His father, Eduard Kiš, had though luck survived the Novi Sad massacre, which killed hundreds of Jews in 1942. The son later describes the massacre as the "start of his conscious life" (Thompson, 2013, 82). The family subsequently managed to relocate to southwest Hungary, but Kiš's father was deported to Auschwitz in 1944 from which he never returned. After the end of the Second World War, Kiš's mother Milica Kiš moved with her two children to the Montenegrin town of Cetinje where Danilo Kiš graduated from high school in 1954. Due to his family heritage, Kiš said of himself that he is an "ethnographic rarity". His background influenced his worldview, which is reflected greatly in his literature.
Kiš spent a major part of his life between Yugoslavia and France. During one such stay in France, Kiš wrote his most important novel, Grobnica za Borisa Davidoviča [A tomb for Boris Davidovich], which brought the writer many problems. The scandal that followed disrupted the Yugoslav literary scene, and essentially marked the fate of Kiš and his creative endeavours. The novel was released in 1976, and the author was immediately accused of plagiarism. Kiš stated, "Let us not be fooled! The controversy around the novel “A Tomb for Boris Davidovich” was primarily political. Who has been behind all this, we can see right now, although I have been aware where it comes from, from the very beginning." (Kiš, 2012, 270).
Kiš found himself in the unpleasant situation of having to defend his artistic and moral integrity, which he did by publishing the polemical book Čas anatomije [The Anatomy Lesson] in 1978. In the book, he responded to attacks over the previous two years. However, it only provoked new controversy: the book’s publication brought him to court, where he stood trial for defamation (more in featured item).
"[...] what is important for me is that I have not sought to persuade, to argue or to convey an ideological message, despite the polemical spark that inspired the creation of this book. Otherwise I would write essays or articles in newspapers. For me it was essential to find, in my domain, fiction, fictional place, my obsessions and hidden polemics with the totalitarian world and thought. I thought, moreover, that it is my moral duty, because in some of my books I wrote of the Nazi terror, to approach, in literary form, the second most important phenomena of our century which represent the Soviet concentration camps." (Kiš, 2012, 207).Kiš was acquitted, but nevertheless, feeling disappointed and misunderstood, he left for voluntary exile to Paris, as a kind of displaced person "in the “ambiguous” sense of the word" (Kiš, Gorki talog iskustva, 161). Kiš left Yugoslavia for the last time in 1979 and from then onwards lived in France, where he taught Serbo-Croatian and worked as an editor for the rest of his life. During that time, he wrote the novels Noć i magla [Night and Fog], Homo poeticus, and Enciklopedija mrtvih [The Encyclopedia of the Death]. In 1986, the French government made him a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters (1986). In 1988, he was elected as a corresponding member of SANU.
In 1989, nearing the end of his life, Kiš took part in an important television documentary series Goli život [Bare Life]. This consisted of a series of interviews with Eva Nahir and Ženi Lebl, two female Jewish political prisoners who were interned at the Yugoslav "Goli Otok" labour camp. Kiš used the series to raise questions on the camp and made comparisons on different totalitarian systems. In this way, he completes his way of dealing with the topic of the camp, which represents an important field of investigation in his writing. According to Kiš, the camp is a distinct twentieth-century invention. Kiš interpreted and analysed this phenomenon internationally. Towards the end of his life, PEN America (the US branch of the international literary human rights organisation) awarded him the Bruno Schulz Prize in 1989. Danilo Kiš died in Paris in 1989 and was buried in Belgrade at his request.
Kiš's books have been translated into about thirty languages. In the mid-1980s, he was considered for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Milan Kundera acclaimed Kiš as "great and invisible", and Mark Thompson described Danilo Kiš as "the writer who turned the Stalinist terror, the struggle against Nazism, and the Holocaust into great poetry […]" (M. Thompson 2013, xi).
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Vieta:
- Belgrade, Serbia
Gábor Klaniczay (1950-) is a medievalist historian and professor at the Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) and Central European University (CEU). In the 1970s and 1980s, he participated in the movements of intellectual opposition groups, and he was an author and distributor of samizdats.
As the son of Tibor Klaniczay, the distinguished literary historian and member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (HAS), he took an interest in the humanities already has a child. For instance, he wrote a homework assignment on a medieval topic as a primary school student. He studied History and English, and he graduated from ELTE in 1974. After that he worked as an editor of the Journal Világosság. Four years later, he was transferred to the Institute of History of HAS as an assistant research fellow. He has worked in education for decades. He taught the sociology of fashion at the University of Applied Arts between 1978-85 and history at ELTE and CEU. He was also the rector of the Budapest Collegium from 1997 to 2002 and in 2008. He completed a Doctor of Science (DSc) degree in 2005.
