Atatürk Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü Dergisi 2012 16 (1): 269-286 Imagination under Pressure: Ideology and History in Danilo Kiš’ A Tomb for Boris Davidovich and Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting Tatiana GOLBAN (*) Abstract: The present study focuses on fictional history and historical fiction as forms of oppositional discourse in the East-Central European literature during highly Stalinized communist regimes. The study evaluates comparatively Danilo Kiš’ A Tomb for Boris Davidovichand Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, two literary works that express a reality which takes place within restricted ideological limits. While exploring the fictional material reified by the writers’ imagination being under the pressure of ideology, a number of aspects have attracted our critical attention. The first regards the importance of history, in general, and of the historical truth, in particular, as being expressed in the texts of the two writers. The second is represented by the authorial attitude towards the motif of ‘memory and forgetting’. The third concerns the originality of the genre: both novels receive the form of a collection of individual stories consisting of certain narrative lines which, on one hand, are seemingly separate, but, on the other hand, are linked within a given collection as a means of expressing the historical truth. The fourth refers to the characteristic humor of Kiš and Kundera’s novels. The works of the two writers reveal a very complex humor, alternating from black humor to thoughtful, from biting to sentimental, exposing the human experiences of grief, pain of existence and anguish at facing death. These aspects represent the main similarities between the two literary discourses, which were written in a period of crisis in the history of humanity, and, in order to reveal this, the investigation of these aspects in their thematic and narrative perspectives becomes the main aim of this study. Keywords: Fiction, ideology, history, historiography, genre, authorship, humor, postmodernity, postmodernism. Baskı Altındaki İmgelem: Danilo Kis’in Boris Davidovich için bir Mezar ve Milan Kundera’nın Gülüşün ve Unutuşun Kitabı Özet: Bu çalışma, Stalin etkisinin yoğun olduğu komünist rejimlerdeki Doğu ve Orta Avrupa yazınında kurgusal tarih ve tarihsel kurguya ilişkin karşıt söylemlerin irdelenmesini içerir. Bu bağlamda belirli ideolojik sınırlar içerisindeki gerçekliği dile getiren Danilo Kis’in Boris Davidovich Için Bir Mezar adlı yapıtı ile Milan Kundera’nın Gülüşün ve Unutuşun Kitabı adlı yapıtı arasında karşılaştırmalı bir inceleme yapılmıştır. Yazarın ideolojik baskı altındaki imgelemiyle somutlaştırdığı kurgusal yapıtını incelerken, genel anlamda tarihin, özel anlamda tarihsel doğruluğun önemi, “bellek” ve “unutma” motiflerine yazarın yaklaşımı, görünüşte farklı olsalar da, tarihsel doğruluğu dillendirme aracı olarak benzer anlatı biçimleriyle bireysel öyküler içeren birbirinin bütünleyicisi farklı eleştirel etmenlerin varlığı ve son olarak Kis ve Kundera’nın mizah anlayışlarıyla karşılaşılır. Her iki yazarın mizah anlayışının kara mizahtan düşündüren mizaha, iğneleyici olanından duyguları hedef alanına kadar farklı mizah anlayışına sahip olduklarının ve çeşitli şekillerde insanın ölüm karşısında duyumsadığı acıyı ve yası ortaya koyduklarının ayrımına varılır. İnsanlık tarihinin belirli bir kriz döneminde kaleme alınmış yapıtlar olarak, iki yapıtın yazınsal söylemi ve biçemi arasında benzerlikler olduğu göze çarpar. İzleksel ve anlatısal bir çözümlemeyle, iki yapıt arasındaki benzerlikleri açığa çıkartmak bu çalışmanın temel amacıdır. Anahtar kelimeler: Kurgu, ideoloji, tarih, tarih yazımı, tür, yazarlık, mizah, postmodernite, postmodernizm. *) Yrd. Doç.Dr., Namık Kemal Üniversitesi Fen-Edebiyat Fakültesi, Batı Dilleri ve Edebiyatları Bölümü (e-posta: [email protected]) Atatürk Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler 270 / Tatiana GOLBAN Enstitüsü Dergisi 2012 16 (1): 269-286 Introduction The status of the writer of fiction in situations governed by oppression, deceit and deliberately blurred parameters, such as those occurred under the control of Russian Communism and its bleak aftermath, was both dangerous and appealing. Although precarious, the East-Central European writers of the highly Stalinized Communist regimes intensified their interest in historical themes and in the subject of re-presentation or interpretation of the past. Often they offered imaginative challenges or alternatives to the so-called ‘official histories’, questioning the established assumptions on which the verity of historical reconstruction was based. These writes questioned drastically the historians’ assertions of truthfulness and accuracy of the past as represented in the standardized historical texts. Since the famous statement of Jacques Derrida in his of Grammatology that “there is no outside-the-text”(Derrida,1974: 158) there appeared the suggestion of the impossibility of finding the truth, not just in its