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Parable of Nationhood
| Article
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14675 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1988 |
2,729 Words |
| Author
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Vasa D. Mihailovich
Vasa D. Mihailovich is professor of Slavic literatures at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is the
translator of the Serbian epic of Peter Petrovic Njegos, The
Mountain Wreath, and co-editor of the forthcoming anthology
entitled Serbian Poetry from the Beginnings to the Present. |
Milorad Pavić's Dictionary of the Khazars is a gold mine for those who like to speculate while interpreting a work of literature. The author himself invites such speculation when he says: "Each reader will put the book together for himself…and, as with a mirror, he will get out of this dictionary as much as he puts into it…You cannot get more out of the truth than what you put into it." The irony of such an attitude, of course, is revealed by two simple questions: Does the truth await us at the end of the novel? And, more importantly, can the truth be ascertained at all? As we shall see, truth is a very elusive commodity, made even more so by the author's deliberate mystifications.
The very foundation of the novel rests on a false premise—the existence of a Khazar dictionary, allegedly printed in 1691 by Daubmannus, an obscure printer in seventeenth-century Prussia. While there was a man by that name, Pavić hastens to add that it was not that Daubmannus who printed the dictionary but someone else by the same name. As a matter of historical fact, there was no such dictionary at all, and the author's claim that his novel is an attempt to reconstruct the original dictionary serves only as a pretext for writing the novel. Obviously, his intentions lie elsewhere, deftly camouflaged by an intricate net of myths, legends, stories, quasi-historical documents, and a thousand-and-one-nights' revelry. Whimsical? Yes. Frivolous? Certainly not. In order to understand the author's motives, some basic postulates must be pointed out that are either clearly stated or can be easily culled form the text. They will also help us appreciate the philosophical, religious, cultural, and aesthetic underpinnings of the novel, which have caused a sensation in France, Germany, Italy, and other countries.
The most important of these postulates is that there is no distinct line separating reality from fantasy. The two spheres are constantly interchanged and their borderlines deliberately blurred. Characters change their appearance and reappear, easily recognizable as someone else. Princess Ateh, one of the four entries in all three parts of the dictionary, who was present at the alleged polemic involving the conversion of the Khazars, reappears in the seventeenth century when attempts are being made to solve the Khazar question, and again during similar efforts in the twentieth century. Similarly, a character with red eyes, a half-gray mustache, and glass fingernails appears as Kuros in a dream of Avram Brankovich, one of the seekers of the truth about the Khazars, and as Samuel Cohen, a Dubrovnik Jew of the seventeenth century. Yet another chameleon is a double-thumbed dream-sister of Brankovich, who turns first into an
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