SUSAN SONTAG
Danilo Kis
The death of Danilo
Kis
on October 15, 1989, at the age of fifty-four,
wrenchingly cut short one of the most important journeys in literature
made by any writer during the second halfof the twentieth century. Born
on the rim of the Yugoslav cauldron (in Subotica, near the frontier with
Hungary) a few years before the Second World War to a Hungarian-Jew–
ish father (Kis is a Hungarian name) , who perished in Auschwitz, and a
Serb Orthodox mother from rural Montenegro, raised mostly in Hungary
and in Montenegro, a graduate in literature of the university in Belgrade,
where he made his debut as a writer, eventually a part-time expatriate,
doing some teaching in France, and finally a full-time one, in Paris , where
he lived his last ten years, Kis had a life-span that matched, from start to
finish, what might have been thought the worst the century had to offer
his part ofEurope : Nazi conquest and the genocide oftheJews, followed
by Soviet take-over.
The year Kis died ofcancer, 1989, was ofcourse the
al1l1us mirabilis
in
which Soviet-style totalitarian rule ended in Central Europe. By mid–
October, the collapse of what had seemed immutable was clearly under–
way; three weeks later, the Berlin Wall was torn down. It is comforting to
think that he died knowing only the good news. Happily - it is the only
thing about his premature death which gives some consolation - he didn't
live to see the collapse of the multi-confessional, multi-ethnic state of
which he was a citizen (his "mixed" origin made Kis very much a Yugo–
slav), and the return on European soil, in his own country, of concentra–
tion camps and genocide.
An
ardent foe of nationalist vanities, he would
have loathed Serb ethnic fascism even more than he loathed the neo-Bol–
shevik official culture of the Second Yugoslavia it has replaced. It is hard
to imagine that, ifhe were still alive, he could have borne the destruction
ofBosnia.
The amount of history, or horror, a writer is obliged to endure does
not make him or her a great writer. Bu t geography is destiny. For Kis there
was no retreating from an exalted sense of the writer's place and of the
Editor's Note: Excerpted from HOMO POETICUS: Essays and Interviews by Danilo Kis. edited.
and with an introduction. by Susan Sontag. translated by Ralph Manheim. Francis Jones. and Michael
H enry Heim. To be published by Farrar. Straus& Giroux. Introduction copyright
©
lY95 bySusan Son–
tag. Translation copyright
©
lYY5 by Farrar. Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved.
