„GROBNICA, ČOVJEČE!“ ILI SVI KENOTAFI DANILA KIŠA

Abstract

We will focus on Kiš’s A Tomb for Boris Davidovich not only as a “posthumous tribute”, a cenotaph, but also as a “cenotaph” to the literary poetics of the time. We will freely claim that both Hourglass and A Tomb “necrologically” summarize (Serbian) modernism, and the Enlightenment, and humanism, and the history of (modernist) poetics and experiments, as well as the entire modernist literary ethics and aesthetics. Kiš’s cenotaph “buries” and “redeems” both Hamlet and Proust, both Leopold Bloom and Borges, both Queneau and Pinget, as well as The Damned Yard, The Springtimes of Ivan Galeb and The Second Book of Migrations, and thus opens up space for what will come after Kiš: Dictionary of the Khazars and all of us up to the present. A Tomb for Boris Davidovich by Danilo Kiš “redeems” modernity, it redeems literature, and, what is more, it does so in the midst of the advanced modernist winter as the season of late modernity. That is exactly why this book is so much more than a mere consolation. And this unprecedented and seminal consolation during the infernally cold winter of (Serbian) modernity and (political) totality of Kiš’s Tomb is, in fact, to be discussed.