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Milorad Pavić (1929-2009) |
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Serbian novelist, short story writer, poet, translator, and literary historian. Milorad Pavić expanded with a fresh and innovative approach the limits of narrative structure. His multi-layered Dictionary of the Khazars (1984) is considered one of the most intriguing works in postmodernist fiction. It was published in separate "male" and "female" versions. In Paris Match Philippe Tretiak called the work "the first novel of the twenty-first century." "The author assures the reader that he will not have to die if he reads this book, as did the user of the 1691 edition, when The Khazar Dictionary still had its first scribe. Some explanation regarding that edition is in order here, but for the sake of brevity the lexicographer proposes to strike a deal with his readers. He will sit down to write these notes before supper, and the reader will take them to read after supper. Thereby, hunger will force the author to be brief, and gratification will allow the reader to peruse the introduction at leisure." (Dictionary of the Khazars by Milorad Pavić, translated from the Serbo-Croatian by Christina Pribićević-Zorić, Male Edition, New York: Vintage Books, 1989, p. 1; originally published in Yugoslavia as Hazarski rečnik: roman leksikon u 100.000 reči by Prosveta, Belgrade, 1984) Milorad Pavić was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia (now Serbia),
into a
distinguished family of writers. He graduated from the University of
Belgrade and received his Ph.D. in literary history at the University
of Zagreb. Pavić began his academic career at the Sorbonne and
continued in Vienna. After teaching literature at the universities of
Novi Sad, Freiburg, Regensburg, Belgrade, Pavić devoted himself
entirely to writing. His first collection of poetry appeared in 1967.
With his wife, the writer and literary critic Jasmina Mihajlović, he
settled in Belgrade. When
Slobodan Milošević rose into power with his nationalist
agenda, Pavić expressed his support for the governments's goals, but he
never joined Milošević's party, and later avoided discussing
controversial issues. Pavić was elected in 1991 a member of the Serbian
Academy of Science and Arts. After the
Kosovo War, in writing of his own life, Pavić said: "I have not killed
anyone. But they have killed
me. Long before my death. It would have been better for my books had
their author been a Turk or a German. I was the best known writer of
the most hated nation in the world—the Serbian nation. XXI century
started for me avant la date 1999, when NATO airforces bombed Belgrade
and Serbia." (quoted in What Is World Literature? by David Damrosch, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003, p. 270)
Milorad Pavić died of complications of a heart
attack on November 30, 2009, in Belgrade. Palimpseti (1967), with which Pavić made his debut as a poet, was followed by Mesečev kamen (1971) and several books of short stories, including Gvozdena zavesa (1973), Konji svetoga Marka (1976). Lyrics such as 'Rejoice Eleventh Finger Reckoner of Stars' and 'But I'm the One From Whom They Stole a Button From His Trouser Leg' reveal Pavić's fascination with paradoxical and unconventional images. He has also published monographs of literary history from Serbian Baroque and Symbolist poetry, reviving and re-evaluating some older Serbian writers and editing their neglected works. Among Pavić's studies are Istorija srpske književnosti baroknog doba (XVII i XVIII vek) (1970), Vojislav Ilić, njegovo vreme i del (1972), and Rađanje nove srpske književnosti (1983). Hazarski rečnik: roman leksikon u 100.000 reči (1984, Dictionary of the Khazars), Pavić's first novel, is a playful mock-history of the Khazars, located somewhere among Turkey, Russia and the Slavic countries to the west. They are an oppressed majority among a total of six ethnic groups (corresponding Yugoslavia's six republics). In the late 9th century A.D., the great Khan, ruler of the obscure Caucasian people, summons the three leading scholars to determine which religion his people will adopt. "A book can be a vineyard watered with rain or a vineyard watered with wine. This one, like all dictionaries, is of the latter variety. A dictionary is a book that, while requiring little time every day, takes a lot of time through the years. This loss should not be underestimated. Especially if one takes into account that reading is, generally speaking, a dubious proposition." (Ibid., p. 334) The story is told in three versions according to the "sources" – the Christian in the Red book, the Islamic in the Green, and the Hebrew in the Yellow, referring to the fact that there is no single correct point of view to any fundamental