A Tomb for Boris Davidovich

A TOMB FOR BORIS DAVIDOVICH explores the nightmarish lives of six characters--a tailor/butcher, an idealist, a communist party functionary, a murdered doctor, a revolutionary, and a mediocrity--in Stalin's Soviet Union. For each character, Kis creates a completely convincing short story, showing the brutality, arbitrary power, and weird logic of Stalin's police state, where a wasted life is nothing. Meanwhile, the seventh story in TOMB is the testimony of a Jewish scholar at an Inquisitional court in the 1300s. In the story's end note, Kis claims he found this testimony, another exploration of arbitrary brutality and twisted logic, in the Vatican Library. Kis's achievement in TOMB is not easy to convey. There's some cynical humor in the book, especially as Kis tells the story of a cuckolding communist functionary who impersonates a priest. And, the story of a mediocre poet, who survived in Stalin's Russia while achieving a pathetic notoriety, actually ends with a LOL pun. But mostly, these stories are hair-raising demonstrations of brutality and capricious disaster and are completely persuasive. For this, I'm strangely grateful, since I'm a comfortable liberal American WASP (who grew up in the Midwest, no less). So, for me, the blasé systemic viciousness that's so real in these stories is--thank goodness--beyond my experience and even imagining. The content of TOMB is truly revelatory. This book's title story, A TOMB FOR BORIS DAVIDOVICH, shows why the world still needs fiction. While Stalin's Soviet Union is hardly my subject, I have wondered about the show trials and their confessions. My question: Is torture the only reason innocent people cooperate in their executions? Well, in this story, Kis explores the intricate game that the interrogator and prisoner play, showing how ego and principle intertwine to create a bizarre yet logical pseudo legal process that offers oddly meaningful incentives to the condemned. It's fabulous work that animates otherwise incomprehensible history. As an exploration and indictment of life in a totalitarian political system, I'd put TOMB on the same elite level as Nabokov's BEND SINISTER. It's not as elegant. But it's more brutal and just as powerful. Highly recommended.

This book of Kis' is a masterful work. The author said they are short stories but the publisher pushed it as a novel and in a way it is something between the two. The stories are seperate and there is not one main plot but a common theme runs through the work and occasionally characters from one story will reoccur or turn up in another story. They are connected though it seems in the sort of way as when someone might say it is a small world that we live in.In his native land this book caused an uproar as the stories pass themselves off as fact but in Kis' style fact and fiction, history and imagination blend for a common aesthetic goal. This he picked up from Borges and his use of "document" in fiction.All this helps the book stand out as a superior work of literature without even getting to the political theme of revolution and the role of individuals in mass movements.This edition is perfect with the intro by Brodsky and William T. Vollmann's afterword.A must read for anyone.

Beautifully written, surprisingly nonchalant portrayal of the actual driving force behind the Russian Communist Revolution, namely an international gang of charismatic professional criminals. Makes you think twice before you empathise with all the victims of Stalin's camps indiscriminantly - some of them obviously deserved their terrible fate.

Just the chapters should grab your attention: The mechanical Lions, Dogs and Books and such. This is about the Communist "True Believers" and Stalin's purges of them. Boris Davidovich is one of those. There is just too much to talk about here, but it is a brilliant work, extremely but not gratuitously violent, and it raises some excellent philosophical questions, particularly with Miksa's killing of the skunk and getting thrown out by Reb Mendel.