Danilo Kiš

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The native form of this personal name is Kiss Dániel. This article uses Western name order when mentioning individuals.

Danilo Kiš
short story writer
  • poet
    • LanguageSerbian, Serbo-Croatian, Hungarian
    Alma materUniversity of Belgrade
    Spouse
    Mirjana Miočinović
    ​
    ​
    (m. 1962⁠–⁠1981)​
    ParentsEde Kiss
    Milica Dragićević

    Danilo Kiš (Serbian Cyrillic: Данило Киш; born Dániel Kiss; 22 February 1935 – 15 October 1989) was a Yugoslav and Serbian novelist, short story writer, essayist and translator. His best known works include Hourglass, A Tomb for Boris Davidovich and The Encyclopedia of the Dead.

    Life and work

    Early life

    Kiš was born in Subotica, Danube Banovina, Kingdom of Yugoslavia (now Serbia). Kiš was the son of Eduard Kiš (Hungarian: Kis Ede), a Hungarian-speaking Jewish railway inspector and Milica (née Dragićević), a Montenegrin Serb[1] from Cetinje. His father was born in Austria-Hungary with the surname Kohn, but changed it to Kis as part of Magyarization, a widely implemented practice at the time.[2] Kiš's parents met in 1930 in Subotica and married the following year.[3] Milica gave birth to a daughter, Danica, in Zagreb in 1932 before the family relocated to Subotica.[4]

    Kiš's father was an unsteady and often absent figure in Danilo's childhood. Eduard Kiš spent time in a psychiatric hospital in

    anxiety neurosis. Between stays in the hospital, Eduard Kiš edited the 1938 edition of the Yugoslav National and International Travel Guide. Young Danilo saw his father as a traveller and a writer.[5] Eduard Scham, the eccentric father of the protagonist of Early Sorrows, Garden, Ashes, and Hourglass
    is largely based on Kiš's own father.

    World War II

    Kiš's parents were concerned with the rising tide of anti-Semitism all around Europe in the late 1930s. In 1939, they oversaw three-year-old Danilo's baptism into the Eastern Orthodox Church in Novi Sad, where the Kiš family resided at the time.[6] Kiš later acknowledged that this action likely saved his life, since as the son of a Jewish convert to Christianity, Danilo would probably have been subject to persecution without definitive proof of his Christian faith.[6]

    In April 1941, Hungarian troops, in alliance with Nazi Germany, invaded the northern Yugoslavian province of Vojvodina.[7] After Hungary declared war on the Allied powers in 1941, territory was annexed and officials began to persecute Jews in the region. On 20 January 1942, gendarmes and troops invaded Novi Sad, and two days later, gendarmes massacred thousands of Serbs and Jews in their homes and around the city.[8] Eduard Kiš was among a large group of people rounded up and taken by the gendarmes to the banks of the frozen Danube to be shot. Eduard managed to survive, only because the hole in the ice where the gendarmes were dumping the bodies of the dead became so clogged with bodies that the commanders called for the officers to stop the killing. Kiš later described the massacre as the start of his "conscious life".[9]

    Following the massacre, Eduard relocated his family to Kerkabarabás, a town in southwest Hungary. Danilo attended primary school in Kerkabarabás.[10] Through 1944, Hungarian Jews were largely safe, as compared to Jews in other Axis-occupied countries since Hungarian officials were reluctant to hand over Jews to the Nazis. However, in mid 1944 authorities began to deport Jews en masse to concentration camps.[11] Eduard Kiš was sent to a ghetto in Zalaegerszeg in April or May 1944, then was deported to Auschwitz on 5 July. Eduard, along with many of his relatives, was murdered in Auschwitz.[12] Danilo, Danica, and Milica, perhaps owing to Danilo and Danica's baptism certificates, were saved from deportation.

