Book 118: Serbia (English) – Dictionary of the Khazars (Milorad PAVIĊ)

I could have pulled the trigger then and there. There wouldn’t be a better moment. There was only one lone witness present in the garden – and he was a child. But that’s not what happened. I reached out and took those exciting sheets of paper, which I enclose in this letter. Taking them instead of firing my gun, I looked at those Saracen figures with their nails like hazelnuts and I thought of the tree Halevi mentions in his book on the Khazars. I thought how each and every one of us is just such a tree: the taller we grow toward the sky, through the wind and rain toward God, the deeper we must sink our roots through the mud and subterranean waters toward hell. With these thoughts in my head, I read the pages given me by the green-eyed Saracen. They shattered me, and in disbelief I asked Dr. Muawia where he had got them.

Still in the Balkans…
I wasn’t quite sure what to make of this book, a bestseller at the time, even after having read it.
It purports to be a dictionary, although I would say it’s more like a small encyclopaedia, a collection of biographies and stories. Although it had been languishing on my to-read list since it when it was all the rage, so for an extremely long time, it finally fortuitously was time to read Serbia at about the time the real Khazars were on the go in my other Crazy Project (giving myself a Classical Education including reading through history and literature, so during the Dark Ages in Europe). I have to admit though that this novel wasn’t really helpful in that regard. For a start, we know very little about the Khazars anyway. Not a single line of the Khazar language exists. What’s more, Pavić’s fictional Khazars may not have very much to do with the real Khazars, any more than Nietzsche’s Zarathustra did with the real prophet Zarathustra/Zoroaster. Anyway, they were an intriguing people, and we do know that they were perhaps the only nation to convert en masse to Judaism.
The Khazars were a nomadic people who lived between the Black and Caspian Seas during the European Dark Ages. The Khazar Polemic is supposed to have taken place in the 8th or 9th century CE, when the kaghan (ruler) called together a Jewish rabbi, a Christian monk and a Muslim dervish to argue for the merits of their respective faiths.
The ‘Dictionary’ is divided into three parts, written from the Christian, Muslim and Jewish perspectives, and sometimes looking at the same incidents and characters from all three sides, which certainly is an intriguing way to consider truth, especially religious truth! The readers can choose to read as much or as little as they like, and in any order they like. (I chose to read the entries alphabetically but with the entries which appear in two or three parts I read these consecutively so that I could compare versions).
In Pavić’s version, the downfall of the Khazar Empire followed hard on the heels of its conversion from one unknown religion to another one (Judaism, Christianity – pace Gibbon! or Islam), and each of the three narrators insist that their religion ‘won’. Some of the longest entries are on the authors of the mythical dictionary.
Magical realism was the flavour of the month at the time of its publication, and there are a lot of influences here – the characters seem like a parade of eccentrics, and the phantasmagorical happenings sometimes seem far-fetched. It is also Post-Modern in its self-consciousness.
Uniquely, the ‘Dictionary’ is published in ‘male’ and ‘female’ versions; buying online I wasn’t sure what I would get but it turned out to be the male version. The difference boils down to a single passage (the male version of which I quoted above). To tell the truth I couldn’t see the point, or tell much difference (perhaps the male version emphasises thought and the female feeling), so I wouldn’t feel short-changed whichever version I ended up with.
Given that the book is about a people and a language that no longer exist, isn’t it ironic that it was published in a country that no longer exists (Yugoslavia) and in a language which supposedly no longer exists (Serbo-Croatian)?
I thought that my Belarusian novel’s “Do not read!” stricture was unique (and no author could mean that seriously), but Pavić also warns us: “The author advises the reader not to tackle this book unless he absolutely has to”. Well, I felt I had to for the sake of Serbia, and am glad that I did. On the whole, I found it a unique, intriguing concept.

PAVIĊ, Milorad (1929 – ), Dictionary of the Khazars: a lexicon novel in 100,000 words, translated from the Serbo-Croatian by Cristina Pribićević-Zorić, New York, Vintage, 1989, ISBN 978-0-679-72461-2 (originally published in 1984)