Dictionary of the Khazars - Milorad Pavić

In the odd pages of Pavić’s magnum opus, the various trials undergone by the ‘great walking parchment’ is described in much detail. An envoy is sent to the Byzantine Emperor Theophilus with his entire body tattooed with Khazars’ history and topography. He lets his hand get chopped off in Constantinople when a man pays in solid gold for the second Khazar year chronicled on his left palm. He is forced to return to the Khazar capital from time to time so that the inscriptions can undergo multiple corrections and new additions. His daily bread comes from hours of standing still so that the Greek and other scribes could copy the Khazar history from his back and thighs into their books. He ultimately passes away, unable to bear the incessant itching brought about by the prized inscriptions and “…and it was with relief that he died, glad to be finally cleansed of history.”

I found The Dictionary of Khazars to be an ode to the life of this great walking parchment who is believed to have said many things contrary to what was inscribed on his skin. Serbian writer Milorad Pavić takes similar liberty while fabricating the history of Khazars, a tribe believed to have lived from the 7^th to 10^th century A.D, inhabiting the land between the Black and Caspian Seas. Drawing on the fable of the lost Dictionary of the Khazars, Pavić wrote its fictional replica in 1984 as a lexicon novel that comes across as encyclopedic fiction, rather than a novel in the conventional sense.

The dictionary chiefly concerns itself with the event that decided the Khazars’ subsequent disappearance in the annals of time – the Khazar polemic. In the guise of the polemic, the Khazar chieftain gets his dream interpreted by a Christian philosopher, an Islamic dervish and a Jewish Rabbi; their intentions - to win the chieftain’s trust and convert his entire clan to their respective religion. The dictionary is segregated into three sources of the polemic - The Red book, the Green book and the Yellow book, with each source claiming the successful undertaking by the Christian, Islamic and Jewish representative respectively, apart from divulging information in the Alphabetic order on the various Chroniclers of the Khazar dictionary in the 17^th century and the 20^th century A.D. Pavić, in the preface admits to using “non-linear narratives” in his attempt to make reading a reversible art form like architecture or painting, where the viewer approaches an art work as how he sees fit.

The book was published as two separate male and female editions with only one altered passage differing in the two editions which Pavić believes is crucial to the text, but I can see it only as a gimmick that succeeded in catapulting the book to immediate attention. I read the androgynous version of the book, by the way, wherein both the male and female organs of the book were intact and left in full view. The book grew tremendously popular, given the fact the book has been translated into 39 languages (and counting). You can catch a glimpse of the many covers of the same book at the official page of the Khazar’s dictionary (http://www.khazars.com/en/foto-galerija/covers-of-the-dictionary-of-the-khazars)

The Female and Male Editions

A princess with two-thumbed hands, parrots that teach the Khazar language, a clan that reads colours like musical notes, a boy whose life span is determined by every falling hair and devils with a penchant for the arts are the some of the many instances where Pavić teases us with his creative brilliance but avoids weaving a compelling story line around those almost eccentric sounding ideas. For example, Petkukin the foster son of Brankovich has the ability to take a different day from future and use it in place of the following day. He has plenty of other super-human traits like being ambidextrous in two different languages and leaving behind rainbow hued sweat but Pavić fails to capitalize on any of these features while narrating his story apart from making a remark or two along the way.

Just as there are recurring characters, there are recurring themes such as the resurrection of Adam Cadmon (or Adam Ruhani) pieced together from the mosaic built by chronicling dreams into the dictionary, painfully compiled across various epochs by the dream hunters. There are religious motifs appearing throughout the novel such as the emergence of Adam as the ideal outcome of the Khazar compilation, the reverence for the seven forms of salt and the frequent mention of the Psalms. The most evident religious reference in the dictionary is the importance given to the interpretation of the dream of the Khazar Kaghan. In all the holy texts of the Abrahamic religions, Joseph (Yusuf in the Islamic text) is called upon to interpret the dream of the ruler.

Writer Jeyamohan suggested I read fellow Yugoslav writer Ivo Andrić’s “The Bridge on the Drina” (published much earlier in 1945) to get a much better insight on the political context of the Balkan region. The book was written in the same language as Pavić’s lexicon novel, the Serbo-Croation a language spoken predominantly in the countries that once made up Yugoslavia (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia). Andrić’s novel is a chronicle that recounts the 400-year-old tale of the bridge constructed over the river Drina. Set in Višegrad, a town in modern day Bosnia-Herzegovina the novel is as much a story of the bridge as the story of the Serbian, Turkish and Austrian conflicts in the region between the rivers Rzav and Drina. The bridge is constructed when the Turks are in power in the 16^th century and over the course of centuries the town becomes a part of the Austrian empire. The new regime ushers in peace and modernity but its nature changes when the Austrian crown prince is assassinated, and the bridge is suddenly under threat of destruction. Andrić’s book is a riveting account of the everyday lives of Bosnian Moslems, Jews, Serbian Christian families and Turks living together both in and out of harmony and whose lives undergo changes with the changing times and rulers.

A key architect of the now defunct Yugoslavia, Ivo Andrić’s commentary on the weakest points of human nature is full of compassion. His writing brims with a natural optimism and he seems to believe in the brethren of all faiths whilst narrating the grim displacement caused by recurring wars. Pavić though, writes with a certain detachment when he writes about the treatment of Khazars in their own state. Pavić’s comments on the state of the Khazars in the hands of the three Semitic giants. The Khazars comprise the larger part of other sects’ armies. They are forced to buy the more expensive undyed bread. They are simply addressed as the non-majority folks and lose their identity as Khazars in a Khazar state headed by foreign sects. Small nations terrorize the big in the name of democracy says the young Khazar assassin at the end of the novel. This fictional mistreatment of the Khazars may be taken for the persecution of Serbs in Yugoslavia but reading the book generally leaves one with the feeling that Pavić’s distortion of history has more to do with experiments with literary devices than driving a political statement. In this aspect, I believe he has made his artwork “reversible” in a sense where he has left us to do the hard work of seeing what fits where.

“The Dictionary of the Khazars” is one of the many works of the postmodernist era that experiments with its form and narrative but unlike other experimental novels which gradually faded into oblivion, Milorad Pavić’s major work continues to attract attention from all quarters due to its creative exploits that borders on eccentricity. Though his works were drawn to the spotlight mostly because of the curiosity that prevailed over the creation of Serbia during the 1980-90s, Pavić comes across as a man with the panache to pull off metaphysical antics disguised as clumsy and random elements in a work that sounds as mundane as a lexicon novel. For who else can write something like this and get away with being called the most popular Serbian writer ever...

He was fond of saying that this revelation had come to him once when a fly was drowning in his eye as he watched a fish, and thus the fish fed on the fly