TOTALITARNI SISTEMI U „GROBNICI ZA BORISA DAVIDOVIČA“ DANILA KIŠA

Abstract

The question of totalitarianism is one of the key phenomena of the twentieth century. The emergence of totalitarian systems—both in the form of Nazism and Fascism, as well as Stalinism and Soviet Communism—marked the history of modern man and left deep scars in the collective consciousness. Their brutality, systemic repression, and ability to reduce the individual to a mere instrument of ideology also inspired many writers to reflect on the limits of freedom, violence, and truth. Danilo Kiš, in his collection of short stories A Tomb for Boris Davidovich (1976), addressed the fates of individuals caught in the whirlwind of revolutionary ideology and state apparatus in a literary-historical way, focusing on the Soviet Stalinist system, while at the same time opening the broader question of the nature of the totalitarian mechanism, that is, drawing a parallel with the Nazi system. The aim of this paper is to show how Kiš challenges totalitarianism in A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, with particular attention given to how Kiš, shaped by his own trauma, perceives Stalinism and totalitarianism through the lens of the Holocaust, and in fact compares Soviet totalitarianism with the Nazi model, since both systems, despite ideological differences, display profound structural and methodological similarities. In this way, Kiš’s book acquires a universal significance and becomes a testimony to the mechanism of violence that transcends a specific historical context. We will also touch upon the question of Central Europe as the cradle of modern terror and as a metaphor for concentration camps/systems. We shall rely on the concept of postmemory forged by Marianne Hirshc and the concept of multidirectional memory (Michael Rothberg) in our paper.