The Unsung – ‘Dictionary of the Khazars’ by Milorad Pavić

Back in the 1980s, I read Arthur Koestler’s book The Thirteenth Tribe (1976), in which the author argued that Ashkenazi Jews – Eastern European Jews, as opposed to Sephardic Jews, who are associated with the Iberian peninsula – were not descended from Palestinian Jews but were mainly descended from Khazars, a Turkic people who established a kingdom – a kaghanate – between the Caspian and Black Seas in the 6th century through the 10th century, when the Russians wiped them out. Supposedly, the Khazars converted en masse to Judaism at some point, but that’s still in dispute. Koestler’s theory has been largely disproven through genetic research, and apparently his book was wildly controversial, but I didn’t know that when I read it as a callow teenager, and it’s still, to me, a fascinating book. While its historicity might be dubious, it did one thing: put the Khazars on my radar, and as you might recall, I very much enjoy not only history, but weird, out-of-the-way history, and Khazars have been relegated to the sidelines of history even though it seems fairly clear that the Khazars formed a bulwark against Muslim expansion into the Crimea during the Arabs’ early, hugely successful phase and therefore might have saved the Byzantine Empire from being encircled and possibly even Western Christendom, as who knows where the Muslims might have gone if they had destroyed the Byzantines in the 7th or early 8th centuries (as they almost did)? So I became fascinated by the Khazars, and I’m always interested when they get a mention in any history book I happen to be reading. Thanks, Arthur Koestler, even though your thesis is apparently garbage!

Then, when I was studying abroad in 1992, I took a postmodern literature class. My semester abroad was my worst, GPA-wise, in my life, because I didn’t really care all that much about doing well (I mean, I was in Australia, for crying out loud!), but I absolutely loved the classes I took (this one, a novel-to-film comparison class, and a Reformation class), even though I didn’t do all the work I should have. I was 20 when I started taking the class, and I was always a big reader, but I stuck to very certain kinds of books: sports books, history books, science fiction, fantasy, and mysteries, in general. I had read some so-called “classic” literature simply because I had been assigned it for school (that’s how I read War and Peace – my Russian history teacher assigned, telling us we’d never read an actual history book that better explained the Napoleonic invasion of Russia, and he was right), but I hadn’t really read much of more current, “serious” literature. The class opened my eyes to modern literature, however, and it was extremely revelatory. I read two of my favorite books in that class: Slaughterhouse-5 and White Noise, and I began seeking out more … well, “weird” stuff, I guess, but not just stuff classified as “postmodern” (whatever that means, as it’s a fairly muddled definition), but just more contemporary literature that didn’t fit into the categories I read when I was a kid. I imagine if people still read (it’s shocking how few people do), they probably go through a fairly similar evolution, but maybe I’m wrong.

The upshot of this is that when I saw Dictionary of the Khazars by Milorad Pavić (and you’ll forgive me, I hope, if I dispense with the accent, as I hate how it crunches the “c” down in the finished product) in a bookstore (and I’m about 95% sure I bought this in Melbourne), I was primed to get a book with that title at that particular time. Despite my interest in the Khazars when I was a bit younger, I might have skipped it because it wasn’t “my kind” of book, but by 1992, I was ready for it. It had been published in 1984 in Pavic’s native Serbo-Croatian, and published in English in 1988. It was Pavic’s first novel, published when he was in his fifties after he had spent years writing poetry and short stories. I guess it’s not really “unsung,” as it was translated in dozens of languages and was apparently fairly successful, but it seems like it should be mentioned more as a classic, as it’s a superb book, but while people still talk about Borges and Nabokov and even DeLillo (who’s my favorite author), Pavic seems to get left out. That ain’t right!

