Between History and Biography: Postrevolutionary Russia in the Documentary Grip of Danilo Kiš, Yury Trifonov and Lado Kralj

Abstract

The paper focuses on the different narrative techniques used to approach historical subject matter (the Russia of the 1920s and 1930s) in the collection of stories A Tomb for Boris Davidovich by Danilo Kiš (1978), the novel The Old Man, written just a year later by Yury Trifonov, and the novel When Making an Omelette, written in 2014 by Lado Kralj. Its starting point is Danilo Kiš, who – in all of his works – thematises the seamless merging of fiction and truth. Emphasising the elusive relation between them, he makes abundant use of (pseudo)documentary sources which intertwine real and fictional characters, names, events and testimonies, thus ultimately blurring the line between these two spheres if there ever had been one. On the basis of his autopoetics as laid down in The Anatomy Lesson, his answer to the polemics following the publication of the Tomb, the paper proceeds to the other two novels, which also “support” their fiction with documentary sources but share, in contrast to Kiš, a more traceable biographical element, since both represent a kind of roman à clef. The differences in their approach (Trifonov bases his narration on fragments of memory which inevitably reveal their Rashomonic aspects, Kralj undermines the narrative course of the Bildungsroman by supernatural and fantastic elements) arouse questions about the so called “objective reality”: can we ever detect how things “really were”? Or do they exist as such – again, just as in Kiš – only in the literary work, so that the historical truth (or should we say: historical justice?) can only be achieved through literary mystification?