “The Lute and the Scars” is another colorful autobiographical piece that depicts bohemian Belgrade in the 1950s, the cold, lingering Stalinism of the USSR, and the struggle of a young writer to find authenticity and maintain personal integrity. “The Marathon Runner and the Race Official,” also bearing the imprint of inimical Soviet conditions, memorializes the precariousness — the mortal condition of being pitilessly “exposed,” if you will — of the marginalized and marked outsider: Kiš’s preferred formula for the concept of “victim.” Each of these stories is anchored in Kiš’s biography or in literary history more generally.
For an overview of the complicated genesis of the stories in this volume, the following table has been assembled from the original notes provided in the Serbian edition.
Readers will perhaps find it useful to stay attuned, while immersed in these stories, to conceptions of “home,” to various ways of embodying and depicting the “creative life,” and to the corrosive effects of dystopian dictatorships. The stories do at times have a lyricism that approaches the inimitable writing in the stories of Early Sorrows: For Children and Sensitive Readers; they are, on the other hand, nowhere near as bloody as, and by and large not as harrowing as, the stupendous component tales of A Tomb for Boris Davidovich. They have enough of the virtues of these other story collections to elicit a strong reaction from readers, however, and they also read like “vintage Kiš”: to wit, the compression, the enumeration, the poignant detail, and the restlessly conversational language. The stories also offer us a chance to embrace a more fully Yugoslav, or Serbian, Kiš. The deep affection for Ivo Andrić and, metaphorically, the acknowledgement of the author’s own set of “debts,” is every bit as much “the real Kiš” as the cosmopolitan-ism — an artist’s search for authenticity and intuitive acceptance of diversity and intellectual and emotional (as opposed to political or ethnic) affinity — of “The Stateless One.” Likewise, the reflections on Yugoslav conditions in “The Lute and the Scars” and in this translator’s other favorite story in the collection, “The Poet,” are just as real as his many nonfiction pieces on French symbolism, Thomas Mann, and James Joyce. Finally, the looming presence of the USSR in so many of these stories reminds us that the political coloration of the backdrop to Kiš’s life changed, significantly, from black to red before his teenage years were out. This epic turn left its indelible marks on his intellectual biography, and it precipitated neatly into that most engaging of his plays, Night and Fog (see Absinthe: New European Writing 12 [2009]: 94–133).