The more erudite a writer is (and as evidenced by the text he creates), the more difficult it is to find the right key that would open the door to understanding his work. The door is solid and elegant, it can be seen that it was made by an experienced craftsman who learned to use the knowledge of other craftsmen. It would not be polite to peep through the keyhole; hacking won’t do either – the door is too beautiful to risk damage. However, I would really like to see what is hidden behind them. Sometimes, when you finally manage to unlock a door, there is another door behind it and you have to start all over again. Danilo Kiš is certainly one of such writers – masters of mysteries and textual labyrinths – and for the first time one of his works has been published in Latvian.
Kish was born in 1935 in the northern city of Subotica in Yugoslavia (now Serbia), which is located only a few kilometers from the border with Hungary. Multiethnic environment (already grown up Kish often spoke critically about nationalism), Serbian mother and Jewish father, anti-Semitism of the 1930s (in 1939, little Kish was baptized in the Orthodox faith, which probably saved the boy from death during the Nazi occupation), father mental problems (Kish is said to have been present when his father asked his mother for a sharp object during a family visit to the psychiatric hospital to kill himself), the Second World War, his father’s arrival in the Auschwitz death camp – Kish’s childhood is full of scary, complicated and traumatic events.
The interaction between the author’s biography and the works he created is complex: someone will say that “the author is dead” and the events of his life have no essential meaning in relation to literature; another will say that what is written is always closely related to the author’s life experience. In the case of Kish, childhood impressions are really not unimportant – this is confirmed by the motifs of his works: focusing on major historical events and processes (Stalinism, Nazism), describing the anxious and mysterious nature of man, solving existential questions, when the hero of a literary work takes fragile steps on the blade of a knife, as a human being Representation of a being seeking (and often not finding) God.