transcendental philosophical sense, but also in the prospect of a material and historical referent. This claim of the textuality of existence and the difficulty or impossibility of reaching a reality outside representation and signification were initially not applied particularly to history by Derrida, butin the postmodern world it created a powerful impact especially upon the oppressed people who experienced traumatic events and historical incidents. In the same line, the famous philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard declared that postmodernism takes place in the recognition that Enlightenment rationalism and scientific positivism are not connected to objective truth and reality, but, to a certain extent, are simply “language games”, like fiction, thatonly produce“the effects of reality” and that, in the postmodern context, turn out to be “the fantasies of realism” (Lyotard, 1984: 74). In these circumstances, both ‘realistic’ fiction and ‘objective’ history not only become deluding in their endeavor to present the world as an extremely comprehensible and coherent system, but “they also become ideologically charged deceptive practices that posit an immanent and essentialized world where none exists” (Berlatsky, 2003: 101). Concurrently during this period, historiography itself became the object of reevaluation. Important scholars such as Hayden White and Fredric Jameson persist on the impossibility of our ‘knowing’ the past, except the narrated, textualized and interpreted reconstruction. White claims that a historical work is “a verbal structure in the form of the narrative prose discourse that purports to be a model, or icon, of past structures and processes in the interest of explaining what they were by representing them” (White, 1973: 2). Thus, in this context, the writer of history, like the writer of fiction, inevitably makes use of emplotment in order to outline the succession of historical events. The postmodern emphasison the ‘real’ as inseparable from the constructed and the textual became the matter of concern of the historical fiction, particularly in that dominant kind of “historiographicmetafiction” that Linda Hutcheon defines “in terms of its ability to contest the assumptions of the ‘realist’ novel and narrative history, to question the absolute knowability of the past, and to specify the ideological implications of historical Imagination under Pressure: Ideology and History in Danilo Kiš’ A Tomb for 271 Boris Davidovich and Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting representations, past and present” (Hutcheon, 1995: 71). The postmodern reader of the historiographicmetafiction responds to the historical material represented in such novels with a strong awareness of its emplotment (fiction) and its basis in the historical real (fact), admitting at the same time that the historical real might have potentially disturbing and political consequences. I. History, Fact, and Fiction in Kiš and Kundera This study evaluates comparatively Danilo Kiš’sA Tomb for Boris Davidovich(1976) and Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting(1978), two literary works in which the inaccessibility of the real and the truth blur the boundary between historical facts and fiction.While exploring the fictional material reified by the writers’ imagination being under the pressure of ideology, a number of aspects have attracted our critical attention. The first regards the importance of history, in general, and of the historical truth, in particular, as being expressed in the texts of the two writers. The Yugoslavian novelist Danilo Kiš (1935-1989) was totally conscious of the fact that any narration of historical events requires a poetic skill and that the writing of history or historical fiction means to select, to reconstruct, to make use of the probabilistic language that supplies a narrative with details which the historian cannot actually know, but rather guess, based on a general knowledge of the historical context. This is a practice which is especially encountered in topics, such as Stalin’s purges and the gulag system, where hard documentary evidence is scarce.Kiš’s claims that the filling in the emptiness of the gaps between two given facts with the “hard stuff of the imagination which in its persuasiveness has the power of a document” (Kiš, 1990: 188). Thisgives his work what Jennifer Levine has called “the aura of the real” (Levine, 1979: 133). In A Tomb for Boris DavidovichKiš makes references to a variety of historical documents, such as recorded memoirs, encyclopedias, case histories, general histories, newspaper articles, and also many of the presented events and characters are historically genuine.He uses the historical document in order to objectify his text, to confer to it the quality of truthfulness and credibility and to strengthen the reader’s illusion of the text’s authenticity. Moreover, “it can serve as a form of self-censorship, preventing the author’s consciousness from slipping into grandiloquence, sentimentalism, and