Celebrated Serbian Writer Pavic Dies at 80

By: Milen Vesovic
Belgrade, Dec.1, 2009 (Serbia Today) - Milorad Pavic, storyteller, poet and playwright, member of the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences, died last night at the age of 80.
Pavic was a historian of Serbian literature from the 17th to the 19th century, an expert on the Baroque period, a translator, an authority on Pushkin and Byron, and a university professor. His works have over 80 different translations in different languages around the world. By experts from Europe, USA and Brazil, Milorad Pavic was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Pavic came to domestic and worldwide fame with world wide acclaim for his novel Dictionary of Khazars published in 1984. The post modernist novel was proclaimed as essential reading for the new century.
At the beginning of his literary and professorial career, Pavic published a book of poems, Palimpsest in 1967, and History of Serbian literature of the Baroque Age in 1970. The second book of poems Moon Stone was published in 1971, and the first collection of stories Iron Curtain in 1973 immediately set forth his surreal and esoteric style. Horses of Saint Mark (1976), Russian Hound (1979), New Belgrade Stories (1981), The Souls of Bathing Last (1982) strengthened his unique and innovative image in the literary world.
In the second novel, Landscape Painted Tea (1988), the author offers exciting work for lovers of cross words. In 1991, he published a third novel, Inner Side of the Wind which was followed by Last Love in Constantinople, also called the manual for divination, in 1994.
Pavic's most widely acclaimed work, which made him an international figure in the literary world was Dictionary of the Khazars, published in 1984. There is no easily discerned plot in the conventional sense, it is based on a historical event generally dated to the last decades of the 8th century or the early 9th century when the Khazar royalty and nobility converted to Judaism, and part of the general population followed. However, from this starting point, Pavic often veers into his own style of playful, somewhat Borgesian fantasy. Most of the characters and events described in the novel are entirely fictional, as is the culture ascribed to the Khazars in the book, which bears little resemblance to any literary or archaeological evidence. The novel might be a sort of metafictional false document, as the people and events in the novel are presented as factual.
Many critics noted that the writer Pavic's intrepid imagination made him a leading European postmodernism, but his unique style and structure made him hard to categorize and it will make him even harder to replace.