(Continued from last Saturday)
As an example of plagiarism, Jeremić considers story Mechanical Lions. And yet, despite this, he admits that Kiš is a case of the arrival of the second Death to the Soviet Union, which took over from one Steiner's text, enriched it with new details, without departing from the basic plot. He took over the description of the devastated church and the profane scenography on the church frescoes from Luja Reoa. Apparently, Professor Dragan is pretending to be uninformed about the postmodern way of writing, which he invented. Borges, which followed Rain, by transferring the familiar plot into the magical world of his own narrative, by creating a new order, plot, style and composition. Basically, the writer, through allusions to the atheistic - materialist dogma in the Soviet Union, and the staged scene of church service, showed the reverse side of communism, the deceptions that the regime used abundantly to deceive its true nature, the tricks of the magician to deceive leftist supporters from the West, and impose a lie as the truth.
Not even the central story of the collection Tombstone for Boris Davidovich, after which the entire book is named, there is no shortage of Jeremič's complaints: Kiš mainly used as a plot the memory of BI Rubina about the case of her brother Isaac Ilyich Rubin, and to some extent, a writing by MP Yakubovich about his own case, which Roy Medvedev published in the book Stalinism.
But, in the story of a Soviet revolutionary-intellectual, the author showed all the mastery of his literary genius, delving into the psychology of the hero, the investigative procedure in which the revolutionary vigilance of the investigator and the resistance of the interrogated to admit the nebulous fabrications about his alleged counter-revolutionary activities collide. Regardless of this factographic meddling, the intangible quality of Kišov's prose remains, the atmosphere of the time, which cannot be copied from documents, as one of the strongest condemnations of communism written in our language. This must have irritated his opponent, who, despite all his learning, was a zealous apologist for the post-war Yugoslav system-ideology that, like his model in the Soviet Union, elevated camps for its renegades to the level of an institution. This is the difference between a crime and the conception of the concept of a camp. The writer did not want to be an accomplice, as left-wing intellectuals did when it came to the Stalinist or Nazi camps, and to justify the Gulag as a historical necessity. The writer is a witness to the crime, its recorder who does not allow human suffering to fall into oblivion. Finally, Jeremić accuses Kiš of being an ungrateful imitator, who shows a high degree of disrespect for his role models. The writer allegedly tries to cover up the origin of his texts, appropriate the efforts of others, game from other people's hunting grounds, and shows it as his own contribution to literature. As an example, Jeremić cites the words of Luís Reo from the book Russian art, which was used to describe Kiev and the church of St. Sophia, in stories Mechanical LionsNo matter how much Jeremić tried to find similarities, there remains a crucial difference related to the contextualization in the description of Kiev and its sacral buildings for the whole story. The writer allegedly reworked and poeticized Louis Reo's text in his literary workshop, which shows how tasteless it is to talk about his imitative practice.
The forgery indictment is a complete failure of interpretation. stories titled Dogs and BooksWithin the novella, which Kiš persistently classifies as a short story, it is stated that the topic of Baruch Neumann is actually a translation of the third chapter. Baruch's confession: Once a Jew, once baptized, and later converted to Judaism, the inquisitorial register, in which Jacques Fournier, the future Pope Benoit XII, was seduced as a detailed and conscientious confession before his tribunal. Kiš refers to the metaphor of the cyclical movement of time, historical repetitions Devil's Port, the shedding of sacrificial blood, the similarities in the names Boris Davidovich Novsky - Baruch David Neumann, point to an incomprehensible mystery, and the overlapping of events in the plane of history, which is hidden from the positivist approach of science.
Regardless of Jeremic's idea, the influence Tombs for Boris Davidovich, has remained unchanged to this day, as a reminder of the horrors of the Stalinist camps. The thesis that the writer literally copies and attributes other people's texts to himself, while not showing any real creative effort, has fallen on deaf ears. The claim that there is not a single grain of originality in any layer of his texts, and that he creates stories from other people's details, ideas, and myths has proven to be an unfounded ideological purge of the literary scene, from unwanted intruders. Generally speaking, the entirety of Kiš's work, no matter what elements it is composed of, real or fictional, is an original, proof of his enormous artistic potential. In trying to present the writer's role models, the critic has missed the essence of artistic creation, which is always above the established coherence of the work, a quality that cannot be explained by dissecting its constituent parts. Neither did Kiš bluff like a magician and mechanically shuffled the cards, nor did he his art is unoriginal, so Jeremić's effort to degrade him in relation to him is in vain Thomas Mann i Andrić, denying that he is a great writer of the 20th century. If it is any consolation in our culture to remember Professor Dragan Jeremić, he will mostly be remembered for the polemic in which he wanted to exclude Danilo Kiš from our literary history.
Bonus video:
