A Tomb for Boris Davidovich

The title story follows Boris Davidovich Novsky, an old Bolshevik arrested in the purges, and centers on his interrogator Fedukin, who extracts a false confession not primarily through torture but through argument: Fedukin convinces Novsky that a properly written, self-incriminating confession is the last meaningful revolutionary act still available to him, service to the Party disguised as destruction of the self. Kiš's real subject across all seven stories is that specific machinery, ideology persuading its victims to author their own erasure, which he treats as more chilling than naked violence alone.

Each story is dressed as a scholarly dossier, dates, invented bibliographies, footnoted sources, borrowing Borges's device of the fictional citation but redirecting it at documented twentieth-century state murder instead of metaphysical puzzles. 'The Knife with the Rosewood Handle' follows Miksha, a handyman pursued across three decades and multiple borders by an assassin whose motive is never fully explained, and 'The Magic Card Dealing' turns a camp card game into a lottery for who gets sent to near-certain death, the same bureaucratic randomness dressed up, this time, as chance rather than as verdict.

Borges's fictional scholarship, invented authors, invented encyclopedias, generates metaphysical vertigo about the nature of authorship and reality. Kiš borrows the same apparatus, footnotes, source lists, the tone of an academic afterword, but points it at the actual archive of Stalinist terror, so that the vertigo his reader feels is not about whether the world is real but about how completely a totalitarian state can rewrite a real person's documented life into whatever confession serves it.

After publication in 1976, a circle of Belgrade critics accused Kiš of lifting material, an encyclopedia entry, passages resembling Karlo Štajner's Gulag memoir Seven Thousand Days in Siberia, without sufficient transformation, treating his documentary-collage method as theft rather than technique. Kiš answered at book length with The Anatomy Lesson (Čas anatomije, 1978), defending montage and appropriated source material as legitimate tools of documentary fiction, but the controversy cost him standing in Belgrade's literary establishment and fed his decision to settle permanently in Paris.