Gábor Klaniczay was one of the few young men in the late 1960s in Hungary who had an opportunity to remain in Western Europe for a longer period of time. When his father was visiting professor at the Sorbonne, he spent one year in Paris and then some further months in the French capital thanks to scholarships and friendships. During this period, he discovered Western oppositional culture, which framed this generation’s objection to their parents’ values and the world of consumer society.
Influenced by the student movement, Klaniczay joined the Hungarian cultural opposition. First, he was a curious outsider. Later, he became more than a reader of samizdats and a member of the audience at concerts and lectures: he was one of the active participants in that the oppositional world as a writer and distributor of illegal brochures.
The oppositional attitudes were part of a generational phenomenon, according to him. His first relevant experience was the student movements of 1968. Klaniczay interpreted the demonstrations which took place on 15 March in the 1970s and 1980s as resurrecting this spirit in many ways (by shifting ways in which the Hungarian Revolution of 1848/49 was interpreted). He was in Paris in 1968, but he had to travel home in May to take final exams at school, but he saw demonstrations and barricades and he learned the slogan of the French students: “on a raison de se révolter” (“we have enough reason to revolt).
He recognized similar gatherings at the university as well: the rebellious faculty meeting in 1969, reform-KISZ (Hungarian Young Communist League), and the Studium Generale study groups. He and his fellow members of the growing opposition were impressed by reform-Marxist trends, i.e. ideas which criticized the communist system from the left and which were open to social sensitivity. The position in opposition to the state was a given, natural standpoint for him and his friends and colleagues. This attitude included a rejection of the constraints of the state, which made everyday life difficult through its rules and restrictions. Furthermore, the invasion of Czechoslovakia was a crucial experience for him, because he had to join the army at the time. This repressive military action of the communist countries confirmed his political and cultural opposition to the regime.
Klaniczay regards these years as an active, exciting, and stirring period of his life. He had a vibrant social life, and he collected a lot of information about actual issues and opinions through personal connections, meetings, and events with help of samizdats. As a historian, Klaniczay was interested in marginalized, oppositional communities, for example, the groups of people dubbed heretics. In his first book, he wrote about how the oppositional movements of his age shaped his interests as an academic: “I did research on a topic which has helped me understand my conflicts and problems in the 1970s.” (Klaniczay Gábor: A civilizáció peremén: kultúrtörténeti tanulmányok. Budapest, Magvető, 1990)
Numerous elements of the oppositional culture had an influence on Klaniczay: jazz, rock, “psychedelic” beat, punk, trends of New wave in music life; modern art, the avantgarde, neo-Dadaism, happenings in the art sphere, new leftist movements, guerrilla resistance symbolized by the figure of Che Guevara, and movements for civil rights and emancipation in political life in the East and the West. There were “non-official gurus”, crucial relevant groups, cult sites, and clubs with performances in a diversity of genres. Moreover, he and his friends tried to create an alternative lifestyle and establish a commune after having completed university. They saw similar examples around them, for example the commune of the Orfeo art group. (Orfeo was a reference point for Zsuzsa Hetényi, too.)
All of this was combined with an oppositional/underground consciousness and way of life. They lived in an inner world of their own, on the “islands of freedom”. They tried not to deal with the system, but they had to react when the regime took sanctions against them. He was first persecuted at university, when he supported his undergraduate fellow students who organized a protest against the severity of the laws concerning abortion.
In these years, every act had a political meaning: how somebody looked (long hair, old-fashioned folk or Indian clothes from the flea market), interior design (a burlap curtain, mattress on the floor, brick and board design bookshelves), where they drank, how they travelled (as hitchhikers), etc.
It was clear for them that in scientific and cultural life many things were possible, but in political life, there were many prohibitions and taboos. This view is well summarized in the samizdat book by Adam Michnik. According to Michnik, it was impossible to reform the system through official socialist public spaces. Instead, resistance had to create its own institutes, clubs, seminars, and press, and they could thus live their own cultural life and discuss political issues.
