The President of Serbia, Aleksandar Vučić, once again managed to show in one short statement the extent to which he has no idea what he is talking about. First, he said that he would propose to set aside money for the digitization of all doctorates so that everyone could not see "what is black and what is white". The state can save that money because all doctoral degrees have been posted on the Internet for a long time.
photo: Draško gagović...and D. Kish
And then, in the same breath, he blurted out that Danilo Kish's doctorate was also disputed with claims of plagiarism. As someone has well noted, the only similarity between the Minister of Finance and the writer is that "kiš" means "small" in Hungarian, so their surnames are the same, just in two different languages. Let's play: Siniša Kish and Danilo Mali? Names aside, the two, however, belong to such different worlds that it is truly obscure that one should connect them in the same thought.
CHASE AND DEBATE
What did Vučić obviously not know? About the accusations that Kish plagiarized parts of his book Tomb for Boris Davidovich there was a long, but only partially serious, literary debate, which was crowned by two conflicting books: Kišova was called Anatomy class (1977), and the book by the leader of his opponents, Dragan Jeremic Narcissus without a face (1981). Despite the various mutual accusations, that part of the debate still relied in part on literary theory.
The non-literary hunt for Danilo began before that in the illustrated magazine "Duga", in which one of its editors, formerly RTS correspondent from Paris, Dragoljub Golubović Pižon, wrote the article "Lower than other people's pearls", in which he claimed that Tomb for Boris Davidovich plagiarism, that parts of the novel were copied from a French art historian. That thesis was accepted by the Belgrade "Književne novine", the Zagreb newspaper "Oko" and others. The topic was the focus of public interest from September 1976 to March 1977. Kish won the match with 10:0.
NO CHEEKS
Siniša Mali is not the first minister in a European country whose doctoral dissertation was annulled, but he is the only one who did not resign. I will cite just one example: in 2011, the University of Bayreuth stripped the Minister of Defense of the Federal Republic of Germany Karl Theodor z Gutenberg of his doctorate due to plagiarism. On that occasion, the court sentenced him to a fine of 20.000 euros. Chancellor Angela Merkel tried to keep him in the government, said that he was a brilliant politician, that she did not take him because of his doctorate, but because of his political skills, but she failed to save him; the media pressure was enormous. Gutenberg not only resigned, but moved to America out of shame.
More than a week has passed since the statement of the President of Serbia that Kish was accused of plagiarizing his doctorate, many reacted to it as he deserved, but no one looked back on the "Case of the Tomb for Boris Davidovič" itself, and I would say that it is worth remembering on him because there were many mystifications. Some of Kish's gestures and actions were misinterpreted, not only in Yugoslavia, there were also false reports about them in the serious Western press, especially in German literary criticism. I would like to remind you about our, perhaps the biggest, literary scandal.
DOCTOR ANDRIC
In "Vremen" from October 11, 2017, I wrote about Danilo and our friendship, but I did not touch on the scandal surrounding the alleged plagiarism, it was never a topic for the two of us. When I returned from Germany in 1978, I guess he had already overcome anger and sadness. He complained about the attack on his work to others, with whom he was more intimate. I never met him in his favorite bars, except once by chance in Dubrovnik, when he told me he had cancer.
Danilo enrolled in studies in 1954, graduated in 1958 as the first student at the Department of General Literature. He never even thought about getting a doctorate, he realized quite early that being Danilo Kish is much more than even the honorably earned title of doctor defended at any university. This is something that will never be understood by those who think that a paid or written doctorate will make up for their lack of self-awareness and add to their reputation. Ivo Andrić was a doctor of legal sciences, but it never occurred to him to sign his books as "Doctor Andrić".
FOR AND AGAINST
A relatively short book of 140 pages Tomb for Boris Davidovich Kish himself did not know which genre of literature to attribute, so he put "Seven chapters of a common story" as a subtitle. You could say that it is a collection of seven short stories, but since they intertwine and since they are reduced to the same theme and have the same motive, I think that Peaceful Souls can be said to be a novel. I wonder why serious people, above all university professor Dragan Jeremić and the already famous Miodrag Bulatović, were so determined to attack that work.
Because Kisch, admittedly, used descriptions from Karl Steiner's autobiographical book in one story 7.000 days in Siberia, but he dedicated it to Karl Steiner and thus indicated that he relied on it. Describing the visit of French politician Edouard Herriot to Ukraine in 1933, he used published articles and reports about how the Soviet authorities had tricked him into showing him the Potemkin villages. Such an approach was not unusual, many writers before him had it in a similar way.
The conservative Jeremic loved great Russian writers the most, primarily Dostoyevsky, who also sometimes relied on other people's experiences from Siberia. I think that Dragan Jeremic, whom I also knew well, was jealous of Kiš, both because of his early literary fame and because he was a lecturer at a university in France, which Dr. Jeremic never managed to become. In addition, Kish wrote in one of his earlier texts that "nationalism is paranoia", so he deeply offended all our "patriots" who concluded that as a Jew, he is not "ours". And Danilo - I will say more about this later - passionately strived not only to be universal, but also to be "ours".
