SUSAN SONTAG
373
writer's responsibility that, literally, came with the territory. Kis came
from a small country where writers are for better and for worse important,
with the most gifted becoming moral, and sometimes even political, legis–
lators. Perha ps more often for worse: it was eminent Belgrade writers who
provided the ideological underpinning of the Serbian genocidal project
known as "ethnic cleansing." The complicity of most Serb writers and
artists not in exile in the current triumph of Greater Serbian imperialism
suggests that the anti-nationalist voices, of which Kis was the bravest and
most eloquent, have always been in the minority. Much as by tempera–
ment and exquisitely cosmopolitan literary culture he would have pre–
ferred a less embattled course, in which literature was kept separate from
politics, Kis was always under attack and therefore, necessarily, on the
attack. The first fight was against provincialism. This was not so much the
provincialism of a small literature (for the former Yugoslavia produced at
least two world-class prose writers, Ivo Andri c and Miroslav Krlda) as of
a state-supported, state-renewed literature. It could be fought simply by
his being the utterly independent, artistically ambitious writer he was,
almost from the beginning. But worse attacks were to come.
One of those writers who are first of all readers, who prefer dawdling
and grazing and blissing out in the Great Library and surrender to their
vocation only when the urge to write becomes unbearable, Kis was not
what would be called prolific. In his lifetime he published nine books,
seven of them in the fourteen years between 1962, when he was twenty–
seven, and 1976, when he was forty-one. First came a pair ofshort novels,
Th eAttic
and
Psalm
44 (published in 1962; not yet translated into English).
The second book,
Carden, Ashes
(1965), was a novel. The third,
Early Sor–
rows
(1968, also not yet translated), was a book of stories. The fourth,
Hourglass
(1972), was a novel. The fifth and sixth were two collections of
essays,
Po- etika
(1972) and
Po- etika II(1974).
The seventh,
A TombJor Boris
Davidovich
(1976), was a collection of thematically linked stories that his
publishers chose to call a novel. He wrote it while an instructor in Serbo–
Croatian at the University of Bordeaux, as he'd written
Carden, Ashes
while he taught at Strasbourg.
By this time, Kis was spending more and more time abroad, though he
did not consider himself to be in exile, any more than he would have said
he was a "dissident writer": it was too clear to him that writing worthy of
the name ofliterature had to be unofficial. With this seventh book, a suite
offictional case histories ofthe Stalinist Terror, KiS's work finally attracted
the international attention it deserved.
A Tomb Jor Boris Davidovich
also
attracted a seven-month-Iong campaign of negative attention back home
in Belgrade. The campaign, which reeked of anti-Semitism, centered on