By 1976, more and more political movements had emerged. The first samizdats were published and the borders slowly disappeared between culture events and political acts among the alternative groups. One of the oppositional places was the Library of HAS, which was the “unofficial” workplace of the oppositional philosophers János Kis and György Bence. Samizdats changed hands here. Klaniczay played an active role in the distribution in the Historical Institute of HAS and at ELTE. We find Klaniczay’s name among the subscribers of Chater 77, and he participated in the writing of the intellectuals’ collective Diary (Napló) samizdat. His father’s prestige and his boss, György Ránki, who though a party member, also tolerated intellectual freedom, offered him some protection.
In Klaniczay’s interpretation, the concept of oppositional behaviour meant a cultural practice and political discourse organized in the informal social sphere. He and his colleagues were aware that they were under the surveillance of the secret service, so they had to conspire. The consequence of going underground was having to create and participate in a closed “tribal culture” of the oppositional movement.
In the second part of the 1980s, people had more opportunities to act. Klaniczay took part in the demonstrations and meetings of the democratic opposition. He joined the Social Democratic Party to create its cultural policy strategy, but in 1990 he abandoned politics and worked as a historian and professor. He remains active as a historian and scholar today.-
Vieta:
- Budapest, Hungary
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Vieta:
- Budapest, Hungary
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Vieta:
- Budapest, Hungary
Painter and writer Jozo Kljaković was born in Solin near Split on March 10, 1889. He finished secondary school in Split in 1908, after which he studied mathematics and physics in Zagreb. He then went to Prague and Vienna, where he studied architecture at a polytechnic college. He soon devoted himself to painting under the influence of Vlaho Bukovac, and acquired his artistic skill first in Geneva under Ferdinand Hodler, and then in Vienna at various art museums. In 1911, he went to Rome to attend the Institute of Fine Arts, and later began to study Florentine art in early 1912. In the Académie Ranson in Paris in the 1920s, he finally concluded his education with Maurice Denis and Marcel Lenoira, refining his skill in fresco-painting.
Politically, in the First World War, he advocated the creation of the Yugoslav state and fled to Serbia in 1912, avoiding mandatory military service in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. After briefly living in Serbia until 1915 as an art instructor, he went to Paris and Geneva, where he remained until the end of the First World War, and then moved to Zagreb for an extended period. In Zagreb, he was granted a post as a professor of wall and decorative painting at the Zagreb Academy of Fine Arts, where he worked from 1921 until his emigration in 1943. Together with Ivan Meštrović, Kljaković was the central figure of the Zagreb Circle’s art school in the interwar period. As a distinguished public intellectual, in 1934 he signed the Zagreb Memorandum in which he sought the federalization of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia after assassination of King Alexander I Karađorđević.
After the proclamation of the Independent State of Croatia, Kljaković was arrested and interned between October 1941 and February 1942 due to his political past and Yugoslav orientation. He went to Rome in 1943, where he lived until 1947, when he went to Buenos Aires. He returned to Rome in 1956. At that time, he was vice-president of the St. Jerome Fraternity for Assistance to Croatian Refugees in the post-war era. His second stay in Rome lasted from 1956 to 1968, when he finally returned to Zagreb. Kljaković did not dare to return to the country immediately after the war because of his criticisms of Tito's regime and socialist Yugoslavia, but also due to his pro-democratic positions and highly developed religious art.
However, just before his death, when he was old and blind, he decided to return to his own country and die there. There was a process of so-called “liberalization” in the 1960s, and Kljaković no longer had to fear for his life as much as in the initial post-war years. Croatian sculptor Antun Augustinčić, who studied under Kljaković at the Academy of Arts, deserved the most credit for his return. In his letter to Augustinčić dated May 13, 1967, Kljaković explicitly stated that his decision to return to Croatia was crucially influenced by two external events: the Brijuni Plenum and the resignation of Aleksandar Ranković in 1966, one of Tito's main associates, and the Protocol in that same year which established formal relations between the Vatican and Tito's Yugoslavia ad led to the re-establishment of diplomatic relations between the two states.
Because of these political reversals, Kljaković hoped that the "evolution of our communists" had progressed, and he wanted to finally return to his homeland (Kljaković 2018: 111). His return to the country was strictly censored by the regime and Kljaković's funeral was organized under its strict control without a church ceremony. He died in Zagreb on October 1, 1969, at age of 80.
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Vieta:
- Buenos Aires, Argentina
- Metropolitan City of Rome, Rome, Italy
- Općina Solin, Solin, Croatia
- Zagreb, Croatia