Dictionary of the Khazars is what it says it is, although I suppose it’s more of an encyclopedia (which it is occasionally called in the text): a book separated into entries that explain what the heck is going on with the Khazars, although Pavic wanders far and wide under that umbrella. It is, in other words, a very postmodern book – a book that definitely is aware of itself as a book – and Pavic leans into this from the beginning, in which there’s an author’s note about the “real” dictionary, which was published, he claims, in 1691 by a Polish Jew. That edition was suppressed and lost, according to the “author,” but the book you’re reading is an attempt to reconstruct both it and the history of the Khazars and the subsequent efforts by historians to write about the Khazars. Central to the book is the so-called “Khazar polemic” – the meeting at the kaghan’s court of representatives from the world’s three great monotheistic religions – Judaism, Christianity, Islam – to convince the ruler to convert to one of those faiths. Pavic structures the book in three parts – one dealing with Christian entries concerning the Khazars, one dealing with Muslim, and one dealing with Jewish – and in each section, the faith represented is claimed to have “won” the Khazar polemic and converted the kaghan and his people to that particular faith. Some people and things appear in all three sections of the dictionary (Pavic uses keys to show in which section the entries appear), and it’s fascinating to compare what is said about entries that appear in other places or entries that mention other entries, because Pavic either contradicts himself or enhances what we already know about certain entries. The entries are basically from three time periods – the Khazar time period (the 7th-11th centuries, basically), the late 17th century (when the dictionary was supposedly first compiled), and the modern day, which is the early 1980s, when researchers are investigating both the Khazars and the dictionary. In the modern day, for instance, we know someone is assassinated, but Pavic takes his time, across several entries and sections of the book, to give us the entire story, as we have to assemble the picture like a puzzle. Even something that is mentioned in a different time period can have a bearing on the time period about which we’re reading. Pavic throws in a lot of actual historical figures (Saints Cyril and Methodius, Judah Halevi), which is interesting, because despite the strangeness of some of his descriptions, the people did a lot of what he says they did. It’s a clever way to add veracity to a bizarre story.

Pavic uses the Khazars to examine some interesting themes. Obviously, religion is a big one, as the three great monotheistic faiths are trying to convert the Khazars, and Pavic has their representatives discuss why their way is the correct one. This is, of course, one of the big places the book contradicts itself – each representative tells the kaghan why their religion is the best, and the kaghan agrees with each of them. He also returns to the theme, as the Turks are still a big threat to Christianity in the late 17th century and in the modern day, Israelis are fighting Arabs over Palestine. Pavic also writes about the animistic religion of the Khazars and how they practice, which is also interesting. He gets into the idea of revenge and how it can destroy someone, which is never a bad theme to write about. He’s very concerned with dreams, and the book at times becomes very esoteric, as some Khazars were “dream hunters” – people who went into others’ dreams and tried to interpret them with the idea of assembling … well, you can find that out yourself, can’t you? The dreams of humanity are a big part of the book – what we dream about, how those dreams affect reality, what is the relationship between our dreams and God (and the Devil), and what it means when dreams die. It’s really interesting, and Pavic comes at it from many different directions.

His writing is also very neat – as I noted, this is translated from Serbo-Croatian (Edo has probably read this in the original language!), and so while I’m sure it’s a bit weird in the original, I don’t know how weird, because the English is bizarre. Not in a bad way, you understand, but his style is quite unusual – he uses strange metaphors that don’t seem to make sense but fit into the dream-like nature of the narrative, and he comes up with ideas about the characters in the book that are also unusual. He sidetracks to fairy tales, history, war stories, and the assassination plot easily – given the nature of the book, it’s not hard to do, but in the hands of a lesser author, there might be more whiplash when it happens. It’s very hard to describe, so I will post three sections – one from each of the faiths – at random, to give you an idea of what kind of writing it is. From the Christian:

From the Muslim:

From the Jewish:

This is pretty representative of the kind of writing you’ll find in this book, so if that’s not for you, you probably won’t like the rest of it! I find it haunting and beautiful, and Pavic does a wonderful job of creating a bunch of threads and following them along before tying them all together. It’s a dazzling feat.

I read two other Pavic novels, Landscape Painted with Tea (which uses crossword puzzles the way Dictionary of the Khazars uses dictionaries and encyclopedias) and Last Love in Constantinople (which uses Tarot cards), and they’re both good, but not as good as this one. I haven’t been able to find the other novels he wrote, although I’m sure I could if I tried (life got in the way a bit). Pavic died in 2009, and it seems like he had a pretty good life doing his weird literary stuff. As I noted, I’m unsure exactly how “unsung” he is, but I can’t imagine he’s that … sung, even if more people know about him than I think. This is a brilliant book, one of my favorites, and I wanted to let you know about it. That’s what we’re about here at the blog!