pathos. Keeping in check the author’s subjective or, lyrical impulse was, paradoxically, as much a device to authenticate the subject as it was to create an illusion of its authenticity”(Gorjup, 1994: 162-163). In order to make the indicated sources more credible,Kiš provides numerous footnotes throughout A Tomb for Boris Davidovich. Although it is expected that the use of footnotes would reinforce the documentary illusion, their reliabilitybecomesdoubtfuldue to the use of phrases such as “some sources”, “it is a known fact”, and “some investigators”, etc. Instead of granting an air of authenticity, the footnotes suggest somehow that the main text requires some supplementation. The writer wants to call deliberately the attention of the reader to the fictionality of his work, while at the same time trying to give it the credibility of a historical documentary. This approach is employed by Kiš in order to Atatürk Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler 272 / Tatiana GOLBAN Enstitüsü Dergisi 2012 16 (1): 269-286 blur the boundary between fiction and reality. Kiš starts A Tomb for Boris Davidovichas following:“The story that I am about to tell, a story born in doubt and perplexity, has only the misfortune (some call it fortune) of being true: it was recorded by the hands of honorable people and reliable witnesses” (Kiš, 1980: 3). A similar strategy is used at the beginning of another story:“History recorded him as Novsky, which is only a pseudonym (or, more precisely, one of his pseudonyms). But what immediately spawns doubt is the question: did history really record him? In the index of the Granat Encyclopedia, among the 246 authorized biographies and autobiographies of great men and participants in the Revolution, his name is missing. In his commentary of this encyclopedia, Haupt notes that all the important figures of the Revolution are represented, and laments only the “surprising and inexplicable absence of Podvoysky.” Even he fails to make any allusion to Novsky, whose role in the Revolution was more significant than that of Podvoysky. So in a ‘surprising and inexplicable’ way this man whose political principles gave validity to a rigorous ethic, this vehement internationalist, appears in the revolutionary chronicles as a character without a face or a voice.” (Kiš, 1980: 73) By blurring the boundary between fiction and reality Kiš wants to emphasize the ways in which history and historical narration is frequently manipulated and twisted by various modes of emplotment. At the same time he warns about the danger of shaping some historical facts into a range of narrative forms that are ideologically predetermined and thus direct the future interpretation and the understanding of a traditional historical narrative.Kiš wants his readers to admit that if a work of fiction efficiently makes use of the technique of documentation, usually employed by nonfictional accounts of history, then the works of history, which pretend themselves as ‘true’, may also be fiction and might need some verification A Tomb for Boris Davidovichadvocates the treating of any historical record with some doubts we experience toward works of fiction, suggesting the fact that history might be the product of the imagination of its witnesses, the writers. As Hayden White has pointed out, “in this world, reality wears the mask of a meaning, the completeness and fullness of which we can only imagine, never experience… historical stories …give to reality the odor of the ideal” (White, 1980: 20). The suggestion of the unreliability of the historical records is appropriate exactly to the context of Stalinism, in which the official version of history was modified according to the impulse or desire of the dominant political situation.Kiš explicitly points out in A Tomb for Boris Davidovichthat history is a matter of political construction, fiction, a text which is not true. In the story also entitled A Tomb for Boris Davidovich the main protagonist Boris Davidovich is imprisoned in a Stalinist camp where he is forced to confess some crimes he never committed.As a punishment, Novsky’s torturer Fedukinexecutes some young people one by one in front of the prisoner until Boris Davidovich finally capitulates. Although Fedukinis conscious of the fact that the given confession has nothing to do with truth, he encourages the creation of a system of falsified reality in order to preserve the Imagination under Pressure: Ideology and History in Danilo Kiš’ A Tomb for 273 Boris Davidovich and Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting power and supremacy of the Party and its ideology: “Fedukin, the tall, pock-marked, and unbending interrogator, spent some hours alone with Novsky in this cattle car (the doors were locked from outside), trying to persuade him of the moral obligation of making a false confession”(Kiš, 1980: 90). In the hands of such writers of authorized history, as Kiš points out, ‘truth’ becomes a very relative concept, since it was based on numerous confessions forced by the interrogators of