On being plagiarized

Three Yugoslav tales of literary theft

Plagiarius is the Latin term for someone who abducts someone else’s children or slaves. The word is from plaga, meaning net or snare: apparently one used a net when in pursuit of human prey, as in a battue. Literary historians credit the first-century Roman poet Martial with the first use of the term plagium — making the leap from theft of a human to literary theft. It was not a legal leap: Roman law did not have a term, nor a punishment, for the theft of a verse. Martial had minted a metaphor, and a hyperbolic one, for surely the Romans too would rather have their verses than their children stolen (leaving aside the abduction of slaves, which the modern imagination is less likely to put in the same category).

In all European languages today, « plagiarism » means, well, plagiarism. It does not mean kidnapping, much less slavenapping. This includes the linguistic realm of Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian (one language with four centers). If a child is abducted, one speaks of otmica, or more popularly, of kidnapiranje or kidnapovanje. But if, as in my case, your intellectual or literary property has been stolen, it is called plainly for what it is: plagijat. The term endured; the metaphor was forgotten.

Back in 2022 I gathered an anthology of essays and autobiographical prose by the Yugoslav writer Danilo Kiš. Kiš was born in 1935 in Subotica (in what was then the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, now Serbia) and died in 1989 in Paris (in what is still France). The Kingdom of Yugoslavia gave way, in 1945, to the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which would dissolve two years after Kiš’s death, and so Kiš was dubbed the « last Yugoslav writer », most likely by his friend, the Hungarian writer István Eörsi. His demise, as Susan Sontag wrote in her preface to a posthumous collection of his essays and interviews, « cut short one of the most important journeys in literature made by any writer during the second half of the twentieth century. »¹ My anthology was to be published by the Dutch Arbeiderspers, in a longstanding and prestigious series called Privédomein (private domain). That series represents a small and enviable canon of European diaries and other forms of autobiographical prose. Although, « European »? The French were there, the Germans, the Italians and Spanish, the Scandinavians, obviously the Anglo-Saxons (in abundance), and inevitably the Russians. But where, I had wondered, were the Czechs, the Poles, the Hungarians, let alone the poor tribe that had balkanized into Bosnians, Croats, Montenegrins, Serbs, Kosovars? I flattered myself that Kiš himself would have enjoyed the historical justice seeing his work published in a canon that hitherto had overlooked the literatures of Central and Eastern Europe.

Anthologies are labors of love; this one had unusual sorrows. The translator, Reina Dokter, had been ill for a long time, and passed away before even half the selections were translated. With her, we lost a world of expertise. It was Reina who had translated Kiš’s masterpiece into Dutch, the Holocaust novel Peščanik (Hourglass, from 1972), back in the early 1990s. As I had myself resolved never to translate books again (we will come to that sordid affair later), I teamed up with a young and talented translator, Pavle Trkulja, and thought myself a mentor in the honorable craft of literary translation. The anthology’s selections reflected Kiš’s family history, which he obsessively thematized — especially the 1942 pogrom in the Serbian city of Novi Sad, then under Hungarian occupation, which his father barely survived (only to be killed in Auschwitz in 1944). And there were his lively polemics with both the left and the right. He attacked fellow Yugoslav writers who in his view had sold out to the communist regime or who danced to the nationalist marches that were growing louder and louder in the mid-1970s. He also took aim at European leftist writers, mostly French, like Sartre and Beauvoir, and Louis Aragon, who, imagining some utopian future and greater good, defended Stalin’s and Mao’s crimes.

We decided to call the book Homo Poeticus, after a 1980 essay by the master, published originally in Le Nouvel Observateur as « Pour l’homo poeticus, malgré tout » (I do not know whether he wrote this in French or in his own language first), in which, among other things, he refused the label of « Eastern European », and the label of « political » writer, or writer of identity (in his case Jewish identity). Why was it, he asked, that writers elsewhere in Europe could claim universal themes while the Yugoslavs, and the Eastern Europeans at large, were reduced to political themes? And so he proclaimed himself a « poetična životinja », « homo poeticus, that suffers as much from love as from mortality, as much from metaphysics as from politics ».

I have been writing, academically, on Kiš for years. While corroborating some biographical facts for the anthology’s postscript and notes, I came to discover that the closest thing to an English-language biography of Kiš (Mark Thompson’s Birth Certificate, published by Cornell University Press in 2013) had made extensive use of one of my articles without citing it. Was this plagiarism? I checked, double-checked (with fellow Slavic scholars, with an expert from my university) and they all concluded: yes, this is improper use of your work, this is unauthorized appropriation, this is plagiarism.

My article was about « Pannonia », the realm in which Kiš situated, and thereby coded, his own family history in various novels. I had reconstructed the path of this obscure toponym — once the name of a Roman province covering the Danube plain, it was revived by Miroslav Krleža (1893-1981), a giant of Croatian and Yugoslav letters, who, like Kiš, had carefully navigated between leftist and rightist politics (and several of whose books I had translated). Krleža claimed « Pannonia » in his interwar writings — an imaginary home that was nevertheless « distinguished », I wrote, « by its emphasis on alienation and homelessness. »³ I reconstructed the powerful set of metaphors that Pannonia channeled: it was the eternal swamp, a backwater, where progress was doomed to stall, local rebellions were doomed to fail, foreign armies (Habsburg, Ottoman, Russian) doomed to sink in the mud, all while the common man battled perpetually, not even for dignity but for bare survival. This was where Kiš embedded his father’s Holocaust fate, as if to say: neither the communists, nor the nationalists will claim this story, as it is universal history. And more: to adopt Pannonia was, paradoxically, to claim a region where a self-styled cosmopolitan writer was by definition out of place. This, I suggested, was Kiš’s intellectual preparation to join a group of Czech, Polish and Hungarian writers and poets (like Milan Kundera, Czesław Miłosz, Péter Esterházy) who presented themselves in the 1980s, the last phase of the Cold War, as Central Europeans, refusing to collaborate with their « home » communist regimes while also rejecting the constraints of their respective national traditions.

That article brought me into the literary-historical nitty-gritty of Krleža, of Hungarian literature, of threads stretching back to the fifteenth-century humanist poet Janus Pannonius. These were references that, as one of my colleagues assured me, Thompson « wouldn’t have been able to cough up. » This is what I also wrote to Thompson. He answered, apparently deeply shaken, and he admitted that he had used my article and yes, alas, had neglected to cite it. But he did not give in on my most important claim: that the overall argument was mine, and the significance of that argument. I was infuriated, I knew I had been wronged. I have to admit: I even wanted to hurt Thompson in return, somehow. Plagiarism! The plagiarized article was even, kind of, about plagiarism — between the lines, but still — in the sense that Janus Pannonius, in the fifteenth century, also condemned plagiarism. He addressed his own plagiarists (and there seem to have been many) via a riff on Vergil’s borrowings from Homer:

Against the plagiarist from Vergil

When you steal from Vergil,
You claim it’s not from him you steal but
from mighty Homer.
But when you steal what he had already stolen,
I suggest that you steal from Vergil himself.
But since you’re stealing from both poets,
And making a mess of it, you oaf,
What you really deserve is — death by torture⁴

Like a modern-day Janus Pannonius — or a modern-day Martial! — I wanted to unleash epigrammatic fury: Against the thief Mark, In furem Marcum.

Torture, of course, did not occur, Thompson’s limbs were spared. We were both citizens of the Republic of Letters, after all, genteel literati. What followed was a restrained, bottled-up exchange of e-mails. He promised to add a reference to my work in the then-forthcoming French translation of his book (which he eventually also did, and he sent me a copy too), but he maintained that the overall argument had been his own. And so the reader of Thompson’s biography, even of the French edition, will believe that the overall argument about Kiš’s origins is Mark’s rather than my brainchild, snatched from the cradle.

One irony in this (admittedly confusing) affair is the fact that Danilo Kiš was himself accused of plagiarism. In 1975, a few months after the publication of A Tomb for Boris Davidovič (Kiš’s masterpiece of documented fiction, or fictionalized documentary, dealing with the crimes of Stalin’s Gulag), a relatively unknown journalist, in an article entitled « A necklace of someone else’s pearls », accused Kiš of copying plots and descriptions from historical sources, and of mimicking the style of writers such as Jorge Luis Borges and Isaac Babel. The accusation was absurd because copying was the
point: Kiš had done so consciously. He had built on Babel (and on Bruno Schulz, a source that the accuser overlooked) to restore the destroyed world of East-Central European Jewry. He had likewise emulated Borges’s blurring of fiction and history. A Universal History of Infamy had fictionalized real bandits and gauchos; for Kiš, though, the great infamy of the twentieth century was totalitarianism.

