Tomb for Boris Davidovich

by Danilo Kis, Danilo Kies, Duska Mikic-Mitchell (Translator), 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:	9781564782731
Publisher:	Deep Vellum Publishing
Publication date:	06/01/2001
Series:	Eastern European Literature
Edition description:	1ST Dalkey
Pages:	136
Product dimensions:	5.54(w) x 8.52(h) x 0.49(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

William T. Vollmann is the author of seven novels, three collections of stories, and a seven-volume critique of violence, Rising Up and Rising Down. He is also the author of Poor People, a worldwide examination of poverty through the eyes of the impoverished themselves; Riding Toward Everywhere, an examination of the train-hopping hobo lifestyle; and Imperial, a panoramic look at one of the poorest areas in America. He has won the PEN Center USA West Award for Fiction, a Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize and a Whiting Writers' Award. His journalism and fiction have been published in The New Yorker, Esquire, Spin and Granta. Vollmann lives in Sacramento, California.

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."

Editorial Reviews

In Kis's case . . . it is the consistent quality of the local prose that counts. It is how, sentence by sentence, the song is built, and immeasurable meanings meant. It is the rich regalia of his rhetoric that leads us to acknowledge his authority. On his page, trappings are not trappings, but sovereignty itself.

New York Review of Books

A stunning statement on political persecution.

World Literature Today

An absolutely first-rate book, one of the best things I've ever seen on the whole experience of communism in Eastern Europe, but more than that, it's really a first-rate novel.

Irving Howe

A Tomb for Boris Davidovich bears traces of Orwell's 1984 and Koestler's Darkness at Noon, but it has its own special flair.”

New Leader

Kis slices into the essence of revolutionary spirit.

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