(This passage, unchanged, could have formed part of a Postscript to The Encyclopedia of the Dead. It was probably written with that goal in mind.)
In manuscript form among Kiš’s papers were preserved seven tables of contents of a book of stories that would be published in 1983 under the title The Encyclopedia of the Dead. The first two, which we can trace without difficulty to the year 1980, included the title “Ödön von Horváth,” with a notation of the number of pages envisioned (ten in the first table of contents, and eight in the second). Both of the tables were written out by hand on half-sheets of typewriter paper. A remnant of cellophane tape attests to the fact that the list of titles (as if it were some literary duty) had been hung up in plain view somewhere. No tale involving Ödön von Horváth under any title, however, is to be found on the other five tables of contents, all of which were typed and which contain the titles of finished stories. We did, however, find forty-seven typed pages in Kiš’s papers belonging to a “topic for a story” about the life and death of an apatride. One of them bears the title “APATRIDE/MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY,” typed in all capitals, and below that, in parentheses, “OUR HOMELAND IS THE MIND.” We used the first, underlined word as the title of the story, regarding the other two titles as variants. Among the forty-seven mostly uncorrected pages, we were able to discern two entities; their relationship to each other was one of first and second versions. The first consists of fourteen numbered pages, with traces of corrections, apparently carried out in one sitting, with a fine-point black pen. The story of the stateless man, now bearing the name Egon von Németh (the exchange of the surname Horváth for Németh, aside from purely literary concerns, which lie outside the scope of these notes, is interesting in its own right: one common family name used to designate Hungarians living along the borders to Croatian areas has been traded for an equally common family name for Hungarians from border areas next to German-speaking territory), flows continuously in this version, without any kind of breaks, even among sections that are chronologically very far apart. In the text, however, there are fragments, designated by numbers and circled in the same black pen, that later, with almost no changes, appear in the second version of eight pages.
This second version comprises fifteen numbered sections. There is no title on the first page, something that could mean that this version served above all as an investigation of the suitability of the form: the fragment as a structural unit is being put to the test. The question of structure is again of the greatest importance: the sequence of sections (“the texture of events”), their dimensions, the relationship between their relative lengths, interruption in the course of the narrative, and the nature of their graphic representations (characteristic here is the absence of long passages: every section has the semantic density of a stanza of poetry). At the top of the first and second sections there are, in addition, typed sentences taken word for word from scientific texts. A possible function of these quotes: the contribution to a sense of compression; but they have another, more important function: it is as if the author of A Tomb for Boris Davidovich wanted, through them, to say the following: “Look, ladies and gentlemen, what my starting point is, and look what it gives rise to, no matter how ‘carefully’ I exercise my ‘creativity.’”
What about the contents of the remaining twenty-five pages? For the most part unpaginated, they are largely variants of the passages included in the two versions already mentioned. But there are those that show “first-hand” traces of events from the life of the apatride that encompass his entire history. We took it upon ourselves, not without trepidation, to piece the story together (the fragmentary character of the second version made our work easier). We found justification in our desire to defy the irreversible.
Textual Notes:
entirely vague and pointless: Sentence incomplete.
And so forth: A passage for which we could unfortunately find no place in the unified and recomposed “variant,” given its similarity to this section/fragment, but could no more dispense with, on account of its function in the course of the narrative, is reproduced in its entirety here:
Here, in Amsterdam, in an isolated street a stone’s throw from a canal, our stateless man would suddenly find himself among his characters, a word that he used, not without attendant irony, every time his eye was drawn to those human creatures who bore on their faces or their bodies signs of rack and ruin, either patent or hidden. When night had begun its descent onto the streets, around the corner there would suddenly appear women, all dolled up, leaning against the wall in their tight, clingy dresses.
No more and no less so than other people. If he had been told this earlier, two or three years ago, he would not have paid any attention to it: These two sentences were omitted from the first publication of the story (Srpski književni glasnik, 1, 1992).
Jurij Golec
In the last three of the seven tables of contents for The Encyclopedia of the Dead, the titles “Jurij Golec” and “The Lute and the Scars” both appear, in this order. In the seventh table of contents, both titles are crossed out by hand. Why were both removed, even though they dovetail with the basic theme of the book (both find their “metaphysical bearings” in love and death)? The reason (the only reason for which material evidence can be adduced) should perhaps be sought in the radical shift in style that comes from adjusting to their autobiographical, non-fictional character. In their stead “Red Stamps with Lenin’s Picture” appeared at the last minute. We say “last minute” because the title of this other story is not found in any of the tables of contents, something that indicates that it was added to the manuscript just before it was turned over to the publisher. This piece of “fantasy” combines the worlds of the two stories while hewing more closely to the style of the whole Encyclopedia. Whether or not the inclusion of “Stamps” necessitated the exclusion of the other two stories for purely literary reasons is a question of another order, and one that does not lie within the scope of these notes.
The story “Jurij Golec” is preserved in manuscript form in four versions (not counting the layers of “palimpsests” created by revisions in the author’s hand), totaling one hundred and nineteen typed pages, to which should be added fifty-five additional pieces of paper with variations on individual passages or notes and sketches. The sequence of the versions can be established with little difficulty. The first comprises twenty-six pages and has the title “The Actor”; the second, untitled version is forty pages long. Both of these versions contain only the first half of the story. The third version, and the fourth, definitive one, both bearing the title “Jurij Golec,” are of almost equal length (27 and 26 pp.). The fundamental differences between the four versions are the visible reduction in text and the replacement of real personal names with fictitious names or initials. The basic technical issue, which is the main reason that multiple versions exist, is how to depict dialogue without narrative lulls or awkwardness. The customary forms “she said,” “he said,” or “I said,” and so forth, are reduced to an absolute minimum (and in the final text are only used when needed for rhythm or comprehension). The basic events, characters, and situations, however, remained unchanged.