When it came to the Gulag, reality beat fiction, and so Kiš had used (and conspicuously reworked) real historical sources. This documentary layer, he explained, established historical credibility but did not create depth — the depth, that is, that only fiction and its privileges could throw the reader into. And so A Tomb for Boris Davidovič established a new type of historical fiction, a disturbing realm of perennial doubt, doubt that would undermine both totalitarian dogma and a simplistic, linear understanding of history.

All this was way beyond the understanding of the obscure journalist who initiated the absurd attack, which Kiš rightly suspected had been orchestrated by major players with political motives. The farce was a convoluted mixture of the convulsions of a grim system on the way out (communism) and the contractions of a hysterical ideology about to be reborn (Serbian nationalism). The accusation had come out of the shadows of the state-controlled press — a well-known technique to discredit public figures. Tito’s Yugoslavia was not a totalitarian state like the Soviet Union, where dissident writers, even when no longer sent to the Gulag, still ended up in psychiatric hospitals. Nor was it like Czechoslovakia — where, remember, Václav Havel was imprisoned in those years. But neither was there full freedom of speech, and so the dynamics of censorship were often murky. This particular allegation of plagiarism had an additional vicious implication, related to Kiš’ Jewishness, and this is where Kiš — born to a Christian-Orthodox Montenegrin mother and a Hungarian-Jewish father — detected the ghost of Serbian nationalism. How, as he heard through the Belgrade grapevine, had a Jewish writer dared « endanger the authenticity of national cultures »? Had he not better write such stuff in Yiddish?

The case that eventually came to court, in 1978, was not about plagiarism (that accusation’s proof had been predictably flimsy), but about slander. Kiš had retaliated so ferociously — in a collection of essays and polemics entitled Čas Anatomije (The Anatomy Lesson) — that his accusers felt defamed. The book, as bitter as it is brilliant, lashed back at literary critics close to the Yugoslav Communist party, but even more pointedly at Serbian nationalist writers. It anatomized, in fact, the paranoia of nationalism itself.

Nationalism, he wrote, lives by its own fantasy of purity, authenticity, and untranslatability. Literature, in that fantasy, is a tool — an essential tool — of that national self’s expression, and it results in what Kiš dismissively called « peasant prose ». What awakened the paranoia of nationalism was a writer’s nonconformity — as did recognition beyond the nation, in the wider Europe or the wider world where Serbian was, after all, not the sacred Serbian tongue but just another language. The book dealt a final blow when Kiš recalled how, as a child under Hungarian fascist occupation, he had heard the same slogans and the same type of chauvinistic songs (albeit in the Hungarian tongue) that now expressed the one true Serb essence, the inalienable soul of the Serbian nation — and he’d felt the same anti-Semitic vibrations. Serbian nationalism, that is to say, was plagiarizing Hungarian nationalism. All nationalisms plagiarize. Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

The Kiš affair was, in a way, a literary-world preamble to the wars of the 1990s. Nationalism is terrified of the kind of writing that has no need for the supposed originality upon which the national culture rests. It therefore abhors — and condemns as literary kidnappers — those writers who openly pay heed to predecessors from other (« foreign ») languages, who write only with ink and not with their national blood, sweat and tears. Kiš detected in the accusation of plagiarism an expression of the psychology of nationalism: it was the fear, projected and inverted, of one’s own « national » lack of intrinsic value. The same psychology would turn nations into killing machines.

Kiš was cleared of all charges, but the episode, as the critic Vasa Mihajlovich speculated in 1994, « contributed to Kiš’s early death from cancer in 1989 »⁵(as, by the way, did his daily consumption of two packs of unfiltered cigarettes). Neither, though, did his opponents ever fully recover from the blows they received in Čas Anatomije. If they retained their prestige, it was only within chauvinistic circles, where they would, in the second half of the 1980s, fully shed their communist feathers and emerge as the bloody bards of Serbian nationalism.