the Party intended to present a wishful reality. As Fedukin the torturer says: “Even a stone would talk if you break its teeth” (Kiš, 1980:91). Such a representation of a ‘voluntary’ submission of the victims to the ideology of the Stalinist Russia intends to arouse the readers’ precaution and to question whether a given fact is a reliable unit or not. The Czech writer Milan Kundera (1929- )also explores the inaccessibility of the real and the truth and its political consequencesin his work The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Kundera focuses on the illustration of the effacing powers of the institutional history. His novel opens with the description of a photograph, set in 1948, depicting a group of political leaders, among whom Gottwaldand Clementis, standing on a balcony in front of a multitude of people on a cold and snowy day. Gottwald, while giving a speech to the people, wears a fur hat that has just been placed on his head by Clementis. Kundera refers to that account as a unique moment that was reproduced abundantlyby newspapers, posters, schoolbooks and museums to such an extent that even a child could recognize the photograph. “On that balcony the history of Communist Czechoslovakia was born”(Kundera, 1982: 3). Four years after the photograph was taken,Clementis disappeared from all the pictures because he was accused of treason and hanged, leaving behind only his fur hat on Gottwald’s head:“The propaganda section immediately airbrushed him out of history and, obviously, out of all photographs as well. Ever since, Gottwald has stood on that balcony alone. Where Clementis once stood, there is only bare palace wall. All that remains of Clementis is the cap on Gottwald’s head” (Kundera, 1982: 3). In this fragment Kundera portrays the power and capacity of the Soviet regime to airbrush, efface, twist and re-write history in order to fit its own ideological purposes. This meditation on the photograph also explores some aspects of the past. First concerns the flexibility of the past, since in the mechanism of social life, the past is not always a solid, concrete or factual reality. In our individual memories the past can be reconstructed, modifiedand adjusted. Second refers to our endeavor to present the past in a wishful manner, convenient to a certain moment of the present. But the attempt to erase the past is seldom successful, since the trace of the past does not exist just in the individual memory but also in some accounts, histories or someone’s memory. Even thoughthe individual makes some great effort to control the past, it remains a part of the present beyond any manipulation. The framework of Kundera’s photograph illustrates that the past is loaded with ideological burden. It provides the possibility to justify the political and social agendas against those who do not embrace the recognized or official premises. Thus, not only a historical fact but also the past can be an ideological weapon. Atatürk Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler 274 / Tatiana GOLBAN Enstitüsü Dergisi 2012 16 (1): 269-286 Kundera’s photograph shows an extremely twisted report of history from the experience of Clementiswith the Communist Party. When Clementis and his fur hat are seen as components of Czech history (that is when this exemplary moment is a part of the Czech past and is intended to shape its present), the episode is permitted to be recorded in the story of the nation. Conversely, when the Czech leading party is disturbed by this past, Clementis is easily airbrushed from all official records of history. Kundera depicts and argues about the fact that Clementis’ obliteration is a deformation of the historical record. Meanwhile, the theorists of ‘history’, like Michel de Certeau and Michel Foucault, claim that the removal or silencing of the facts and events is inevitable and is a constitutive part of unifying the traditional history. De Certeau affirms that history “customarily began with limited evidence… and it took as its task the sponging of all diversity off of them, unifying everything into coherent comprehension” (de Certeau, 1988: 78).The Clementis episode is just another obvious example of the constant narrative violence in which all history participates. Milan Kundera, like Foucault and de Certeau, tries to show the impossibility of the coexistence of the real and the unifying narrative, the incompatibility of the real and its unifying narration. The same danger of effacing a historical fact is presented by Kiš’s narrative, in which the main character Boris DavidovichNovsky, a true revolutionary and a vehement defender of Communist ideology,“appears in the revolutionary chronicles as a character without a face or a voice” (Kiš, 1980:73). Once Boris Davidovich embodied the symbol of brotherhood, optimism and altruism of the Communist party; now he is obliterated from all records, becoming anonymous, inadequate to the present ambitions of the totalitarian regime. In this context the question of history’s competenceobviously appears. Since history