The Khazar Face

Baroque Sources of the Postmodern Novel

Even though the first readers of Milorad Pavić's Dictionary of the Khazars put most emphasis on the peculiarity and freshness of its narrative device, a "lexicon-novel" does not constitute an absolute novelty in relation to his earlier works. On the contrary, the assessments even in the first reviews,¹ which stressed that the Dictionary of the Khazars stands as the final, most representative expression of the poetics that had been consistently formed by Pavić in his previous books, poetic and narrative ones alike are much more accurate. Leaving aside the fantastic narrative device, this continuity is most evident in the style and themes, as well as in the general sensibility and predominant novelistic inspiration of his oeuvre. Just as in Palimpsests, Moon Stone, or The Iron Curtain—to name only some of Pavić's early works of fiction—in the Dictionary of the Khazars, the writer, in his own words, drew inspiration from Serbian Baroque literature: some of the orators and poets of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries such as Gavril Stefanović-Venclović, Arsenije III Čarnojević, and Zaharije Orfelin.²

Besides the Baroque, in his entire oeuvre, Pavić likewise drew inspiration from the history and culture of Byzantium and medieval Serbia. For instance, in one of the two distinctive plot lines in A Little Night Novel, Pavić relates the origins of Mount Athos and the establishment of the Hilandar Monastery. Employing a device which subsequently became the trademark of Serbian postmodern prose, Pavić, in this allegorical story about two kinds of monks, coenobitic and idiorhythmic, transforms his historical material, freely combining it with legendary and mythological sources. This collage effect, composed of documents and traditional oral narratives, is further expanded with an imaginary story about Atanasije Svilar, deliberately blurring the lines between the fictional and the real world. Reading such a text in which facts become phantasms, while phantasms turn into disguised documents, the real meaning of Michel Foucault's words "In order to dream, one should not close one's eyes, one should read" is revealed to the reader.

Pavić draws on scientific sources, on history and tradition, and on books which comprise the library of the whole of literature. In this sense, Borges stands as his most prominent literary paragon. Pavić shapes the world of his stories and novels as a Borgesian synthesis of personal experiences and multifaceted historical, literary, and philosophical experiences. In his prose writings, most notably in the Dictionary of the Khazars, he tends to realize Borges' ideal of a metaphysical book, a book which, by means of meticulous encyclopedic writing, on the one hand, and chimerical fantasy, on the other, creates a comprehensive imaginary world, truer and more real than the world in which we live.

The plot of the Dictionary of the Khazars is also constructed around the mystification and fictionalization of historical sources, but the oneiric impression of the fictional world is even more striking for two reasons. In the first place, the historical and pseudo-historical material from which Pavić draws inspiration in this instance is much greater and more diverse than it was in A Little Night Novel or some of his other early stories containing a historical background (for example, "An Atlas of Winds," "The Descent into Limbo," or The Iron Curtain). The material for the Dictionary of the Khazars is informed not only by medieval, Christian, Arab, and Hebrew sources on the Khazars, but also looks to some later testimonies on the subject. In the novel itself, the author refers to some twentieth-century Khazar histories which he also made use of in his writing. In a later work, however, Pavić says that wherever possible, he refrained from relying on information on the Khazars "as elaborated by the twentieth century," and that he endeavored to envisage his subject matter primarily through the prism of Baroque works on the Khazars, even though he does not explicitly cite them.³

In the second place, Pavić introduces in the Dictionary of the Khazars one significant formal innovation by virtue of which—it might be claimed—this novel has gained such a...