In 2010, I translated the 2007 novel Sonnenschein, by the Croatian novelist Daša Drndić, into Dutch. I had no idea that this would be my last book translation. Sonnenschein promised to be a success. My instinct told me that here was a writer who brought something new to the European Republic of Letters. As an avid reader of the literary pages of dailies and weeklies from all over the linguistic realm formerly known as Serbo-Croatian, I had come across glowing reviews of Sonnenschein. A stylistically virtuosic historical novel, set in the city known as Gorizia in Italian, Görz in German, Gorica in Slovenian, it tells the story of Haya Tedeschi, a young Italian-Jewish woman from a secular, assimilated family who under the Nazi-occupation of the Adriatisches Küstenland has a brief affair with an SS-officer (the real historical figure Kurt Franz, a commander of the Treblinka concentration camp), leaving her pregnant. As an infant, her son, Toni, is taken away from her — the kid is napped — and ends up in the Lebensborn program and comes of age under a different identity, his true origins unknown to himself.

If you work in the Dutch language, here is how the translation market works. Usually, fiction from Central and Eastern European countries first needs a translation into one of the major Western European languages, German or French, and more rarely English, which then helps to convince publishers in « smaller » Western- and Northern-European languages (like Dutch). Sonnenschein was different: my Dutch translation would appear in the same year as the Slovenian, Polish, Hungarian and Slovak translations, well before the French, English and German editions. How had this happened? Or rather, how had I pulled this off?

In those years, my work as a literary translator from Bosnian / Croatian / Serbian into Dutch entailed getting publishers interested in titles, much in line with the neoliberal spirit of the age and the perceived role of literary authors and translators as entrepreneurs. And I was entrepreneurial. Moreover, Sonnenschein’s subject matter made it eligible for translation. Readers all over Europe would be interested, I was sure, in a highbrow novel about the Holocaust and its aftermath, in the Italian-Slovenian/Croatian borderland, in a city that would be divided during the ensuing Cold War: a « little Berlin ». After all, one of the few gateways leading from the literary sphere of the European east to that of the west is via the kind of fiction where the stakes are high: serious literature, a challenging read, dealing with grave subject matter. Kiš had been a trailblazer in that respect: one of the major writers on the Holocaust coming from the east, now firmly canonized in the west.

A first Dutch publisher declined (« interesting, but we already publish Sebald, and even he is very hard to sell »); a second one accepted, bought the rights, and published my translation. Exchanging e-mails over the intricacies of the translation, the novelist and I soon became friends. « Daša Drndić » became Daša, and I got to know a witty, sharp, erudite writer who had received her portion of hardship: expelled by Serbian nationalists from Belgrade radio as a cultural journalist in the early 1990s, living in Canada during the Yugoslav wars, only to return to the city of Rijeka, in an independent Croatia hostile to critical, independent minds like hers.

Zonneschijn (the publisher had insisted on translating this Croatian novel’s German title into Dutch) was a modest yet reassuring success: positive reviews in the newspapers that mattered and an invitation for the author to be a writer-in-residence by the Dutch Literary Fund. For me it was a small triumph. This mild euphoria lasted until the last weekend of October 2011, when I received a letter from publishing house De Geus that Zonneschijn had been withdrawn from bookstores, and that all hard copies were going to be destroyed due to — what else? — plagiarism.

Here is the story, which I first learned from Daša’s editor, Seid Serdarević, at Fraktura, her Zagreb publisher. There had been a frantic, late-night meeting earlier that month at the Frankfurt Book Fair, with him, Daša, and the Dutch publisher. It turned out that Claude Lanzmann, rive gauche public intellectual, former editor of Les Temps Modernes, one-time lover of Simone de Beauvoir, and most of all the venerated director of Shoah, the nine-and-a-half-hour long documentary on the destruction of European Jews, had taken offence after learning that Daša had quoted fragments from his film in Sonnenschein without citation. As Serdarević explained to me in an e-mail, which I translate here:

This is a long and sad story that has been dragging on since April of this year. While preparing the French and English editions, editors were looking into the sources that Daša has been using, and one of these is Shoah by Lanzmann. They asked him for permission but he responded furiously, wanting to sue all parties involved, and he demanded the book be withdrawn, accusing Daša of plagiarism. His French lawyers told him that there is no use suing us or the other Eastern-European publishers, but he did threaten De Geus and so they have withdrawn the book.

