Po-etika, knjiga druga

Quote from the book: "art is... still the last instance, the last refuge of the human spirit. When everyone roars with their pig hearts, the last ones who will still see with human eyes and feel with a human heart will be those who were no stranger to the experience of art."

Born in Subotica in 1935 in a mixed Jewish-Montenegrin family, Kiš lost his father Eduard in Auschwitz in 1944, which profoundly shaped his worldview: themes of death, trauma, identity and history permeate his oeuvre, from "Sandman" (1972) to "Tomb for Boris Davidovič" (1976). In interviews, inspired by Nabokov and the Russian formalists (Shklovsky, Eichenbaum), he advocates palimpsest – layered erasure and rewriting of the text to an absolute, albeit elusive principle. He criticizes "autopastiche" (self-return) and generalizing criticism, preferring fragmentation, irony and depersonalization to lyrical sentimentalism or ideological programs. His poetics is "unhappy and resigned": unhappy with the inconsistency of demands, resigned to their unattainability, but persistent in the face of biographical "capture" (Sartre) and anxiety before death.

The book contains discussions on influences (Prust, Andrić), literary form (from first to third person, fragments in "Peščanik" with 67 parts), politics (rejection of socialist realism, fight against injustice without ideology) and existential questions. Later, parts were included in "Homo poeticus" (1983), Kiš's selection of essays and interviews, while the whole was published posthumously in "Skladište" (1995). As a symbol of intellectual resistance, "Po-Ethics" influenced European literature, translated into numerous languages, emphasizing literature as a question, not an answer – in a world where history devours the individual. Kiš, who died in 1989 in Paris, remains a voice opposed to oblivion: "Counting is a talisman against death."