SUSAN SONTAG
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choose one's own parents. But nobody obliges a writer to declare his or
her parentage. Kis, however, had to proclaim his. Like every writer who is
a great reader, he was an inveterate enthusiast about the work of others.
His talent for admiration also made him an extremely collegial writer,
which he expressed best in the numerous translations of contemporary
writers he undertook from French, Hungarian, Russian, and English into
Serbo-Croatian. In expatriation he was still really back home, in his head
and in all his work - despite his lived estrangement from the literary world
of his native country. He had never forsaken them, though they had
betrayed him.
When Kis died in Paris in 1989, the Belgrade press went into national
mourning. The renegade star of Yugoslav literature had been extin–
guished. Safely dead, he could be eulogized by the mediocrities who had
always envied him and had engineered his literary excommunication, and
who would then proceed - as Yugoslavia fell apart - to become official
writers of the new post-Communist, national chauvinist order. Kis is, of
course, admired by everyone who genuinely cares about literature, in Bel–
grade and elsewhere. The place in the former Yugoslavia where he was
and is perhaps most ardently admired is Sarajevo. Literary people there did
not exactly ply me with questions about American literature when I went
to
Sarajevo for the first time in April 1993. But they were extremely
impressed that I'd had the privilege of being a friend of Danilo Kis. In
besieged Sarajevo people think a lot about Danilo Kis. His fervent screed
against nationalism, incorporated into
The Anatomy L esson,
is one of the
two prophetic texts - the other is a story by Andric, "A Letter from 1920"
- that one hears most often cited. As secular, multi-ethnic Bosnia - Yugo–
slavia's Yugoslavia - is crushed under the new imperative ofone ethnicity/
one state, Kis is more present than ever. He deserves to be a hero in Sara–
jevo, whose struggle to survive embodies the honor of Europe.
Unfortunately, the honor ofEurope has been lost at Sarajevo. Kis and
like-minded writers who spoke up against nationalism and fomented–
from-the-top ethnic hatreds could not save Europe's honor, Europe's bet–
ter idea. But it is not true that,
to
paraphrase Auden, a great writer does
not make anything happen . At the end of the century, which is the end of
many things, literature, too, is besieged. The work ofDanilo Kis preserves
the honor ofliterature.