Short stories · A way to begin
A Tomb for Boris Davidovich
Гробница за Бориса Давидовича
Danilo Kiš · 1976
Synopsis
Seven stories, presented as the seven chapters of a single story. A young revolutionary, Hanna Krzyżewska, is killed with a knife by an executioner who knows anatomy; then other lives unfold, caught between the revolutionary underground and the criminal underworld, political conspiracy and the circles of power, in the Eastern Europe of the first half of the twentieth century. Only one story goes back to fourteenth-century France, where the Jews are being persecuted.
Context
The author conceived the book during his time as a language lecturer in Bordeaux. When it appeared in Belgrade in 1976, he was accused of plagiarism and of political distortion, in what he called the greatest literary affair of the post-war period; he replied in 1978 with a polemical essay, then left the country for Paris. Several of the stories are biographies in which invented characters meet historical figures. The English translation appeared in 1978, the French one from Gallimard in 1979.
Who it is for
Seven short stories written in a style close to the document and the archive. It is better to know what the Stalinist purges were.
Prizes and reception
Harold Bloom placed it in his Western canon; it is, with two other books, the work by which its author is most widely read in the world.