    Kiš's father's murder had a massive impact on his work. Kiš crafted his own father into Eduard Scham, the father of the protagonist of Early Sorrows, Garden, Ashes, and Hourglass. Kiš described his father as a "mythical figure," and would continually claim that his father had not been murdered in Auschwitz but had "disappeared."[13]

    Post-war life

    After the end of the war, the family moved to

    Yugoslavia, where Kiš graduated from high school in 1954. Kiš studied literature at the University of Belgrade. He was an excellent student, receiving praise from students and faculty members alike. He graduated in 1958 as the first student at the University of Belgrade to be awarded a degree in comparative literature. After graduating, Kiš stayed on for two years of postgraduate research.[14]

    Career

    While doing research at the University of Belgrade, Kiš was a prominent writer for Vidici magazine, where he worked until 1960. In 1962 he published his first two novels, Mansarda (translated as The Garret) and Psalm 44.[15] He then took up a position as a lector at the University of Strasbourg. He held the position until 1973. In that period, he translated several French books into Serbo-Croatian. He also wrote and published Garden, Ashes (1965), Early Sorrows (1969), and Hourglass (1972). For his novel Peščanik (Hourglass), Kiš received the prestigious NIN Award, but returned it a few years later due to a political dispute.[16]

    Kiš was influenced by James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Bruno Schulz, Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges, Boris Pilnyak, Ivo Andrić and Miroslav Krleža[17] among other authors.

    Plagiarism controversy

    In 1976, A Tomb for Boris Davidovich was published. Kiš drew inspiration for the novel from his time as a lecturer at the University of Bordeaux.

    Kiš returned to Belgrade that year only to be hit by claims that he plagiarized portions of the novel from any number of authors. Critics also attacked the novel for its alleged Marxist themes.

    Kiš responded to the scandal by writing The Anatomy Lesson. In the book, he accused his critics of parroting nationalist opinions and of being anti-literary. Several of the people that Kiš criticized in The Anatomy Lesson sought retribution following its publication. In 1981, Dragan Jeremić, a professor of aesthetics at the University of Belgrade and opponent of Kiš, published Narcissus without a Face in which he reasserted his claim that Kiš had plagiarized A Tomb for Boris Davidovich. Dragoljub Golubović, the journalist who published the first story accusing Kiš of plagiarism, sued Kiš for defamation. The case was eventually dismissed in March 1979, but not after it drew substantial attention from the public.[18]

    Move to Paris

    Rattled by the plagiarism controversy and subsequent defamation lawsuit, Kiš left Belgrade for Paris in the summer of 1979. In 1983 he published The Encyclopedia of the Dead. During this period in his life, Kiš achieved greater global recognition as his works were translated into several languages.[19]

    Death and Funeral

    After feeling weak for several months, Kiš was diagnosed with metastatic lung cancer in September 1989. He died a month later, on 15 October 1989. Kiš was 54 at the time of his death, the same age that his father had been when he was sent to Auschwitz.[20] As per his request, he was buried in Belgrade with the Serbian Orthodox Church rite.

    Personal life

    Kiš was married to Mirjana Miočinović from 1962 to 1981.[21] At the time of his death, he was living with Pascale Delpech, his former student from the University of Bordeaux.[22]

    Kiš was a close friend of writer Susan Sontag. After his death, Sontag edited and published Homo Poeticus, a compilation of Kiš's essays and interviews.[23]

    Style and themes

    Bust of Kiš in Subotica
    Danilo Kiš on a 2010 Montenegro stamp

    Kiš was influenced especially by Jorge Luis Borges: he had been accused of plagiarizing, among others, Borges in A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, which prompted a "scathing response" in The Anatomy Lesson (1978),[24] and the influence of Borges is recognized in The Encyclopedia of the Dead.[25] From Bruno Schulz, the Polish writer and prose stylist, Kiš picked up "mythic elements" for The Encyclopedia of the Dead, and he reportedly told John Updike that "Schulz is my God".[26]

    Branko Gorjup sees two distinct periods in Kiš's career as a novelist. The first, which includes Psalm 44, Garden, Ashes, and Early Sorrows, is marked by realism: Kiš creates characters whose psychology "reflect[s] the external world of the writer's memories, dreams, and nightmares, or his experiences of the time and space in which he lives". The worlds he constructed in his narratives, while he distanced himself from pure mimesis, were still constructed to be believable. The separation from mimesis he sought to achieve by a kind of deception through language, a process intended to instil "'doubts' and 'trepidations' associated with a child's growing pains and early sorrows. The success of this 'deception' depended upon the effect of 'recognition' on the part of the reader". The point, for Kiš, was to make the reader accept "the illusion of a created reality".[27]

