In Dr. Taube's time, there was still hope. We must also remember that the encirclement of the Soviet Union by hostile capitalist states was a proven fact (no matter that Stalin made paranoid capital from it), that Communism had been brutally put down in Germany, and that the nightmare of Hitlerism now threatened everything that the Taubes and Verschoyles stood for. No wonder that to a believer in the nobility of socialism, Soviet Communism, even Stalina Communism, was the last best chance. It would have taken more suspiciousness than most do-gooders possess to fathom Stalin. And maybe, like some of my American friends, they wanted to remain ignorant. Maybe m politics, as in sexuality, a purity of passion exists only in the preconsummation state of half-blind surmises.[13]
It is part of Danilo Kiš's achievement to have created these two more or less sympathetic characters, who can be accused of no sins more serious than self-delusion. The Communist ideal is of course more fully realized in Boris Davidovich Novsky in the title story. Unlike Verschoyle and Dr. Taube, this man is hardheaded, competent, effective, trusted and even famous-a real hero. Precisely for that reason (such runs Stalinist logic), he has to get eliminated, for what if someday he got the idea of offering himself as an alternative? His Achilles’ heel is pride in his own rectitude. If the Communist Party is the most scientific and advanced vehicle for the salvation of humanity, and if, therefore, it must be considered "my Party, right or wrong", and if it needs me to do anything, no matter how loathsome, which it claims will accomplish the end, then I’d better do it. This is the argument which wins over Novsky’s counterpart, Comrade Rubashov, in Koestler’s famous Darkness at Noon. What wins Novsky over, on the contrary, is being forced to watch the murder of men who physically resemble himself immediately after each victim has been told: “If Novsky doesn’t confess, we’ll kill you?” And Novsky, with that failing-or virtue-which afflicts people who care about the world and long to improve it, feels responsible for these deaths. In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevsky at one point propounds the doctrine that our only hope of rescuing humankind from its own evil is through acknowledging our kinship with one another to such a degree that we experience guilt and repentance for violence committed by others. This magnificently crazed notion may well be appropriate for lone politician-saints such as Gandhi. For Novsky, it’s fatal. He "realised with horror that this repetition" of murders “was not accidental, but part of an infernal plan: each day of his life would be paid for with the life of another man; the perfection of his biography would be destroyed.” And so Novsky, like Verschoyle and Dr. Taube, gets duped precisely because he possesses empathy and compassionate impulses (no matter that it's masked by the pretense of cold vanity over his reputation). He agrees to confess.
The more pragmatic careerist Chelyustnikov in “The Mechanical Lions” fares slightly better than Novsky, for he has fewer ideals. He lives out his term in a prison camp. Whatever false confession he’s made to sign, we can be sure that it affects him less by wounding his trickster-conscience than by pricking his apprehensions about his own survival. Likewise, the envious, anti-Semitic murderer Miksha Hantescu in "The Knife With the Rosewood Handle" perishes in the Gulag only through the generalized neglect of his jailers, not through any decree of liquidation. And, indeed, survivors of the camps have often attested that criminals won more success there than politicals. (Miksha doubtless would have met a better fate had he not been a foreigner, hence an unreliable element.) Kiš's. warning in these series of parables is horrifically clear: In systems such as Stalin's, people are vulnerable to the ultimate degree of repression in direct proportion to their generosity of heart.
This is why I sympathize with Brodsky’s conclusion in the introduction that A Tomb for Boris Davidovich “achieves aesthetic comprehension where ethics fail". I sympathize with it, but I disagree with it. It is precisely in such situations as Kiš's characters find themselves that ethics is most desperately needed. One cannot blame the Chelyustnikovs overmuch; certainly one cannot blame them in comparison to the Stalins. But surely by that very token we ought to honor the Novskys who retain sufficient integrity to feel ethically cornered in a context far from entirely of their own making. Granted, Novsky's ethics in his cold prison darkness may he best described as a beacon of light without warmth. Granted, he's misled by them in the end-or is he? Maybe his choice to save the lives of his other doubles by confessing was really the best one. Who can say? At least he made a choice.
As representatives of the various human types and motives which can be marshaled by a given ideology, Kiš's characters are inexhaustibly memorable. Indeed, they’re universal. The steady man Chelyustnikov is of a piece with the Khmer Rouge general I once interviewed who joined that gang of Maoist murderers with open-eyed enthusiasm simply because he could see that Pol Pot would win. The poet Darmolatov can be found today in every culture and regime of the world. And Kiš reminds us of that fact with his parallel tale “Dogs and Books", set six centuries before the fall of Novsky.
I scarcely need repeal Brodsky's praises of the style, whose merit would have been apparent without them. The author's economy of language (which Brodsky rightly calls "a poetic type of operation"), combined with equal parts of lyricism and desperate irony, work together to make this one of the great books. Although firmly set in a specific time, it could be profitably read and reread when all the Marxist states have become as fabulously forgotten as the civilization of the Etruscans.
William T. Vollmann
2001
13
For a panorama of Communist sincerity across Europe in World War II, and its various convolutions and involutions, the reader is recommended to read Manes Sperber's novel trilogy Like a Tear in the Ocean.