Geoff's Reviews > A Tomb for Boris Davidovich

Brilliant forward by Joseph Brodsky? Check.

Adequate afterword by William T. Vollman? Check.

Bookended in-between? I’ll quote Grace Zabriskie’s interloping madwoman from Inland Empire: ”Brutal fucking murder!”

A Tomb for Boris Davidovich is a book of brutal fucking murders. You begin to feel the creeping disquiet, the emerging horror, very early on, when Miksha, the tailor’s apprentice, solves the problem of a bothersome skunk that’s been snatching chickens from the chicken coop by trapping the polecat, and while still alive, running a rusty wire through its nostrils, hanging it in full display on the tailor’s front doorstep, making incisions along its neck and belly (“like a crimson necklace”), turning the living, screeching, spraying beast inside out, leaving a writhing pendulum of gore to awaken his boss. And for this, he is offered a better job! Things are not as they should be in this book. But then again, this is the mid-twentieth century in Eastern Europe. Things are not as they should be.

I’ve only read two books by Danilo Kiš, this and Garden, Ashes, which may have been the finest book I came across last year. But that well-under 500 pages combined of prose by Kiš sticks with me as vividly as works I have poured over again and again by familiar, cherished authors. Garden, Ashes is a touching, sad, and brilliant specimen of that genre of literature no one wishes had to exist, but in existing redeems so much of the 20th century’s disgusting legacy: childhood memoirs of the Holocaust and Communism’s terror. That book, though also horror-stricken, is touching in a sensorial way very particular to how an adolescent would naively see a world in the process of great destruction. A Tomb for Boris Davidovich is a punch in the face- seven dark short stories descending into the whirlpool of political violence, the revolutionary underworld, torture enacted by the state, lives described vigorously in miniature to set the reader up for barbarous conclusions. That this book was actually published in 1976 in Yugoslavia is a fact shocking unto itself- it portrays the eastern bloc as a murder factory where no one is safe, where thinking is a crime worthy of pummeling the body to a pulp, where labor camps are ubiquitous, and where virtue is calculated by one’s capacity for betrayal and violence.

In Kiš’ treatment, however, we are not just witnesses to merciless, senseless acts. He is too good a writer for that. The first few stories ease you in, brutal as they are, and then, almost quietly, the book begins to expand and reach forward and backward in time, and the violence of the Soviet regime begins a kind of timeless echoing, and Kiš achieves a sort of universalizing of terror- that fascistic, authoritarian horror is a sorry offspring of humanity simply being human- from religious persecution to anti-religious fervor, this is a part of who we are that we have not yet had the courage, willpower, or imagination to expunge.

The final three stories, “A Tomb for Boris Davidovich”, “Dogs and Books”, and “The Short Biography of A.A. Darmolotov”, enlarge Kiš’ lament into a hurricane-like sprawl. He subtly interweaves the tales, as characters from earlier instances reemerge offhandedly, in oblique appearances that are only suggestive of connections, but that begin to pose a haunting question of the interconnectedness of individual lives in history, of the cyclical nature of time, of the sadism that humanity can’t seem to shake out of our nature, even with centuries of lessons to ponder.

As a comment on the politically motivated slaughters of the 20th century, this book is important; as a work of art of dazzling prose and historical investigation (one of those books where fiction and fact are inseparable), this book is important; as a portrait of the cool cruelty to which lives are subjected and destroyed in the name of an ideology, this book is important; as a plaintive dirge to the necessity of free thought (and its near-impossibility when confronted by the stark power of enforced, militarized conformity), this book is important.

Also, Brodsky’s forward is full of great lines, such as “What usually slows the passage of time and by the same token causes an ideology to linger, however, is not so much that the murderers often outlive the murdered as that the living mistakenly regard the dead in the same way as a majority regards a minority.”