At the time of the scandal we are writing about, Dragan M. Jeremić was a full professor at the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Belgrade, teaching aesthetics and sociology of art. He was the president of the Writers' Association of Serbia twice. As a literary critic, he was a kind of ideologue of the writers who gathered around the magazine "Savremenik", stubborn defenders of what they considered the classics, opponents of any kind of "modernism". Artists who were contemporary had the magazine "Delo" as a kind of their organ.
At that time, the literary "bazaar" was sharply divided over Kish. Miodrag Bulatović was one of the loudest among the "strikers", probably because Kiš was his huge competition, and he was translated far more than Bulet. Miodrag Šćepanović, who was famous and recognized at the time, was also on the island of Kiš. Many, in my opinion, more important names stood by Kish, among them Oskar Davicho or the incorruptible Mihiz.
A STORM IN A GLASS OF WATER
It is important to emphasize that neither side had anything to do with the ruling League of Communists. His authorities did not interfere in this discussion. Jeremić and his like-minded people were nationalists, in essence, therefore, opponents of that government. The stories that Kish had to flee to France due to the persecution of communists are simply untrue. He was against Stalinism, and the Yugoslav social order, in his opinion, had nothing to do with Stalinism. I reject as wrong the subsequent speculations that Kish criticized Stalinism because he was not allowed to criticize Titoism (which was also said by serious people like Slavko Goldstein). It is stupidity, just as it is stupidity to claim that Ivo Andrić is in To the cursed courtyard described socialist - with or without quotation marks - Yugoslavia.
It is interesting that Kish did not deal with the subject of Goli Otok, the suffering of the prisoners in that unquestionably Stalinist-type camp, until before his death, when he touched on Israel by participating in a conversation with Zhenya Lebl, who was imprisoned there for some time. Dragan Jeremić considered it appropriate to emphasize that he is certainly not a Stalinist, although he deeply disagrees with the man who is a fighter against such a system.
Divisions among writers, formally due to the attack on Kis, and essentially along the line of attitude towards literature, classical realism and new searches, and also according to political opportunities, which would later turn into a discussion about language between the association of writers of Serbia and Croatia, had flared up throughout Yugoslavia, above all in Zagreb, where along with Kiš in the front rows were Predrag Matvejević and Slavko Goldštajn, who was the first to publish Tomb for Boris Davidovich. Krleža wrote to Kish at that time: "...Let that storm (in a glass of water) blow over."
CHILDREN OF STALINISM
If someone is Tomb for Boris Davidovich read decades ago, let him read it again before seriously discussing it. Plagiarism is certainly not. It is important that with the knowledge and opinion we have acquired in the meantime about the October Revolution, Stalin or the development of the USSR, we form our current position before rushing to give evaluations about something that happened the day before yesterday. What is important is the way in which Danilo Kish recounts real documents and other people's thoughts, but in a new language, a language so unique and - I have to use a banal word - so beautiful, that everything seems new, poetic, but also strange, unexpected, surrealistic.
Most of those seven stories have some dedication to Danilo's friends, Mirko Kovač, Borislav Pekić, memories of Leonid Šejka and Filip David. As far as I know, no one has yet addressed the question of why which story is dedicated to whom. Filip David had previously, and on this occasion, recounted his conversations with Kiša during the scandal, but it seems to me that he did not say anything about those dedications. He is the most invited to say something about it. One story is dedicated to the French writer André Gide, and one, let's say, to Karl Steiner.
It is not possible to briefly recount the book and the interweaving of the fates of the seven heroes in seven stories. The bottom line is that all of them in one way or another served the revolution that killed them. Stalinism ate its children.
IN LOVE WITH TWO WOMEN
In his initial resentment, Kish complained that intrigues and slander about him were being spread "from official telephones." He must have been referring to the telephones at Jeremic's faculty and in the Writers' Association of Serbia, headed by a nationalist group of writers. I repeat, because it is important: no government or Party authority interfered in this case.
A few days ago, Pascal Delpesch stated that Danilo left Yugoslavia and went to live in Paris because of the whole scandal. I must mention that he told me that this was not why he accepted the position of lecturer at the University of France, but that he left primarily because of her, so that he could be with Pascal. He complained to me that he "doesn't know what to do, because he is in love with two women." In Belgrade, he somehow remained faithful to his first wife, Miri Miočinović.
I was never as intimate with Danilo as, for example, Kovač or David. We met when he received an award for literature at an anonymous competition of the Union of Jewish Municipalities of Yugoslavia as an unknown student. Filip David also won a prize at the same competition, and I met him then. My last meeting with Danilo was to discuss my translation Encyclopedia of the Dead in German, in my apartment in Voždovac, where we were neighbors for a while. He was already marked by a serious illness and knew that he would soon die, he did not cling to the hope of medical miracles. He talked to me - probably on the Hungarian-Jewish line, along which he had no other comrades - he talked to me differently than he did to his drinking and poetry buddies. There could be no competition between us as to who was the "greater victim", let alone who was the greater writer. That was clear.
