Word: pavic
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Dates: during 1988-1988
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DICTIONARY OF THE KHAZARS: A LEXICON NOVEL by Milorad Pavic...
...also comes in two forms, a male and a female edition, which differ in only one passage of just under 15 lines of text. Most astonishingly, this novel, translated from the original Serbo-Croatian, has ) become a best seller in France and Germany; its Yugoslav author, Milorad Pavic, 59, a professor of literary history at the University of Belgrade, is well on his way to international fame...
Whether English-speaking readers adopt the Khazars with equal fervor remains to be seen. The runaway success of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose (1983) may be a precedent, since both novels offer murders mixed with medieval arcana. But Pavic does not convey anything resembling the suspense generated by Eco's relentlessly straightforward, deductive progress toward the darkness at the heart of an obscure monastery. Instead, in the "Preliminary Notes" to this presumptive dictionary, readers are advised to proceed in any manner or order they choose: "No chronology will be observed here, nor is one necessary...
...conference in Constantinople on "The Cultures of the Black Sea Shores in the Middle Ages," Pavic reveals, several scholars of the Khazar question attempted to pool their separated understandings of the Khazars. These scholars are the last heroes of the Dictionary, and, like their medieval predecessors, their desire to understand the Khazars leads them across cultural boundaries. The scholars' attempt to bring different traditions together is relevant to the 20th century Middle East. As Pavic's Dictionary chronicles the assimilation of the Khazars and their confrontations with other cultures, Pavic seems to plead for unity in the Middle East without...
...form alone, The Dictionary of the Khazars is revolutionary. It entertains the reader while forcing him to concentrate intensely. In addition, Pavic tells an allegory about the contradictions in language. His Khazars, who aspired to speak their own language with a foreign accent and who deliberately chose translators who made mistakes in the Khazar language, are painfully aware of the limits and possibilities of communication across boundaries of culture, gender, time and religion...