Birth Certificate

Mark Thompson

Mark Thompson is the author of A Paper House: The Ending of Yugoslavia, Forging War: The Media in Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Hercegovina, and The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front, 1915¿1919. He lives in Oxford.

Introduction: Great and InvisibleBirth Certificate (A Short Autobiography) by Danilo Kiš1. Birth Certificate (A Short Autobiography)2. My father3. came into the world4. in western Hungary5. and was educated at the commercial college...6. the birthplace of a certain Mr Virág...7. by the grace8. of Mr Joyce...First Interlude-The Garret (1962)9. I believe it was the liberal policy...10. together with a desire for integration...11. Many details of the family chronicle...12. Among my ancestors on my mother's side...13. The ethnographic rarity I represent...14. In 1939, in my fourth year...15. my parents had me baptised...16. This saved my life.17. I lived until my thirteenth year...Second Interlude-Garden, Ashes (1965)18. I worked as a servant for rich peasants...19. The 'troubling dissimilarity' that Freud calls...Third Interlude-Early Sorrows (1969)20. in my ninth year I wrote my first poems...21. From my mother I inherited a propensity...Fourth Interlude-Hourglass (1972)22. And it was not without significance...23. My mother read novels until her twentieth year...24. In 1947 we were repatriated by the Red Cross...25. Immediately after we arrived...26. I had to wait a year or two...27. For two years I learned violin...28. At the secondary school I continued to write...29. We were taught Russian by White Army officers...Fifth Interlude-A Tomb for Boris Davidovich (1976)30. From the Gymnasium I entered the University...Sixth Interlude-The Anatomy Lesson (1978)31. As a lector for Serbo-Croatian...32. For the last few years I have been living in Paris...Seventh Interlude-The Encyclopaedia of the Dead (1983)33 (1983)AcknowledgementsNotesBibliographyIndex