Danilo Kiš and the uses of aestheticism in socialist Yugoslavia

Abstract This article examines the literary career of Yugoslav/Serbian writer Danilo Kiš (1935–1989) by focusing on his theoretical debts to nineteenth-century aestheticist thought. Kiš is an author usually associated with the representation of twentieth century’s great historical traumas, including both the Holocaust and the Gulag, and his work is routinely examined through the lens of what he himself termed ‘po-ethics’—a dual concern with literary form and the ethics of representation. In this article I complicate that vision by showing how Kiš’s theoretical reflections and approach to writing were governed by a set of preoccupations firmly associated with the legacy of nineteenth-century aestheticist thinkers like Charles Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde. These include a hostility to didacticism, critique of modernity and of the notion of progress, and an embrace of aesthetic autonomy and the cult of form. I demonstrate that this distinct set of theoretical commitments simultaneously shaped Kiš’s formal choices and helped him position himself within the context of multiethnic and socialist Yugoslavia. I also chart the complex evolution of his views and examine the ways in which, later in his career, Kiš sought to balance these aestheticist attitudes with a sense of political responsibility. Kiš, I argue, is one of the most remarkable and most complex examples of a contemporary writer seeking to maintain a formalist agenda while confronting the demands of historical testimony.