A Tomb for Boris Davidovich

by Danilo Kis, Duska Mikic-Mitchell (Translator), Joseph Brodsky (Introduction), William T. Vollmann (Afterword)

Overview

Composed of seven dark tales, A Tomb for Boris Davidovich presents variations on the theme of political and social self-destruction throughout Eastern Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. The characters in these stories are caught in a world of political hypocrisy, which ultimately leads to death, their common fate. Although the stories Kis tells are based on historical events, the beauty and precision of his prose elevates these ostensibly true stories into works of literary art that transcend the politics of their time.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781628975161
Publisher:	Deep Vellum Publishing
Publication date:	08/26/2025
Series:	Dalkey Archive Essentials
Pages:	150
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Danilo Kis was one of Serbia's most influential writers and the author of several novels and short-story collections, including A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, The Encyclopedia of the Dead and Hourglass. In 1980 Kis was awarded the Grand Aigle d'Or from the city of Nice. He died in 1989 at the age of 54.

Read an Excerpt

The story that I am about to tell, a story born in doubt and perplexity, has only the misfortune (some call it the fortune) of being true: it was recorded by the hands of honorable people and reliable witnesses. But to be true in the way its author dreams about, it would have to be told in Romanian, Hungarian, Ukrainian, or Yiddish; or, rather, in a mixture of all these languages. Then, by the logic of chance and of murky, deep, unconscious happenings, through the conscious­ness of the narrator, there would flash also a Russian word or two, now a tender one like telyatina, now a hard one like kinjal. If the narrator, therefore, could reach the unattain­able, terrifying moment of Babel, the humble pleadings and awful beseechings of Hanna Krzyzewska would resound in Romanian, in Polish, in Ukrainian (as if her death were only the consequence of some great and fatal misunderstanding), and then just before the death rattle and final calm her in­coherence would turn into the prayer for the dead, spoken in Hebrew, the language of being and dying.

What People are Saying About This

Danilo Kis

From the Author:

" . . . to immerse myself in the period, so mysterious and shrouded in secrecy (or distorted by the haze of propaganda), but also to shed any bias I might have had (except the bias of artistic sensitivity), to avoid 'psychologizing' my characters, and to stick as closely as possible to facts. . . .That's what was going through my mind as I worked on A Tomb for Boris Davidovitch."