question. The Jewish section, placed at the end, is the longest and draws together many of the themes. Pavić did not separate reality from fantasy, the past from the future. Dictionary of the Khazars offeres an alternative to traditional ways of reading, including an intepretation through the lens of the future bloody breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. "Everybody can discover and read in my books many things," Pavić said in an interview. "The reader has nearly the same rights as the author." ('You Can Read It Across or Down' by Jonathan Baumbach, The New York Times, December 16, 1990) The book within a book itself comes in two editions, a "male" and a "female" version, which differ by one paragraph. Pavić's lexicon novel continued the long tradition of
histories of imaginary lands, starting from Jonathan Swift's islands
for his Lilliputs, Brobdingnags, and continuing in Lewis Carrol's Wonderland,
L. Frank Baum's Oz, etc. Moreover, in the background there was also Jorge Luis Borges'
story 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius' (1940), which feature an
encyclopaedia from another reality. Behind Pavić's net of legends, facts,
metaphysical philosophizing,
and quasi-historical stories, the reader can decipher a plot, in which
the Khazar dream-hunters try to attach themselves to the body of the
angel ancestor of mankind. They "plunge into other people's dreams and
sleep and from them extract little pieces of Adam-the-precursor's
being, composing them into a whole, into so-called Khazar
dictionaries, with the aim of having all these assembled books incarnate on earth the enormous body of Adam Ruhani." (Ibid., p. 166) The Khazars are said to be a mythical tribe, who flourished somewhere in the Balkans between the seventh and ninth centuries. Readers are informed that the novel is an attempt to reconstruct a destroyed dictionary, Daubmannus's 1691 Lexicon Cosri. (There is no such dictionary.) Pavić calls his novel "an open book" in his introductoy remarks to the first edition. "Each reader will put the book together for himself, . . . and, as with a mirror, he will get out of this dictionary as much as he puts into it." ('Pavić, Milorad,' in World Authors 1985-1990, edited by Vineta Colby, New York: H. W. Wilson Company, 1995, p. 659) A surprise bestseller, by the late 1990s Dictionary of the Khazars had been translated into twenty-six languages. "Suffice it to say that his dreams are faster than those
of other people, that he dreams more swiftly than a horse, and that his
telephones neigh like a stable full of stallions, reporting on these
dreams." (Landscape Painted with Tea,
translated from the Serbo-Croatian by Christina Pribićević-Zoric, New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990, p. 119; originally published in Yugoslavia
as Predeo
slikan čajem, Prosveta, Beograd, 1988) Pavić's second novel, Landscape with Tea,
is a playful
combination of a crossword puzzle and modern Odyssey. Atanas Svilar
(alias Razin) is an architect wrestling with the feeling of being a
failure. "Have you ever wondered why your life has remained futile, as
though you had been spending your time thrashing at snakes, as unfilled
as dreams before Friday?" (Ibid., p. 33) He joins a monastery on Greece's Mount Athos, where
his disappeared father, a Russian mathematician named Fyodor Alekseyevich Razin, had been during World War II. Svilar's
search for his roots and for the meaning of life becomes entwined with
the history and secrets of the most ancient of all monasteries. In Book
Two Svilar changes his name to Atanas Fyodorovich Razin, leaves his
family, and moves with the beautiful Vitacha Milut to the United
States. The plot is constructed like a cryptic
crossword, with chapters which can be read "down" or "across." The
solution of the puzzle is supposed to lead to the solution of life. "I
was wrong to think of it as a collection of parables, jokes and asides
given structure and meaning by the crossword device. It’s a collection
of parables, jokes and asides that the crossword device renders even
more ambiguous." ('Crossword book club: Landscape Painted With Tea by Milorad Pavić' by Alan Connor, The Guardian, 18 July 2022) Poslednja ljubav u Carigradu: priručnik za gatanje (1994, Last Love in Constantinople) has an innovative game-oriented twist as Landscape Painted with Tea: Subtitled "A Tarot Novel of Divination,'' the book is accompanied by a pack of Tarot cards, which the reader may use to read in a new way the books 21 chapters. This postmodernist experimentation has much in common with Julio Cortázar's novel Hopscotch (1963). Last Love in Constantinople is a colorful romance set in Eastern Europe during the Napoleonic Wars. The protagonist is Sofronije Opujic, a young cavalryman, whose service in