Tomb for Boris Davidovich

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When, after great difficulties, this book was first published in 1976, in Zagreb, Yugoslavia, it was immediately assaulted in the press by the conservative "Stalinist” elements at the top echelon of the Yugoslav literary hierarchy. The war cry emanating from the top was picked up at the bottom by Serbo-Croatian nationalists, who are traditionally pro-Russian and traditionally anti-Semitic, for the bulk of Danilo Kis characters are Jews, as is the author himself. Yugoslavia is a small country, and the politics in a small country are always big, literary politics especially. Due to this proportion, an attack against a writer becomes extremely focused. It was focused sharply enough to send Danilo Kis into “nervous shock”.

There are several topics an author may deal with which can jeopardize his well-being, and history is one of them. Depending on its proximity to the present, history provides a writer with background, content, cast of characters, and sometimes, as in the case of Kis, with the writer’s actual context. The very fact of describing historical events is regarded by history as an attempt to demote it into the past and is resisted vehemently. An historical novel becomes therefore a vehicle of time, an instrument that purports to outline the boundaries between past and present by means of estrangement from its subject, A narrative reduces history to a story and creates, by being conducted from a certain "'outside", a new time category, heretofore unknown.

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