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Danilo Kis. Lauta i oziljci. Mirjana Miocinovic, ed. Belgrade. BIGZ. 1994. 112 pages.
Danilo Kis, the author of The Encyclopedia of the Dead (1989; see WLT 65:1, p. 150) and Hourglass (1990; see WLT 65:1, p. 150), died in 1989. Since then his poetry, essays, and verse translations into Serbo-Croatian have been published posthumously. Lauta i oziljci (The Lute and the Scars) adds to that list. This thin volume, edited by Mirjana Miocinovic, one of Kis's literary executors, contains five short stories and two brief prose fragments, entitled A" and "B," all written in the 1980s. The first four stories were intended for The Encyclopedia of the Dead but for reasons unknown were left unpublished. The editor suggests that two of the four were excluded because of their autobiographical character.
The blurring of fact and fiction, an essential element in Kis's poetics in general, is fully represented in Lauta i oziljci. To give authenticity to his stories, Kis introduces documented figures as characters. Throughout the collection he continues to treat one of his obsessive themes, the relationship between Eros and death. As in the Encyclopedia, death figures prominently here: the heroes die-accidentally, from natural causes, or by their own hands. Kis saw death as the only inescapable human reality.
These stories are also about writers, authors without a country, who feel allegiance only to their native tongue and their spiritual background. Such is the first story...