Which explained the letter that I had received from the publisher. The publisher in the « smaller » language of Western Europe was the easier target. And De Geus, to my dismay, had obliged rather pro-actively, not merely withdrawing the book but destroying the remaining copies, I reckon about 1500.

I learned from Daša that she had tried to contact Lanzmann, who initially agreed to meet her during the London Book Fair in April that year, but then declined. So she wrote him a letter, to which he did not respond. That letter never became public, perhaps for the best: all her arguments are valid (and convincing), but she sounds hurt and wounded. She explained her literary approach in Sonnenschein to historical facts and documents; she referred to Kiš to defend that approach, presuming that Lanzmann knew Kiš’s work as a major writer about the Holocaust.

How she really felt about the affair became clear in a series of e-mails to me, in Croatian, which I translate here:

Of course this is not about plagiarism, but about the fact that we did not ask for Lanzmann’s permission to use fragments from Shoah, which are, by the way, these fragments, not his possession but the words of victims and of one perpetrator.

She complained that Lanzmann was acting « prepotentan » — a Croatian word sort of like « arrogant », but that literally means « over-virile » — and that « much could be said about his case […] how old age deforms certain persons, or rather how in old age such deformations are unleashed, as one loses control of one’s sphincter, or bladder. » For bladder, she gave two words, « mjehur » (Croatian) and « bešika », (Serbian). The privilege of being a writer in a polycentric language (Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian), beside the mutual intelligibility, is the vast lexical variation it opens to you. A swollen, over-virile and yet ailing bladderbladder. A virtuoso-vitriolic sentence worthy of Martial.

Meanwhile, Daša rewrote those passages in Sonnenschein that referred to Lanzmann’s Shoah. The British publisher Quercus published the new version of the novel under the title Trieste early in 2012. It gained major critical acclaim. Daša had become a household name in European literature. There was no mention of the changes in the manuscript; readers of the English translation did not know they were reading an edited version. And the Dutch edition? No prospect whatsoever of a new, revised edition. In fact, not a word from the publisher.

More than six years later, in 2018, during the last weeks of her life, I did receive a call from the Dutch publisher. It was a new editor, someone I had not met before. « There is this Croatian writer, Drndić, » she said, who is getting rave reviews in the British press, had I ever heard about her, and did I perhaps know her work? « Yes, I do, » I told the editor, « and so would you, if you would check your own archives. » And when she proceeded to ask if I would be interested in translating Daša’s latest title, I told her: « No, unfortunately I no longer do literary translations. »

I fondly remember seeing Daša appear, with her trademark big dark sunglasses, in a bookstore in Rijeka where I was reading from my work. It was 2017, she was already gravely ill at age 70, and I knew, as she had confided in me over the phone, her voice weakened, that she had not much longer to live. Now, after all those years, setting aside feelings of grief, and, admittedly, hurt and vanity, I am still wondering what was exactly at stake in the « Lanzmann-Drndić affair » (for that is how this nasty case should enter the annals of the European Republic of Letters). Serdarević, her Zagreb editor, had a point when he wrote to me in the same e-mail that in the whole affair, there appeared to be

a lack of understanding of literature and an artistic approach, and of something that I found out talking to the [French] editors of the book, and that is an essentially different tradition of postmodernism in Central Europe as compared to Western Europe.

Serdarević was being polite. Western Europe was patronizing, for it dictated which forms of storytelling were permissible and which not. How curious. Wasn’t the East, having lived through the double trauma of Nazism and communism, supposed to be the part of Europe where important lessons had been learned, lessons the rest of Europe should listen to? And yet the West dictated the proper and admissible modes of storytelling, for instance when it came to the question of how disturbing we allow post-modernist historical fiction to be.

Daša turned to real events and real historical documents in search of a new kind of historical authenticity. Sonnenschein takes historical figures (the Nazi Kurt Franz) and inserts invented figures and events in those lives. To her, Kiš was a forerunner. He had meticulously described his own family history in his fiction but insisted that the autobiographical fact was worthless outside the frame of fiction: the historical data (whether your own or someone else’s), must undergo a književni postupak, a « literary approach ». Kiš borrowed the term from Russian Formalists such as Viktor Shklovsky and Yuri Tynianov, theorists who in the 1920s and 30s had insisted on the uniqueness of literary form — not accidentally against the tide of political repression.