itself contributes to the committing of such violence, like erasing facts from the past and twisting the events, is history effective at all?Michel Foucault implies that “history becomes ‘effective’ to the degree that it introduces discontinuity into our very being…’Effective’ history deprives the self of the reassuring stability of life and nature, and it will not permit itself to be transported by a voiceless obstinacy toward a millennial ending”(Foucault, 1984: 88). Foucault contrasts here the traditional or ‘classical’ history to a new history or genealogy that disassembles instead of unifying, meaning thatClementisand Boris Davidovich might be accepted to stay in the chronicles or pictures although they are not part of that leading ideologyany longer and they might be allowed to remain in the memory of the posterity. II. Memory and Its Fictional Implications In fact, as an alternative to Foucault’s new history, many thinkers started to advocate memory. Our past is our heritage; our tradition is shaped by our experiences, ideas and memories.Recollection, remembering is a moral and social responsibility, but what should be remembered exactly? Nowadays memory has become the subject of important research, exploring especially questions of individual and collective memories. Maurice Halbwachs, Imagination under Pressure: Ideology and History in Danilo Kiš’ A Tomb for 275 Boris Davidovich and Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting a theorist notorious for his studies on ‘collective memory’, perceives memory as a phenomenon which preserves continuity and consistency within a community.Meanwhile history, in its records, gives priority to the dramatic changes and rupturesbetween past and present:“History (…) is not interested in these intervals when nothing apparently happens, when life is content with repetition in a somewhat different but essentially unaltered form without rupture or upheaval. But the group, living first and foremost for its own sake, aims to perpetuate the feelings and images forming the substance of its thought” (Halbwachs, 1980: 85-86). The collective memory, unlike history, is preoccupied mostly with how to protect and retain the shared heritage, traditions, feelings and images. Pierre Nora makes an attempt to underline the difference between memory and history. In his work Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de memoireNora asserts: “Memory and history, far from being synonymous, appear now to be in fundamental opposition. Memory is life, borne by living societies founded in its name. It remains in permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of its successive deformations, vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation, susceptible to being long dormant and periodically revived. History, on the other hand,is the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer. Memory is a perpetually actual phenomenon, a bond tying us to the eternal present; history is a representation of the past” (Nora, 1989: 8). This distinction resembles the one implied by Milan Kundera in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. In this narrative memory is presented as a bond to a community and an identity that is jeopardized by the erasing powers of history. Similar to Clementis episode mentioned earlier, Kundera’s novel continues to depict the manner in which history is manipulated and controlled by those in power, as well as its shocking impact upon collectivity.The Book of Laughter and Forgettingis set during the rule of Gustav Husak, named by Kundera as the “President of Forgetting”, famous for cashiering 145 Czech historians from the research institutes.Mirek, from the story entitled Lost Letters, an academic dismissed after the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, tries desperately to avoid the erasure of history through the means of his own memory. He keeps vigilant records of political meetings and correspondence believing that “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting” (Kundera, 1982: 3).Mirek, an activist among those who made the Prague spring, represents the “generation who revolted against their own youth”, having “an urge to reach back into the past and smash it with his fist, an urge to slash the canvas of his youth to shreds” (Kundera, 1982: 13, 20). This is an urge that Kundera greatly doubts, since it proves to be futile.Mirek wants to retrieve the letters that provide evidence for the past love to the adamantly Stalinist Zdena he now remembers with shame.He wants to airbrush her from his past, from his memory in the same manner as Clementiswas airbrushed from the history of his nation: “The reason he wanted to remove her picture from the album of his life was not that he hadn’t loved her, but that he had. By erasing her from his mind, he erased his love for her. He airbrushed her out of the picture in the same way the Party Atatürk Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler 276 / Tatiana GOLBAN Enstitüsü Dergisi 2012 16 (1): 269-286 propaganda