A Tomb for Boris Davidovich. [Paperback]

Danilo. Kis (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (1978)
• ASIN: B000OJPW1E
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)

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27 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars If a man does not erect in this age his own tomb ere he dies, June 17, 2005

By 

Leonard Fleisig "Len" (Washington, D.C.) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Tomb for Boris Davidovich (Eastern European Literature Series) (Paperback)

he shall live no longer in monument than the bell rings and the widow weeps. Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing.

Danilo Kis was born in Serbia in 1935 to a Hungarian Jewish father and Montenegrin Serbian mother. His father perished in the Holocaust. Kis died of cancer in 1990 at age 55. As noted in an excellent introduction by the writer, poet and Nobel Prize winner Joseph Brodsky, publication of A Tomb for Boris Davidovich in Yugoslavia in 1976 created a firestorm in Belgrade similar to the controversies that flared up when Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was published in the USSR during Khrushchev's thaw. The book was savaged by the Yugoslav writer's union. As Brodsky notes in one memorable line, "there are several topics an author may deal with which can jeopardize his well-being, and history is one of them". The controversy, standing alone, may justify reading Tomb for Boris Davidovich. I am pleased to report that these stories are so well-constructed and laden with meaning that it would be worth reading even if its publication had been greeted with equanimity by the apparatchiks that manned the Yugoslav writers' union.

The seven stories that comprise Danilo Kis' A Tomb for Boris Davidovich have a few elements in common. Each involves a protagonist from a different country, Ireland, Hungary, Rumania, Poland, or Russia. In effect, each protagonist comes from a nation or a group that participated in the Comintern (the Soviet led Third International that coordinated the worldwide activities of various Communist organizations established by Lenin in 1919). Each gets swept up in the machinations that swirled around the Soviet Union's Great Terror of the 1930s. Each ends up either dead or in the Gulag.

With one exception each of the stories takes places in the 1930s. The one exception, "Dogs and Books" is set in 14th-century France at the time of the inquisition. Although that story seems out of place, when one compares the structure and fact-pattern of this story to the title story of the book one can only be struck by the obvious similarities between the methods and mind-set of the inquisitors and the methods and mind-sets of the interrogator in the story Tomb for Boris Davidovich.

The title story is also jarring because it contains many of the same themes set out in Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon. In the context of a short story, the brevity and terseness of Kis' language makes the telling of the story considerably more powerful in some respects than Koestler's novel length telling of a similar tale. Even if a reader feels that Kis' story does not quite match Koestler's, the fact that the comparison can be made with a straight face is high praise.

Last, Tomb for Boris Davidovich should be of great interest to anyone interested in the work of the great Argentine writer, Jorge Luis Borges. The structure and theme of Tomb for Boris Davidovich was intended by Kis to be part of a literary polemic between Kis and Borges, specifically concerning the title of Borge's Universal History of Infamy. Kis discusses this literary exchange in one of his essays. In it he asserted that the universal infamies related by Borges were those of gangsters, pirates and highwaymen. Kis argues that as far as infamy was concerned, "infamy is when in the name of the idea of a better world for which whole generations have perished, in the name of a humanistic idea, you build camps and destroy both people and their most intimate drams of a better world."

In many respects, Tomb for Boris Davidovich may be considered as an exquisitely crafted attempt to construct a literary monument to those who died (perhaps naively and foolishly) and for whom bells never rang and for whom the widows have long since stopped weeping.

L.Fleisig

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Incriminating piece of work, May 28, 2006

By 

Matko Vladanovic (Zagreb, Croatia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Tomb for Boris Davidovich (Eastern European Literature Series) (Paperback)

One could almost draw paralleles, with fate of Danilo Kis and his novel, in former Yugoslavia, with every "free thinker" troughout the known history. Nobody, especially totalitarian regime, likes "the voice that yells in the desert". So it became that this book was putted on a certain kind of "index librorum prohibitorum". What makes it tragic, is the fact that that was happening in the upper half of twentieth century.

What was so incriminating in that book, that communist party simply had to make that move? When one starts to question revollution, when one starts to question necessity of one voice-one peolpe doctrine, when one sees in "fight of the oppressed" just a certain kind of tragedy, human misery that has been manifesting repeatedly through human existene, one must become "enemy of the state". And that has not changed up until today, nor it will. But that is the story for some other place and time.

There is much of J.L. Borges influence in this work, especially in the short stoy called "Dogs and books", but you mustn't think that this is Borgesian "collection" of stories. These work are much less artistic (whatever that means) and much more they resemble reality, life itself, than Borges work does.

By telling the story of seven individuals, the lived their life in a countries rich with political struggles, Danilo Kis draws excellent portrait oh human ability to endure, and even so, to somehow fail miserably and be forever gone from this world.

Why the four stars? I was hearing so much of this book, and when I finally read it, it somehow dissapointed me, probably was expecting to much, or maybe is just that, taht I have failed to grasp entire meaning of the novel. So, better to read it again :) If you looked for great writer from, Mid-Southern Europe, Kis is the one you could deffinitely start with.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Extraordinary, Powerful, Dark, Brutal, October 25, 2009

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Ethan Cooper (Big Apple) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Tomb for Boris Davidovich (Eastern European Literature Series) (Paperback)

A TOMB FOR BORIS DAVIDOVICH explores the nightmarish lives of six characters--a tailor/butcher, an idealist, a communist party functionary, a murdered doctor, a revolutionary, and a mediocrity--in Stalin's Soviet Union. For each character, Kis creates a completely convincing short story, showing the brutality, arbitrary power, and weird logic of Stalin's police state, where a wasted life is nothing. Meanwhile, the seventh story in TOMB is the testimony of a Jewish scholar at an Inquisitional court in the 1300s. In the story's end note, Kis claims he found this testimony, another exploration of arbitrary brutality and twisted logic, in the Vatican Library.

Kis's achievement in TOMB is not easy to convey. There's some cynical humor in the book, especially as Kis tells the story of a cuckolding communist functionary who impersonates a priest. And, the story of a mediocre poet, who survived in Stalin's Russia while achieving a pathetic notoriety, actually ends with a LOL pun. But mostly, these stories are hair-raising demonstrations of brutality and capricious disaster and are completely persuasive. For this, I'm strangely grateful, since I'm a comfortable liberal American WASP (who grew up in the Midwest, no less). So, for me, the blasé systemic viciousness that's so real in these stories is--thank goodness--beyond my experience and even imagining. The content of TOMB is truly revelatory.

This book's title story, A TOMB FOR BORIS DAVIDOVICH, shows why the world still needs fiction. While Stalin's Soviet Union is hardly my subject, I have wondered about the show trials and their confessions. My question: Is torture the only reason innocent people cooperate in their executions? Well, in this story, Kis explores the intricate game that the interrogator and prisoner play, showing how ego and principle intertwine to create a bizarre yet logical pseudo legal process that offers oddly meaningful incentives to the condemned. It's fabulous work that animates otherwise incomprehensible history.

As an exploration and indictment of life in a totalitarian political system, I'd put TOMB on the same elite level as Nabokov's BEND SINISTER. It's not as elegant. But it's more brutal and just as powerful. Highly recommended.