To read a text as literature implies a pact between writer and reader: both need to be on the same page about the specific literary approach. The pact that Daša proposed to her readers — one that could be called her specific understanding of postmodernism (whatever that is) — was a radical one, for it called into question the consensus about how we see postwar Europe (if there was or ever can be such a consensus). To her, subject matter like the Holocaust or the Yugoslav wars could not be captured in traditional narratives, because those straightforward narratives create the illusion that history is simply a thing of the past, a thing that we re-construct. No, she said, we create the past in the here and now. It was an an offense to past and present alike to deny that present creation. How, for instance, can you maintain that genocide in Europe (Auschwitz) is a thing of the past, when it actually happened again in Bosnia in the 1990s?

It is relevant to recall here W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz (2001), another story of kidnapping. The protagonist, Jacques Austerlitz, is put on transport in occupied Prague and grows up in the United Kingdom under the adopted name of his foster parents. Speaking of a literary approach, Carole Angier reconstructs in her biography of Sebald that the character Austerlitz is compiled from four or five people that the author personally knew. What links Drndić’s Sonnenschein and Sebald’s Austerlitz

It is relevant to recall here W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz (2001), another story of kidnapping. The protagonist, Jacques Austerlitz, is put on transport in occupied Prague and grows up in the United Kingdom under the adopted name of his foster parents. Speaking of a literary approach, Carole Angier reconstructs in her biography of Sebald that the character Austerlitz is compiled from four or five people that the author personally knew. What links Drndić’s Sonnenschein and Sebald’s Austerlitz is a powerful animating paradox: the closer these stories approach historical reality (the documents in Sonnenschein, the photographs in both), the more important the insistence on the difference between literature and lived life. The reader (and this is part of the pact) is left with a fundamental doubt about identity. There is further paradox: such doubt produces, perhaps unexpectedly, not a formal anarchy, not an everything goes (the traditional critique of postmodernism) but the sense of a new and profound authenticity. As Susan Sontag put it, this time about Sebald, what she found in his work was « the preternatural authority of [his] voice: its gravity, its sinuosity, its precision, its freedom from all-undermining or undignified self-consciousness or irony. »5⁶

The tragedy of the Lanzmann-Drndić affair is that Lanzmann’s absurd allegations almost succeeded in framing Daša as a plagiarist, a literary thief from one of the Eastern-European banana republics. For let it be clear: it wasn’t plagiarism, it was a daring, audacious and innovative attempt to renew the historical novel. In a public interview in Amsterdam, 2010, Daša explained that what inspired Sonnenschein — her rage against interwar Nazism and fascism, biological racism and nationalism — had stemmed, retrospectively, from her experience of the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. Those wars were no Balkan anomaly but essentially European wars; the postwar silence that followed Lebensborn confirmed to her that the violence triggered by nationalist ideology in the former Yugoslavia was symptomatic of a continent that wanted to believe it had left behind such horrors. But it hadn’t.

And yet Lanzmann had left a slur on Daša’s literary legacy — for that is what an allegation of plagiarism does. This indeterminate status of her work is perhaps the most arresting thing for me. Had Lanzmann acknowledged Sonnenschein as imitatio and aemulatio of his phenomenal documentary film, then he would have also acknowledged, or at least shown willingness to ponder, that the Holocaust is, yes, in one sense a completely unique set of disastrous events, but also that genocide has no copyright — that the origins of the violence that almost annihilated European Jewry, the inspiration if you like, persisted after World War II, as a covert, hidden, suppressed and yet essential trait of Europe. Cynthia Ozick wrote in the 1980s (perhaps inspired by Shoah, whose American premiere she attended) that « ‘never again’ is a pointless slogan: old atrocities are models (they give permission) for new ones. »⁷ Daša had, in effect, echoed Ozick, writing in her letter to Lanzmann that in order to not allow those old atrocities to give permission, she simply had to use Lanzmann’s work. « Fascism is not dead, I believe », she also wrote to him, and received silence.