section airbrushed Clementis from the balcony where Gottwald gave his historic speech” (Kundera, 1982: 21-22). The political implication of memory is an evidentfactandMirek tries to fight insistently to preserve his personal memory against the impending effacement of history. His protests against the erasure or manipulation of the historical fact seems to be caused by a defense mechanism that functions in the case of annihilation, but, ironically, while defending himself he also tries to destroy some fragments from his past that he is not willing to include in the process of building his identity. In his attempt to fabricate his identity, he makes the same abuse of power as the leaders of ideology of his time:“Mirek is as much a rewriter of history as the Communist Party, all political parties, all nations, all men. People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It’s not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past. They are fighting for access to the laboratories where photographs are retouched and biographies and histories rewritten” (Kundera, 1982: 22). At the beginning of the story we seem to sympathize with Mirek for his efforts to retain public history, but this sympathy vanishes when we understand that he is not willing to accept the failures of his personal past as well. Mirek’s labors to recover his love letters are futile and arrogant, “his desire to bring his past under his own control evidences the assertiveness of selfhood, the-self-conscious exhibitionism that runs through the satiric targets of the novel (…), through the various sexual adventurers and pretentious politicians, to the sexless nudists of the last scene” (Knight, 2004: 108). Politics is trivial, unappealing, but at the same time is attractive exactly due to its ability to confirm the individual self and also to ‘overrepresent’ the self. However, the process of ‘overrepresentation’is an illusory one because it “betrays or even annihilates the inner self” of the individual. (Knight, 2004: 108)Zdena has become a blemish on his past, on his reputation and Mirek wants to ‘forget’ her, but the ‘forgetting’ of the personal history represents self-effacement, any discourse which erases the historical context of a person is totalitarian and abusive. At this moment Mirek betrays his inner self because his act of erasure symbolizes his complicity with Communist idealizations and oppression that he despises so much. The creation of the personal identity by the help of memory- construction is a very dangerous act, bringing with it many political consequences. In this context Kundera seems to suggest the resemblance between the ‘official’ history and individual memory, both of them being mere constructions, narratives, instrument of power and abuse. Mirek tries to blur the boundaries between fiction and reality in a convenient manner, using the method of a novelist: “One of a novelist’s inalienable rights is to be able to rework his novel. If he takes a dislike to the beginning, he can rewrite it or cross it out entirely” (Kundera, 1982: 11).Mirek’s personal memory might be clearly represented in Imagination under Pressure: Ideology and History in Danilo Kiš’ A Tomb for 277 Boris Davidovich and Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting his autobiography, giving the illusion of the objective representation of the self, Kundera suggesting that the depiction of the self through memory is impossible. In addition to this we may mention Paul de Man’s description of autobiography as following: “We assume that life produces the autobiography as an act produces its consequences, but can we not suggest, with equal justice, that the autobiographical project may itself produce and determine the life and that whatever the writer does is in fact governed by the technical demands of self-portraiture and thus determined in all its aspects by resources of his medium” (de Man, 1979: 920). By satirizing Mirek’s urge to make a novel of his life Kundera makes satire of any authorial enterprise as well. Novelists always will assert their right to ‘rework’ their novels for the sake of creativity and perfection. But the writers’ plight to create a unique work of art–by removing, silencing or adjusting the imperfections caused by human nature and history – may involve them in the same criticism hinted at Mirek. Revealing the process by which the author rewrites and adjusts his material, Kundera shatters the illusion that his text is timeless or objective. By drawing attention to the erasure or the solipsistic tendencies of revision, Kundera breaks the enchantment caused by art or ideology upon the readers. The relativism and the mutability of memory are also the matter of concern of A Tomb for Boris Davidovich. In his endeavor to oppose memory to forgetting, Danilo Kiš also tries to emphasize the fact that memory apparently safeguards, confirms and even defies false history, but by the end it proves to be just a mere construction with no concrete relation to the reality it asserts, vulnerable to manipulation and