    In those early novels, Kiš still employed traditional narrators and his plots unfolded chronologically, but in later novels, beginning with Hourglass (the third volume of the "Family Cycle", after Garden, Ashes and Early Sorrows), his narrative techniques changed considerably and traditional plotlines were no longer followed. The role of the narrator was strongly reduced, and perspective and plot were fragmented: in Hourglass, which in Eduard Scham portrayed a father figure resembling the author's, "at least four different Schams with four separate personalities" were presented, each based on documentary evidence.[27] This focus on the manipulation and selection of supposed documentary evidence is a hallmark of Kiš's later period, and underlies the method of A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, according to Branko Gorjup:

    First, most of the plots in the work are derived or borrowed from already-existing sources of varied literary significance, some easily recognizable—for example, those extracted from Roy Medvedev and Karl Steiner—while others are more obscure. Second, Kiš employs the technique of textual transposition, whereby entire sections or series of fragments, often in their unaltered state, are taken from other texts and freely integrated into the fabric of his work.[27]

    This documentary style places Kiš's later work in what he himself called a post-Borges period, but unlike Borges, the documentation comes from "historically and politically relevant material", which in A Tomb for Boris Davidovich is used to denounce Stalinism. Unlike Borges, Kiš is not interested in metaphysics, but in "more ordinary phenomena";[27] in the title story of The Encyclopedia of the Dead, this means building an encyclopedia "containing the biography of every ordinary life lived since 1789".[28]

    Adaptations and translations of Kiš's work

    A film based on Peščanik (Fövenyóra), directed by Hungarian director Szabolcs Tolnai, was finished in 2008.[29] In May 1989, with his friend, director Aleksandar Mandić, Kiš made the four-episode TV series Goli Život about the lives of two Jewish women. The filming took place in Israel. The programme was broadcast after his death, in the spring of 1990, and was his last work.

    Kiš's work was translated into English only in a piecemeal fashion, and many of his important books weren't available in English until the 2010s, when Dalkey Archive began releasing a selection of titles, including A Tomb for Boris Davidovich and Garden, Ashes;

    Booktrust called a resurrection of Kiš.[30]

    Bibliography

    References

    1. ISBN 978-1-61069-936-5
      .
    2. ^ "Book Reviews | Dalkey Archive Press". Dalkeyarchive.com. 21 November 2013. Retrieved 10 January 2014.
    3. ^ Thompson 2013, p. 7
    4. ^ a b Thompson 2013, p. 8
    5. ^ Thompson 2013, p. 9
    6. ^ a b Thompson 2013, p. 75
    7. ^ Thompson 2013, p. 79
    8. ^ Thompson 2013, p. 80
    9. ^ Thompson 2013, p. 82
    10. ^ Thompson 2013, p. 100
    11. ^ Thompson 2013, p. 54
    12. ^ Thompson 2013, p. 55
    13. ^ Thompson 2013, p. 11
    14. ^ Thompson 2013, pp. 249–247
    15. ^ Thompson 2013, p. 245
    16. ^ Thompson 2013, pp. 265–266
    17. ^ Razgovor sa Danilom Kišom. youtube.com
    18. ^ Thompson 2013, pp. 253–277
    19. ^ Thompson 2013, p. 279
    20. ^ Thompson 2013, pp. 309
    21. ^ Thompson 2013, pp. 249–251
    22. ^ Thompson 2013, p. 268
    23. ^ Kiš, Danilo (1995). Sontag, Susan (ed.). Homo Poeticus. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux.
    24. JSTOR 4612839
      .
    25. ISBN 978-0-7734-6777-4
      .
    26. JSTOR 20689381
      .
    27. ^
      JSTOR 40868819
      .
    28. ^ Power, Chris (2 August 2012). "A brief survey of the short story part 42: Danilo Kiš". The Guardian. Retrieved 16 December 2013.
    29. ^ "Hourglass (2007)". IMDb. Retrieved 12 January 2014.
    30. ^
      Booktrust
      . Retrieved 9 January 2014.
    31. ^ Sacks, Sam (24 August 2012). "Book Review: Psalm 44, The Attic, The Lute and the Scars". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 9 January 2014.
    32. ^ a b Robson, Leo (14 December 2012). "The Lute and the Scars by Danilo Kis – review". The Guardian. Retrieved 9 January 2014.

    Sources

    External links

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