When I think of the complex and sophisticated way writers like Daša, and Sebald and Kiš, treated biographical material — their own or others — in their own work, I can only be perplexed by traditional biographies of them. It is a fraught venture. As a genre, the biography gives ample cause for unease anyhow. A common trope is that of the biographer as intruder, as a thief. Janet Malcolm, reviewing (favorably) Anne Stevenson’s biography of Sylvia Plath in 1993, wrote that « the biographer at work, indeed, is like the professional burglar, breaking into a house, rifling through certain drawers that he has good reason to think contain the jewelry and money, and triumphantly bearing his loot away. »⁸ How absurd, then, to break into the home of the inventors of a new kind of historical fiction, where it is written all over the walls that biographies are pointless and outdated. For biography (which I think Joseph Brodsky somewhere called « the last bulwark of realism ») is possibly history-writing at its rudest, assuming causal relations between life events and their literary rendering. To write a biography about a writer like Kiš is a violation of the poetics of the very author it claims to revere.

Maybe Thompson’s sin wasn’t plagiarism, but rather the unoriginal original sin of becoming a biographer. He had written a book on Danilo Kiš that would seduce the reader into what Malcolm called « an excitingly forbidden undertaking: tiptoeing down the corridor together, to stand in front of the bedroom door and try to peep through the keyhole ». Stealing from an obscure Dutch scholar should then come as no surprise.

I found out about Thompson’s plagiarism of my work a couple of years after Daša’s death. I am sure that the whole business with Thompson would have greatly amused her, as she had had her own brush with the burglar-biographer. She and Kiš, as she disclosed to me at one point, had been involved in a love affair when she was still very young. I reckon this must have been in her twenties when she was a student in Belgrade, in the late sixties or early seventies; Kiš was eleven years older. I wasn’t the only one she confided in, as I found out. Perhaps it was her way of claiming her rightful position in a literary genealogy, in a world where crucial things like literary kinship, credibility, and yes, authenticity, were traditionally established by male writers and critics along male patterns. Anyhow, inevitably this fact had reached Thompson as well — illicit love affairs, the ultimate loot of a biographer! — and he hastened (I imagine) to visit Daša in her home town Rijeka, Croatia. He shared with her that he knew about the affair, and he was wondering, he told her (as she told me), if she was willing to talk to him about this. I also imagine there was a silence (a deliberate one, in which I imagine her luxuriating) before she told him she felt no need to elaborate on this, but that there were letters… Greed flamed in Thompson’s eyes (my projection). Again, a protracted silence. For obvious reasons, she concluded, she could not give him the letters. When he insisted, she kindly offered to paraphrase them for him.

Did Thompson consider re-imagining those letters, faking them? Daša pondered this herself. A couple of days later, the weirdest thing happened. While sitting in her kitchen (« you should see the sorry state of my apartment »), she saw, through a hole in the wall, a small hand entering. She yelled, the hand speedily disappeared, and a moment later she could hear footsteps running away. She realized that she wouldn’t be surprised had Thompson paid a few kids to actually try to break into her home. « One can only imagine how far some biographers are willing to go », she said when we saw each other for the last time, over coffee on a terrace in the center of Rijeka. Her body ravaged by illness, her gargantuan laughter visibly hurt.

1. Danilo Kiš, Homo Poeticus: Essays and Interviews, ed. Susan Sontag (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1995). ↩︎
2. Danilo Kiš, Homo Poeticus: Essays and Interviews, ed. Susan Sontag (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1995). ↩︎
3. Guido Snel, « The Return of Pannonia as Imaginary Topos and Space of Homelessness, » in History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centuries, vol. II, edited by Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer (John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2006). ↩︎
4. Janus Pannonius, Epigrammata / The Epigrams, edited and translated by Anthony A. Barrett (Corvina Kiadó, 1985). ↩︎
5. « Faction or fiction in A Tomb for Boris Davidovich: the literary affair », The Review of Contemporary Fiction (Spring 1994). ↩︎
6. Sontag, « A mind in mourning », Times LiterarySupplement (25 February 2000).7  ↩︎
7. « It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature », Letters of Intent: Selected Essays (Atlantic Books, 2017). ↩︎
8. Janet Malcolm, « The Silent Woman », The New Yorker, 16 August 1993. ↩︎