A Tomb for Boris Davidovich by Danilo Kiš
Published 1976 · 43,886 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · Fiction, Literary Fiction, Short Stories, Political Fiction
How hard is A Tomb for Boris Davidovich to read?
A Tomb for Boris Davidovich scores 67 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 62 out of 100
- Multilingual proper nouns (Russian, German, French, Yiddish), archaic political vocabulary (Comintern, Okhrana, commissar, knout), and frequent citation of historical texts in the original. Dense but not neologism-heavy; difficulty comes from cultural unfamiliarity rather than invented language.
- Sentence structure: 58 out of 100
- Long, beautifully architected sentences with embedded qualifications, parentheticals, and subordinate clauses — often running half a page. The style is more Sebald than Faulkner: syntactically demanding but grammatically clear. Narrative intrusions ('it seems to me,' 'the most likely hypothesis') create layered hedging within single sentences.
- Abstraction: 60 out of 100
- The author's note to 'Dogs and Books' invokes Marcus Aurelius, Nietzsche's eternal return, and Borges on Stoic cyclical time as the structuring idea behind the book's entire design. The stories dramatize historical materialism, the theology of confession, and the paradox of ideological self-sacrifice — but always through vivid biographical narrative rather than pure discourse.
- Information density: 70 out of 100
- Every paragraph packs historical citations, documentary evidence, multiple pseudonyms to track, and metafictional commentary on source reliability. The text footnotes itself, cites archives by number, and embeds literary criticism within fiction. Comparable to 2666 in its encyclopedic compression, though the book is short — density is extreme per page.
- Narrative indirection: 72 out of 100
- The narrator openly signals uncertainty ('seems dubious to me,' 'if we can believe'), shifts registers from archival report to speculation to lyrical imagination ('I see Verschoyle retreating from Malaga...'), and embeds confessional testimony inside Inquisition trial transcripts. Truth is always approached obliquely through competing sources.
- Symbolic density: 68 out of 100
- Recurring symbolic motifs — ice/fire (Boris Davidovich's father baptized in the Dnieper, Boris leaping into a furnace; Verschoyle drowning in a cabin), the cenotaph/empty tomb of the title, dogs as enforcers of ideological purity across centuries, books as both the objects of persecution and the only defense against it. The title story and 'Dogs and Books' mirror each other across six centuries with identical names and arrest dates.
- Ironic distance: 65 out of 100
- The mock-archival precision — citations, footnotes, probabilistic hedges — creates systematic ironic distance between the clinical documentation and the horror it records. The narrator's intrusions ('I choose the sequence of spiritual rather than historical dates') acknowledge the constructedness of the testimony. Sustained but not Nabokovian; closer to Sebald or Vonnegut.
- Resolution withholding: 73 out of 100
- Every narrative ends in obliteration, disappearance, or unverifiable fate. Boris Davidovich leaps into a foundry furnace and rises as smoke. Verschoyle vanishes into Soviet captivity. Baruch Neumann is almost certainly burned, but the record stops. The book refuses commemorative resolution — its 'tomb' is explicitly empty, a cenotaph for those the archive cannot hold.
- Structural complexity: 65 out of 100
- Seven linked fictional biographies framed as documentary history, with numbered footnotes, author's notes that reveal source fabrication, and a final metafictional commentary ('Dogs and Books' Note) exposing the entire structure's design. The stories cross-reference each other — Taube, Novsky, and Darmolatov appear in multiple stories. Not as radical as Pale Fire but far more architecturally deliberate than conventional short fiction.
How A Tomb for Boris Davidovich is regarded
A Tomb for Boris Davidovich holds a literary regard score of 73 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.