deformation. At the beginning of A Tomb for Boris DavidovichKiš presents the ‘biography’ of Boris DavidovichNovsky, a fervent Communist who has dedicated his entire life to the Party and its ideology. During the Stalinist regime of the 1930s,Novsky is arrested, being charged for treason. From the day of his arrest his life is spent in prison camps, being constantly subdued to extreme sufferings and tortures. In the pasta leading revolutionary and a true defender of the progressive ideas of the Party, now Novsky is sacrificed for the sake of Stalin’s ambitions, being destroyed by his own supposed ‘comrades’. The elimination of Novsky from the history is opposed apparently by Kiš’snarrator who tries to restore the memory of the brilliant revolutionary through the means of biography. He begins his narration in a promising manner, claiming that Novsky’s“biography does not lack information; what is puzzling is the chronology” (Kiš, 1980: 77).However, the reliability of this claim becomes doubtful due to the “obvious gap in our sources” or “his later whereabouts are more or less known”, creating the effect of a pleasant, but false satisfaction that the given text is true (Kiš, 1980: 81).Kiš’s narrator somehow calls attention to the fictionality of his narration and, at the same time, to the fictionality of life and thus to the biography of this character: “This brave man died on November 21, 1937, at four o’clock in the afternoon. He left a few cigarettes and a tooth-brush…..In late June 1956, the London Times, which still seemed to believe in ghosts, announced that Atatürk Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler 278 / Tatiana GOLBAN Enstitüsü Dergisi 2012 16 (1): 269-286 Novsky had been seen in Moscow near the Kremlin wall. He was recognized by his steel dentures” (Kiš, 1980: 108). The reconstruction of the protagonist’s denture, ironically, in this context suggests the reconstruction or re-creation of life and biography of Boris Davidovich, showing that not only a piece of history can be remodeled, reworked, invented,but a human existence as well might be a part of legend, that is, of fiction. The unreliability of Kiš’s narration calls us to investigate the reliability of Novsky’s autobiography. We admire Novsky’s stoicism in resisting the pressure of power, his determinism “to ascertain his moral position, which was whispering demoniacally into his ear that his biography was final and well rounded, without flaws, as perfect as a sculpture” (Kiš, 1980: 94). But if in the case of Kundera’s character the past holds the control over memory and does not allow oblivion, Kiš’s character is subdued by the present, represented by the official power, which is able to deform, adjust and manipulate its ‘material’. Novsky realizes the dreadful situation of his life: he, who considered himself the master of his life, capable to create his own identity and biography, is annihilated completely by the authority. Boris Davidovich acknowledges that “the perfection of his biography would be destroyed, his life work (his life) deformed by these final pages…. By his stubborn refusal tocooperate with the inquiry, he would find himself (indeed, he already did) at the beginning of a long series of murders committed in his name” (Kiš, 1980: 94, 96). The ability of theauthority to construct not just historical evidence but even human life makes Danilo Kiš focus on the value of confession, apparently the most trustworthy piece of truth a human can ever produce. The confession becomes the center of attention of the writer especially when it is considered the context of the Christian tradition and, in particular, the Russian Orthodox tradition of public confession. But in this text the confession motif loses its sacred aura; instead, it becomes an instrument of pressure manipulated by the power. The confession does not allow the possibility to the protagonist to be sincere and truthful because “the whole structure of this confession rested on a lie squeezed out of him by torture”(Kiš, 1980: 98). Showing the unreliability of any written word,Kiš tries to depict the fact that what is left to us as recorded history is nothing else but a denaturalization, based on battle of interests, battle for domination, and the communal memory is a constant subject to manipulation. This is illustrated skillfully in the combat between Novsky and Fedukinover each word of Novsky’s confession: “This was why he fought with unsuspected strength for every word, every phrase. For his part, Fedukin, no less resolute and cautious, made maximal demands. Through long nights the two men struggled over the difficult text of the confession, panting and exhausted, their heads bent over the pages enveloped in the thick cigarette smoke, each trying to incorporate into it some of his own passion, his own beliefs, his own outlook from a higher perspective” (Kiš, 1980: 98). Boris Davidovich’s struggle over confession represents his attempt to retain the memory of himself against the probable effacement of history, represented by Fedukin.