Garden, Ashes by Danilo Kiš

First published:Basta, pepeo, 1965 (English translation, 1975)

Type of work: Impressionistic realism

Time of work: The late 1930’s and early 1940’s

Locale: Northern Yugoslavia (Voyvodina)

Principal Characters:

• Eduard Scham, a railway official, poet, and world traveler
• Maria Scham, his wife
• Andreas “Andi” Scham, their son
• Anna Scham, their daughter

The Novel

The story of Garden, Ashes is narrated by Andreas (“Andi”) Scham in a series of loosely connected reminiscences about his childhood. At the beginning of the novel, he is a five-year-old boy who remembers vividly the incomprehensible happenings around him: the constant comings and goings, the changing places in which he lives, the numerous older relatives whom he cannot quite remember, and the mysterious disappearances of his father, Eduard Scham. Only later does Andi fully understand these happenings; at the time, surrounded by an aura of anxiety and even fear, he tries simply to cope with them and to understand their meaning, though the fact that his fertile imagination frequently blows things out of proportion does not help. As an obedient child, he follows the adults’ orders instinctively, aware of the fateful nature of the happenings around him. Andi never mentions explicitly the war going on around him, yet he senses that his Jewish father, a former railroad official, is being harassed and hunted for reasons the child cannot yet understand.

Andi is comforted by his steadfast mother, Maria Scham, and his older sister, Anna, who, though yet a child herself, is able to cope slightly better with the ominous events. It is his mother whom he trusts and understands. Although Maria never tries to explain the true nature of the traumatic events happening to them, the two tacitly understand each other. In such a gloomy atmosphere, however, even an innocent “love” between Andi and Julia, a Gentile girl, assumes overtones of forbidden fruit.

Throughout these events, Andi is aware of one constant in his young life—his father. Aside from his love for his father, Andi is fascinated by his eccentricity and originality, by his intelligence which borders on genius, and by his father’s strange aloofness toward him. As if forewarned of events to come, Eduard seems to avoid becoming too close to his son; the more he tries to maintain his distance, however, the more his son wants to be close to him. When Eduard is humiliated—as he is, many times—he pretends otherwise, blaming his problems on the inability of others to understand him. He hopes that Andi will understand his father’s singularity and his role as a sacrificial lamb selected by uncontrollable celestial forces. Just when the two seem to have drawn closer together, the inevitable happens, and Eduard is swept away in a pogrom.

Long after his father’s departure, Andi (now eleven) often thinks about him, no longer trying to understand him but instead accepting him as he was. More important, Andi discovers that he has inherited many of his father’s traits. He has just as exuberant an imagination, he feels the same urge to travel to exotic places, and he has begun to write poetry. Above all, Andi senses that the shadow of his father will accompany him into manhood. “Above the forest hovered the spirit of our father,” he says before leaving home. “Haven’t we heard him clearing his nose into a newspaper and the forest echoing threefold?”

The Characters

Although the novel is narrated by Andi, relating his childhood impressions, the true protagonist is his father, Eduard. Eduard occupies the central position in the rather diffused plot, and he is constantly on his son’s mind, an eccentric and incorrigible dreamer, a frustrated genius, a poet, a philosopher, a drunkard, a proud squanderer of his many gifts, a misplaced wanderer from some mysterious, exotic land. In real life, Eduard is a railroad inspector, as if to symbolize one of his constant urges—to disappear every now and then, to travel without any apparent goal or direction and without the knowledge of his family. (It was this urge which inspired him to write his magnum opus, A Railroad, Bus, and Airline Schedule, into which he infused his considerable poetic talent.) Eduard is always reaching for the stars, desiring the unattainable and setting his goals higher and higher; the more unlikely the achievement, the better. An amateur philosopher, he adopts a fatalistic point of view. In his words, “There are people who are born to be unhappy and to make others unhappy, who are the victims of celestial intrigues incomprehensible to us....I look at myself in the role forced on me by the heavens and by fate, conscious of my role at all times yet at the same time unable to resist it with the force of logic or will.”

Eduard’s relationship with his family is quite vague and similarly fatalistic. He acts as though he could live without them, yet he always returns from his wandering. He is aloof from his wife without being guilty of infidelity. He absentmindedly calls his son “young man,” yet he is anxious to secure Andi’s respect and admiration. Eduard’s premonition of his tragic fate makes him hide his feelings, as if to spare his family grief after his final departure. Above all, he is a victim of circumstances in the colossal dance of death that was World War II. As a Jew and an intelligent man, he cannot help but see what the future holds for him, and this vision saps his strength, no matter how much he struggles to accomplish his goals in his remaining time.

Andi is too young to understand fully his father’s predicament; nevertheless, he feels the magnitude of the loss, for he misses his father at the time when he needs him the most—in his formative years. Perhaps for this reason, father and son share an almost mystical bond, as may be seen in the early development of their similar, and at times identical, traits. At the end of the novel, Andi is determined to follow in his father’s footsteps, to reach, through his poetry, the same star his father saw. In other respects, Andi shows the traits of any boy between the ages of five and eleven: playfulness, imagination, anxiety, and a tendency to live in a world of his own. His parents differ greatly, and Andi has inherited from them a remarkable balance of traits—from his mother, sensitivity and confidence, from his father, wild imagination and the desire to excel.

Maria is a rock of granite amid the surrounding misfortune. Her love for her husband is not clear from Andi’s reminiscences, although that can be assumed because she stands by him throughout the turmoil. She also has much to give to her son through her tales of her past, which are perhaps not as colorful as those of her husband, but which nevertheless nourish the young child’s imagination. Between the two of them, the parents give their boy a good start on the road to manhood.

Critical Context

In 1965, when it was first published, Garden, Ashes announced the arrival of a young and unmistakable talent in Serbian and Yugoslav literature, Danilo Kiš. Kiš’s two previous novels, Mansarda and Psalam 44 (both published in 1962), were only harbingers of his mature achievements. With Garden, Ashes, Kiš stepped to the front of a promising new generation of writers, and he has remained there ever since.

Kiš’s stature among his contemporaries can be attributed in part to his surprising maturity in matters of style. Garden, Ashes is written in both a realistic and a somewhat impressionistic style, imbued with poetry all the more effective because of its unassuming gentleness. Another striking feature of his style is the richness of his vocabulary, which is a well-balanced mixture of Serbian and international expressions normally shunned by most writers. In this respect, Kiš is provocatively modern. Modern, also, is a certain experimentation in style, such as his inclusion of a drawing of a Singer sewing machine and his avoidance of straight plot; in fact, the novel has hardly any distinct plot or even a chronological sequence of events. Even though the novel is basically realistic, it requires the reader’s efforts to supply the missing links. The abundance of rich metaphors and images, coupled with cultural and historical allusions, adds to the artistic quality of Garden, Ashes, making it one of the best novels in the second half of the twentieth century.

Bibliography

Czarny, Norbert. “Imaginary-Real Lives: On Danilo Kiš,” in Cross-Currents. III (1984), pp. 279-284.

Mihailovich, Vasa D. “Serbian Fiction 1965,” in Books Abroad. XL (1966), pp. 281-283.

Pawel, Ernst. “Garden, Ashes,” in The Nation. CCVII (September 16, 1978), p. 246.

White, Edmund. “Danilo Kiš: The Obligations of Form,” in Southwest Review. LXXI (Summer, 1986), pp. 363-377.