Kish once said that he drank at night and worked during the day. To me, his bohemianism always seemed somehow unnatural, contrived. I had the impression that he drank and cursed in order not to fit into the stereotype of a Serb. He thought that would make him "theirs". Jeremic's campaign against him showed him that for "them" he would remain a foreigner, a foreigner, a Hungarian Jew, despite his Montenegrin mother, Orthodox baptism and everything he did.
Similar in this respect was the much younger, great actor Predrag Eidus. And he - at least in my opinion - was running away from Judaism by pretending to be a Serbian bohemian.
BOOKS THAT SHOOK YUGOSLAVIA: Two masterpieces and a forgotten book that challenges them
ANATOMY AGAINST THE NARCISSIST
Anatomy class should not be read only as Kish's angry response to Jeremic, and especially to the ignorant who attacked him like a pack of hyenas on a wounded lion, but as an important work for understanding Kish's poetics. I believe that we should thank the anger, the insults, and even the sadness that overwhelmed him at that time, that he began to examine himself, to think about why he wrote what. He developed a methodology that remains important and instructive for all writers, even for those who move in other directions, because his is almost impossible to follow. I have always felt that there is little to learn from great writers, they are discouraged because their work is unattainable. You can learn from mediocre and even bad authors. And those rare ones who play in the big leagues and otherwise rely on their own talent, no matter how much they read and admire their predecessors.
Jeremic's book Narcissus without a face as an attempt to respond to Kishov Anatomy class it deserves the attention of only particularly persistent students of literary theory. To me, in the context of the question of whether Kish was "expelled", it is an interesting jeremiad that the authorities are attacking him, Jeremic, taking away his right to life, that they did not even give him an apartment. Subtext: Kish received an apartment from the state twice.
To what extent did Jeremić and his company get confused because of Anatomy class also proves that Danil Kish was sued in a regular court for defamation and demanded huge financial compensation for the mental pain suffered. Unfortunately, I have not been able to find anything about the course of the trial, not even the date it was held, let alone the verdict, I don't know how long such records are kept anyway. Indirectly, on the basis of other files, we learn that the court acquitted Kish on all counts of the indictment, even finding that Tomb for Boris Davidovich it's not plagiarism, which would be comical if it wasn't something so painful for Kiš, for whom it was still a satisfaction, although the court was not competent for it.
THE LAST YUGOSLAV WRITER
Comparing that trial of Danilo Kish with the verdict of the Ethics Commission of the University of Belgrade against Sinisa Mal is not possible, but some questions in connection with it still arise. Decisions about the plagiarism of a doctoral dissertation are made at universities around the world according to clear rules. For plagiarism in literature, the lawsuit must be filed by the author whose work was plagiarized, that is, his heirs, agent or publisher. The competent court is always stated in the author's contracts, the judgment is passed on the basis of the findings of experts. Since long processes usually threaten, such cases are usually settled by an out-of-court settlement.
In the case of a defamation suit over a book Anatomy class, the question of whether there was plagiarism in Kish's book is irrelevant. Theoretically, only the people he allegedly plagiarized could file a lawsuit for plagiarism. Admittedly, I am not a lawyer, but while working at the Union of Writers, I dealt with copyright. The statement of the President of Serbia comparing the cases of Sinisa Malo and Danilo Kish really has no foundation, nor is it logical, and Aleksandar Vučić, as a lawyer who legally graduated from the Faculty of Law, should know that.
While I am writing this text, they call me from the Jewish Museum in Belgrade and ask if I have any more criticism that I wrote about the performance of the play Plagiarism Jacques Confin, which was performed at the National Theater in his native Leskovac. I don't have any. I even forgot that I wrote it, I forgot his work, but, of course, I didn't forget that great doctor and humorist. And the affair surrounding the alleged, non-existent plagiarism of Kish would have been forgotten a long time ago if the President of the Republic had not brought it up to date in order to relativize his finance minister's behavior. Nonsense is unimportant, let's read the works. If all this noise contributed to the re-reading of Danilo Kish, warned young people who had not read him to finally do so, then it had a meaning, although not the one that Aleksandar Vučić was aiming for.
While he was physically able, Danilo was sometimes in Yugoslavia, sometimes in France, he said for himself that he was the last Yugoslav writer.
I am one of the few who remember Danilo Kish as younger than themselves. I remember most fondly how we met as neighbors in Voždovac, he approaches me on all fours with disheveled hair and greets me in Hungarian:
Azt montetta az öreg Kis,
let's drink a little.
In my free translation:
Old Kiš really cares.
to drink a little now.
