Serbian Studies: Journal of the North American Society for Serbian Studies

Twentieth-century prose author, essayist, and translator Danilo Kiš (1935–89) had a complex family background that significantly impacted his writings. He called himself a Yugoslav writer, though he could as well have said Jewish or Montenegrin or Serbian. Since his death, he has become more widely known outside of Central Europe largely as a Jewish writer and a writer on Jewish themes. This paper will outline the relationship of truth and invention in Kiš’s fiction and focus on one peculiar trait: the subversive current of humor in his writing about historical tragedies, in particular the Holocaust and the Stalinist Terror and Gulag, which Kiš chooses as themes, or which have been thrust on him by his own life. I look primarily at the largely autobiographical novel Bašta, pepeo (Garden, Ashes, 1965) and the naïve and unlucky characters in Grobnica za Borisa Davidoviča (A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, 1976), most of them Communists and many of them also Jews.¹

Kiš was born in 1935 in Subotica, Vojvodina, a former Austro-Hungarian province in the north of Serbia and the east of interwar Yugoslavia. In the 1930s, Vojvodina was even more ethnically mixed than it is at present. Kiš himself had an unusual heritage for the time: his father was a Hungarian Jew whose own father had his children baptized in the Roman Catholic church and changed the family name from Koen to Kiš, which means ‘little’ in Hungarian (in which it is spelled Kis). Kiš’s mother was an Orthodox Montenegrin, but the family’s two children seem not to have been baptized in the Orthodox [End Page 43] church until 1939, in a move that apparently later saved their lives. Kiš’s father returned alive from the Racija, a massacre carried out by Hungarian fascists in Novi Sad in 1942,² and shortly after that the family moved to Hungary to live near the rest of Eduard Kiš’s family. After the Jews of that region (including Eduard and his Hungarian family) were sent first to a ghetto and then on to Auschwitz, Kiš and his mother and sister remained in Hungary until 1947, when they were repatriated to Montenegro where her family still lived. Kiš completed high school in Cetinje and eventually attended university in Belgrade. He majored in Comparative Literature, became involved with literary publications in the Yugoslav capital, and began his career as a writer.

Although Kiš made influential translations of poetry (from Russian, English, and Hungarian) and wrote influential literary and cultural criticism from a Central European perspective, it is fiction with a specific combination of historical/autobiographical and fictional/fantastic elements that established his reputation and, according to many scholars, marked the ascent of postmodernism in Serbian letters, while also engaging world literature on a wider stage. Kiš’s biography shapes one group of his books of lyrical prose, while in others he weaves historical or quasi-historical facts into densely poetic fiction.

The autobiographical and historical bases of Kiš’s writing function in parallel ways; this makes them distinct in tone from his essays and polemical prose, even when they treat exactly the same subject matter. The lyrical fiction refers to recognizable reality or historical record but signals its departure from fact, be it historical record, personal memory, or the memoirs of others, by altering small details. In Bašta, pepeo, the second of three early novels based on Kiš’s childhood, the nickname of the main character Andreas Scham,³ Andi, is an anagram of “Dani” Kiš, and the family is recognizably Kiš’s own, though names and other details are slightly changed. Grobnica za Borisa Davidoviča picks up facts and names from a variety of historical and fictional sources and plays with them even more strikingly.⁴ [End Page 44]

For example, to take a Yugoslav source rather than any of the several Russian ones he draws on, Kiš takes both data and pieces of narrative from Karlo Štajner’s monumental 1971 memoir 7000 dana u Sibiru.⁵ Štajner’s Moscow acquaintance Eimeke becomes the spy “E. V. Ajmike”;⁶ the butcher and obedient...