Abstract

Following a vituperative campaign from the Yugoslav political and literary establishment, Danilo Kis, one of this century's best Serbian writers, left his country and moved to France, until his death in Paris in October 1989. Kis' A Tomb for Boris Davidovich (1976) was accused by Yugoslav critics of plagiarism, an absurd accusation that hid, as Dragan Klaic noted, an attempt to “dismiss [Kis] for his lack of national consciousness.”² The child of a Hungarian Jewish father who perished in Auschwitz and a Montenegrin mother, the first graduate of Belgrade's Comparative Literature department, a sophisticated translator of Hungarian, Russian, and…