Psalm 44

His relation with — or, rather, his position within — history was defined by his traumatic personal experience: as a child he witnessed the Novi Sad massacre in the winter of 1942 (to which frequently returns in his work, Psalm 44 included), when Hungarian fascists slaughtered a large number of Jews and Serbs; his family was persecuted and spent the war displaced in Hungary; his father disappeared in Auschwitz. But his engagement is just as intensely intellectual: the question of how one could (and why one would) write novels after Auschwitz and Kolyma (the Stalinist camp) was a burning one for him throughout his working life. (“Should anyone tell you Kolyma was different from Auschwitz,” he told the Young Writer, “tell him to go to hell.”) He, of course, kept on writing, but the perpetual doubt about the purpose of writing required a continuous reevaluation of the ethical and aesthetical foundations of literature.

Each of his books has a distinctly different structure, but his quest was not for an abstractly perfect literary form. What he kept looking for was any form at all that could match and contain the intensity, fragmentariness, intellectual weight, and troubling connotations of modern history, as well as the sheer pain and sorrow it has generated. If Kiš was a postmodernist, it was out of painful necessity. His inclination to construct difficult narrative structures was not a consequence of his highfalutin whimsy but rather of a deeply held conviction that he needed to (re)discover and (re) deploy narrative techniques (“Study the thought of others, then reject it,” he instructed the Young Writer) that could match the horrific intricacies of the twentieth century and his personal experience in it. Thus his masterpieces Garden, Ashes and Hourglass (both, with Early Sorrows, part of a novelistic family cycle or, per Kiš, “the family circus”) have a perishing father at the absent center, but are constructed markedly differently. Both novels could be described as “experimental” in the lazy cant of critics baffled by any form outside the cramped confines of psychological realism, but Garden, Ashes harkens back to Bruno Schulz and his prophetically mad father, while Hourglass is structured as an interrogation, featuring, in one of the most heartbreaking structural devices in the twentieth-century literature, a letter Kiš’s father sent to the family before he was deported to Auschwitz.

Kiš’s ethical/aesthetical system (there is no dissociation between ethics and aesthetics in his mind) is founded on the axiomatic value of individual sovereignty. That sovereignty is universal — every human being is entitled to it — and is continuously and brutally violated by history. Thus the uniqueness of his father’s experience, including his particular path to ovens of Auschwitz, is exactly related to the uniqueness of the forms Kiš reinvents to restore his father’s invaluable life, destroyed by those who did not believe in the sanctity of individual sovereignty.

Kiš wrote Psalm 44 at the age of twenty-five, in less than a month, in order to submit it to the contest of the Association of Jewish Communities in Yugoslavia. He had come across a newspaper story about a young couple revisiting a camp where their child was born and decided to write about it; he could do it, because he “could accept a somewhat unusual plot as factual.” He was writing at the same time his novel The Attic, which was entirely different in form and spirit. The two short books would be published in the same volume in Belgrade in 1962.

The mastery of Kiš’s structural — and therefore aesthetical — choices at such a young age is most impressive. The young man’s creative confidence is sharply evident in his undertaking a narrative project that

a) takes place in a death camp;

b) focuses on women, one of whom has given birth in the camp;

c) exhibits near-arrogant familiarity with the history of European thought, its ethical decline and collapse included;

d) is mostly set in the few hours before an escape attempt;

e) refuses to avoid the moral and structural challenges inherent in the situation.

Psalm 44 thus augured the arrival of a major talent, even if few could see that Kiš would be among the twentieth century’s essential writers. One shudders to think what masterpieces — in addition to, at least, A Tomb for Boris Davidovich; Garden, Ashes; Hourglass; and The Encyclopedia of the Dead—Kiš would have produced had he not been stricken by cancer at the age of fifty-four. The Nobel Prize committee had already been circling around him and, had he not died, his great works would have been available to a much larger number of readers, influencing young writers all across the globe.