Napoleon's army is complicated by a mysterious prophecy and love for the daughter of his father's enemy. Characteristic of Pavić's novels is mastery of form and language, brilliant metaphors, playfulness, and his interest in such basic philosophical questions as what is the truth, and how can it be obtained? "There are no strict divisions between Pavić's representations of reality," said David A. Norris, the writer of A Cultural History of Serbia: Tradition and Change (2024). "His works demand, like all literature, that readers suspend belief and surrender themselves to the text. Paradoxically, Pavić's resistance to traditional generic classification is a recognition of their power." ('Milorad Pavić' by David A. Norris, Contemporary World Writers, edited by Tracy Chevalier, preface by Susan Bassnett, Detroit: St. James Press, second edition 1993, p. 399) The magic of the narrative is taken to its ultimate conclusion in The Tale That Killed Emily Knorr (2005), in which Pavic imagines a tale that can kill and be killed. The play For Ever And A Day (1993) had a menu-like structure, three interchangeable "starters," one "main course" and three interchangeable "desserts." According to Pavic's instructions, the director should never take more than one "starter" or more than one "dessert" with the same dinner. "Imagine the menu as a tragedy, or the tragedy as a menu! With the menu's magic formula of 3+1+3! You couldn't give it a better cap or prettier dress!" (For Ever and a Day: A Theatre Menu, translated by Christina Pribićević-Zorić, Beograd: Dereta, 1997, p. 22)
Together with such writers as Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Italo Calvino, and Umberto Eco, Pavić charted new territories in modern fiction. The writer and literary critic Jasmina Mihajlovic has noted, that Dictionary of the Khazars, Landscape Painted with Tea, Inner Side of the Wind, and Last Love in Constantinople have characteristics of the hypertext, and they could be read most effectively if they were transferred into a hypertext format. Her view was shared by Robert Coover in his review of Dictionary of the Khazars. "Since the computer radical and prophet Ted Nelson first invented the word ''hypertext'' to describe such computer-driven nonsequential writing nearly a quarter of a century ago, there has been a steady, now rapid, growth of disciples to this newest sect of dream hunters. A new kind of coverless, interactive, expandable ''book'' is now being written; there are no doubt several out there in hyperspace right now; and ''Dictionary of the Khazars'' could easily take its place among them as inspired hackers, imitating Mr. Pavić's Father Theoctist Nikolsky, gleeful inventor of saints' lives, add their own entries, helping to fashion Adam Cadmon's body." ('He thinks the way we dream' by Robert Coover, The New York Times, November 20, 1988) For further reading: 'He Thinks the Way We Dream' by Robert Coover, The New York Times Book Review (20 Nov. 1988); Razgovori sa Pavićem by Miloš Jevtić (1990); Hazari, ili, Obnova vizantijskog romana: razgovori sa Miloradom Pavićem by Ana Šomlo (1990); Hazarska prizma: tumačenje proze Milorada Pavić by Jovan Delić (1991); Prilog za bibliografiju Milorada Pavića by Jasmina Mihajlović (1991, pp. 231-305. Separately and as part of the book "An Anchoret in New York" in Collected Works, 1990); Priča o duši i telu: Slojevi i značenja u prozi Milorada Pavića by Jasmina Mihajlović (1992); Das historische und das fiktive im "Chasarischen Wörterbuch" von Milorad Pavic by Edeltraude Ehrlich (1994); 'Pavić, Milorad,' in World Authors 1985-1990, edited by Vineta Colby (1995); 'Pavić, Milorad' by JC [John Clute], in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, ed. by John Clute and John Grant (1997); 'Milorad Pavić,' in Horror, Ghost & Gothic Writers, edited by David Pringle (1998); Prvi pisac trećeg milenija: životopis Milorada Pavića by Radovan Popović (2002); 'The Poisoned Book,' in What Is World Literature? by David Damrosch (2003); Milorad Pavić mora pričati priče by Sava babić (2010); The Search For The Mythical State of Innocence: The Mythopoeic Dimension in The Novel Dictionary of the Khazars by Ivan Cvetanović (2006); 'Male or Female Time? Milorad Pavić’s Dictionary of the Khazars and Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude' by , Ksenija Vulović, European Review, Cambridge University Press, Vol. 23 (July 2015); Milorad Pavić: stanovnik svetske književnost, priredio Ivan Negrišorac (2018); Milorad Pavić, priredila Jelena Marićević (2019); 'Byzantium and Milorad Pavić’s Poetry' by Jelena Đ Marićević Balać and Stefan Pajovic, Serbian Studies: Journal of the North American Society for Serbian Studies, Volume 32, Numbers 1-2 (2021) Selected works:
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