The Encyclopedia of the Dead is a collection of nine stories by Yugoslav author Danilo Kiš. Combining history and fiction in what critics have seen as a postmodern fashion, the stories have helped cement Kiš's legacy as one of the most important 20th-century Yugoslav authors.
Background and contents
The Encyclopedia of the Dead, Kiš's final work, was first published in Serbo-Croatian in 1983. A French translation by Pascale Delpech was published by Gallimard in 1985, and received a mixed review in World Literature Today, the reviewer finding them of uneven literary quality. It was translated in English by Michael Henry Heim and published in 1989 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, then republished in 1997 by Northwestern UP in their European Classics series. The stories combine fiction and history in a postmodern fashion. In a postscript, Kiš provides historical backgrounds and other information. As in his other works, in The Encyclopedia Kiš attempts to "piece together the hybrid identity of the Balkans"; his effort "is mediated through contradictory strategies that cannot provide narrative coherences or certitudes". A Tomb for Boris Davidovich was "a cenotaph...for the hidden victims of Stalin's purges", and The Encyclopedia is an extension of that project of cataloging the victims of history "along more blatantly metaphysical lines", according to Chris Power. As in A Tomb, a predilection with missing texts is an important theme in The Encyclopedia—in A Tomb, for instance, the missing entry in the Encyclopedia of Revolutionaries for the titular character, and in An Encyclopedia the lost correspondence of Mendel Osipovich in "Red Stamps with Lenin's Picture".
Reception and influence
Kiš is frequently compared to Jorge Luis Borges, and critics find this to be especially true of The Encyclopedia. According to Angela Carter's review of The Encyclopedia, however, Kiš "is more haunted, less antic than the Argentine master". The Slovenian poet Aleš Debeljak mentioned both Borges and Kiš in a 1994 essay called "The Disintegration of Yugoslavia: The Twilight of the Idols"; Debeljak, in a passage on who it was that young Yugoslav writers of the 1980s looked up to, explained that "the truly decisive role in our formation as writers wasn't Borges, as influential as he was, but Danilo Kiš", citing The Encyclopedia as one of three Kiš titles. Less positive is German poet and translator Michael Hofmann, who in a 1989 review in The Times Literary Supplement called Kiš "a highly deliberate and self-conscious author of vaguely Pyrrhic books" and finds "terrible cliches" and predictable outlines in the stories.
Major themes in the Text
Major themes in the text are: death, truth, being, archiving and the role of the archivist, religion, myth, storytelling, literature, language, reckoning of the human condition, the human experience, indifference to history, illusion, surveillance, deception, the creation and questioning of an objective reality, truth verses knowledge, the cartography of knowledge, appearance verses substance, culture as a filter of truth, man's ability to distort and manipulate history, positions of power, irony, the meaning of human experience and suffering, subjectivity of morality, the history of ideas, lineage and personal histories.
Stories
; "Simon Magus" ; "Last Respects" ; "The Encyclopedia of the Dead " ; "The Legend of the Sleepers" ; "The Mirror of the Unknown" ; "The Story of the Master and the Disciple" ; "To Die for One's Country Is Glorious" ; "The Book of Kings and Fools" ; "Red Stamps with Lenin's Picture"
