Danilo Kiš used the phrase a "perfect biography" for the first and only time in his story "A Tomb for Boris Davidovich." Boris Davidovich Novsky, the protagonist of this famous story, ended his life by jumping into the cauldron of boiling tar. The scenography of Novsky’s suicide recalls the aesthetics of his early revolutionary actions as something that simultaneously makes him a transgressor of the revolution and its saint. Novsky-the-terrorist was known for surprising and elegant terrorist acts, shocking by their speed, unpredictability, and large number of victims. Tar, which ultimately hides Novsky from the revolution, is traditionally used to publicly mark the traitors of community who had violated its taboos. The flame, boiling, explosion and fire, are the most common symbols by which revolution itself is represented. In the metonymic reading Novsky would be the Revolution itself, but a revolution that is narcissistic, suicidal and melancholic.

The lecture interrogates revolutionary melancholy in the oeuvre of Danilo Kiš as gender melancholy that is always the melancholy of revolutionary masculinity itself. In the work of Danilo Kiš the iconography of the revolutionary initiation - without which Revolution is ineffective - is represented as paternalistic one, based in the cult of heroic sacrifices. Thus, the figure of the revolutionary in Kiš’s work is always a male figure: the role of the revolutionary in the sphere of public discourse is inherited along the male lineage, from the father (of Revolution) to the son (of Revolution). The same patriarchal initiation iconography is also used in Kiš’s poethics lectures on the art of writing through which the figure of the writer is (re)constituted as a heroic and revolutionary male figure. In Kiš’s literary work, the figure of the writer is palimpsestic and it is melancholically inscribed in the figure of a revolutionary (and vice versa). Boris Davidovich Novsky is a revolutionary and a conformist, a humanist and a terrorist, a murderer and a writer, a bon vivant and a ghost at the same time. His biographies constantly multiply undermining the establishing of "the true one" and include the process of inscription of one figure into the other as paradigmatic poetic characteristic of Kiš’s work. Therefore the lecture will also ask questions about the role these inscriptions have had in the constitution of the figure of the writer in Serbian and Yugoslav cultures since the 1980s of the 20th century until today.

The lecture will be focused on gender(ed) revolutionary melancholy embodied in the ambivalent project of a “perfect biography.” Novsky’s death is spectacular precisely because it has been carefully planned with the one and only purpose: to create an image of a perfect revolutionary. The narratives of paternity, one of the most important Biblical narratives, is in the basis of the “perfect biography” project dominated by the totalitarian cult of the revolutionary leader as an iconic ideological father-figure. But the project of a “perfect biography” turns out to be an impossible one. Novsky’s suicidal signature is conceived to be a heroic phase of the Revolution but it paradoxically subverts the revolutionary heroic tradition, transforming the Great Father/Leader of the Revolution into its Great Other.

This discussion will also investigate the specific status of the writer figure and his artistic-aesthetic biography in the context of imperatives and transformations of the project of a “perfect biography” in Kiš’s work. The project of a “perfect biography” will be discussed as a project shaped through an ambivalent struggle for a revolutionary/artistic initiation and revolutionary maturity, for the forgotten past as well as for the lost future of revolution/art, in which sons and fathers play their tragic, mutually interchangeable historical and ideological roles. The project of a perfect biography reveals complex political processes of the (re)production and interpellation of revolutionary and artistic figures/names in which Revolution transmutates into a killing machine with its history crowded by scenes of filicide and patricide.

Tatjana Rosić Ilić is associate professor at the Faculty of Media and Communications of Singidunum University and a research fellow at the Institute for Literature and Art, both in Belgrade, Serbia. She is also a visiting professor at University of Kragujevac's Philological-Art School and a member of the editorial boards of Sarajevo Notebooks and Belgrade Journal of Media and Communications. Professor Rosić Ilić completed her PhD in Yugoslav and Serbian literature at Belgrade University in 2006. Her current research focuses on women, gender, and masculinity critical studies in the context of transitional post-Yugoslav and Balkan culture(s). She will visit U-M for three months in Fall 2016 to complete research on a project entitled, “Paradox of (Auto)censorship and Narratives on Post-Yugoslav Future: Female Authorship in the Culture of Fear,” in cooperation with her host advisor, Tatjana Aleksić, associate professor of Comparative and Slavic Literature.

Cosponsored by the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, the Jean & Samuel Frankel Center for Judaic Studies, and the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies.