None Ofyourbusiness ❤️ 🇮🇱
Could this be the most inventive and fascinating book ever written?
Somewhere between the Caspian and the Black Sea, between the seventh and tenth centuries, a powerful nomadic people called the Khazars ran a thriving empire and then, rather inconveniently, converted to an unknown religion and ceased to exist entirely.
The conversion happened because their ruler, the kaghan, had a dream in which an angel told him his intentions were good but his deeds were wrong, and, as any reasonable monarch would, he invited three wise men to explain this to him: a Jewish rabbi named Isaac Sangari, a Christian monk named Cyril (the very Constantine of Thessalonica who gave the Slavs their alphabet), and an Islamic dervish named Farabi Ibn Kora.
Each argued for his faith with considerable ingenuity, deploying parables, coins minted in hell, and pointed remarks about political arrangements, while the Khazar princess Ateh, a woman who died by seeing herself simultaneously in a fast mirror and a slow one, kept intervening with speeches so oblique and devastating that she repeatedly reversed the kaghan's decision.
The outcome of this "Khazar polemic" is the central mystery, for three religions each claim the Khazars chose them, and all three accounts flatly contradict one another.
The book is a dictionary reconstructed from a 1691 edition compiled by a printer named Joannes Daubmannus, who, with the kind of editorial judgment one associates with catastrophe, printed one copy in poison ink. The Inquisition destroyed the rest in 1692, leaving only the poisoned copy and a companion volume in circulation, the latter containing the helpful annotation: "When you awake and suffer no pain, know that you are among the living no longer."
The dictionary is divided into three books, Red, Green, and Yellow, representing Christian, Islamic, and Hebrew sources respectively, each with its own entries on the same names and events, entries that agree on very little.
Threading through all three books are recurring figures: the dream hunters, a Khazar priestly sect who could slip into other people's dreams and extract fragments of the divine being called Adam Cadmon; Avram Brankovich, a seventeenth-century Serbian diplomat and soldier in Constantinople who sleeps by day and studies Khazar in the night from a parrot; and Samuel Cohen, a seventeenth-century Sephardic Jew in Dubrovnik who assembles his own Khazar dictionary from his room, whose three souls are so disagreeable toward one another that two of them may end up in hell.
The book's fourth dimension belongs to the twentieth century, where three scholars, one Christian, one Muslim, one Jewish, have each dedicated their careers to the Khazar question and arranged to meet in Istanbul at the Kingston Hotel to compare their findings.
Dr. Dorothea Schultz is a Slavicist from Cracow who writes letters to herself in Poland. Dr. Abu Kabir Muawia is a man whose trouser leg, by the novel's final gathering, is already dirty in a way that requires explanation. Dr. Isailo Suk arrives with an egg and a gold key that opens a door it has no business opening.
The three scholars carry the same obsession their seventeenth-century counterparts carried, which is to say each holds a piece of the puzzle the other two require, and each is incapable of simply passing it across the table.
The book was printed in two editions, male and female, identical save for seventeen crucial lines, which is the most economical way a novelist has ever suggested that the two sexes experience the same story differently while preserving the polite fiction that they are reading the same book. I read the female edition.
Milorad Pavic, born in Belgrade in 1929, was a professor of literary history at the University of Belgrade and one of Yugoslavia's most celebrated poets before he turned, at roughly fifty, to prose. "Dictionary of the Khazars" was his first novel, published in Serbian in 1984.
He died in 2009, by which point he had produced a small body of fiction organized around the conceit that a novel is not obligated to proceed in a straight line, though the line he chose to break was the one that separates reading from being read.
The premise is outrageously fanciful, the detail is rendered in the flat, responsible tone of scholarship. The book's reconstructed preface warns the reader not to touch the dictionary unless absolutely necessary, and advises reading it "the way he catches leap-fever, an illness that skips over every other day and strikes only on feminine days of the week." It then adds, with perfect archival serenity, that essayists and critics "are like cuckolded husbands: always the last to find out."
The kaghan keeps changing his mind. The princess Ateh keeps intervening. And the Khazars, having converted to one of the three faiths, or possibly all three, or conceivably none, vanished so thoroughly from history that their graveyard by the Danube does not agree with anyone's preferred account of them. As Dr. Isailo Suk wrote before his own mysterious death: "The cemetery is full of broken menorah-decorated pottery... this is a graveyard of an undone and lost people, which is what the Khazars were at this place and perhaps at this time." Everyone wants the Khazars to be their own. Nobody wants them to be Khazars.
Cyril, who "spent the first half of his life fleeing from icons and the second half carrying them like a shield," argues with the elegance of a man who genuinely believes language is the closest thing to God. Samuel Cohen assembles his own Khazar dictionary from 132 manuscript bags in his rented room, writes in his private papers: "I am missing certain names, and as a result some of the letters will not be filled. How I would love to use only verbs instead of nouns for the entries in my dictionary!"
The Khazars believed that to every person belongs one letter of the alphabet, that these letters converge in dreams to form the body of Adam Cadmon, the primordial being, and that the dream hunters, a Khazar priestly sect, could slip into the dreams of others to collect fragments of this divine body. The dream hunters are also, by the time you have read three hundred pages, a metaphor for every scholar who has ever tried to reconstruct a destroyed text from footnotes and the testimony of people with something to gain from the reconstruction.
Pavic's intelligence operates on several frequencies at once, and the book's comedy is inseparable from its philosophy. Avram Brankovich, the seventeenth-century Serbian diplomat in Constantinople who sleeps by day and studies Khazar from a parrot, is described as a man who "changes languages like mistresses" and speaks Spanish in his sleep but the knowledge melts by the time he wakes. His associate Yusuf Masudi, the lutenist who becomes a dream hunter, "strained to speak, as if trying to urinate after having just peed." The kaghan's dream hunter, when asked to interpret the angel's visit, replies: "God knows nothing of you... the fact that an angel appeared and rambled on in your dream only means that it had nowhere else to spend the night and that it was probably raining outside."
A Khazar envoy, who carried the entire history of his people tattooed on his skin for foreign scribes to copy at night, "lived like a living encyclopedia of the Khazars, on money earned by standing quietly through the long nights," and at the end, "his skin inscribed with the Khazar history began to itch terribly... it was with relief that he died, glad to be finally cleansed of history." The man was a book. The itch was a reading.
The main message, if the book will permit such a reduction, is that truth is not a single document but a multiplicity of contradictory ones, and that the act of assembly is itself an act of creation rather than recovery.
Cohen writes: "Perhaps there are two other people somewhere out there in the world searching for me the way I'm searching for them. Perhaps they are dreaming of me, as I of them, and craving for what I know, because my truth is a secret to them, just as theirs is the hidden answer to my questions."
Each of the three books in the dictionary holds a piece of the puzzle that the other two require. Each faith has assembled a version of the Khazar story that confirms what it already believed. The Khazars themselves, who converted to something and then disappeared, remain stubbornly unresolved, a people whose face was, by legend, impossible to remember.
The dream hunters' competition to reassemble Adam Cadmon from fragments scattered across other people's sleeping minds maps with uncomfortable precision onto the contemporary information environment, where every platform, algorithm, and political tradition maintains its own version of the same disputed event and calls it settled.
Pavic wrote the book in Belgrade, between 1978 and 1983, in a country that would spend the following decade destroying itself over exactly this problem: whose version of the past has the authority to organize the present. He knew, as his Khazar envoy knew, that history is the text written on someone else's back, and that the scribes always copy only the sections that interest them. The rest of the tattooed man walks on, into other territories, carrying dispatches nobody requested.
This has to be my favorite book of all time!
❤️ 🇮🇱
Could this be the most inventive and fascinating book ever written?
Somewhere between the Caspian and the Black Sea, between the seventh and tenth centuries, a powerful nomadic people called the Khazars ran a thriving empire and then, rather inconveniently, converted to an unknown religion and ceased to exist entirely.
The conversion happened because their ruler, the kaghan, had a dream in which an angel told him his intentions were good but his deeds were wrong, and, as any reasonable monarch would, he invited three wise men to explain this to him: a Jewish rabbi named Isaac Sangari, a Christian monk named Cyril (the very Constantine of Thessalonica who gave the Slavs their alphabet), and an Islamic dervish named Farabi Ibn Kora.
Each argued for his faith with considerable ingenuity, deploying parables, coins minted in hell, and pointed remarks about political arrangements, while the Khazar princess Ateh, a woman who died by seeing herself simultaneously in a fast mirror and a slow one, kept intervening with speeches so oblique and devastating that she repeatedly reversed the kaghan's decision.
The outcome of this "Khazar polemic" is the central mystery, for three religions each claim the Khazars chose them, and all three accounts flatly contradict one another.
The book is a dictionary reconstructed from a 1691 edition compiled by a printer named Joannes Daubmannus, who, with the kind of editorial judgment one associates with catastrophe, printed one copy in poison ink. The Inquisition destroyed the rest in 1692, leaving only the poisoned copy and a companion volume in circulation, the latter containing the helpful annotation: "When you awake and suffer no pain, know that you are among the living no longer."
The dictionary is divided into three books, Red, Green, and Yellow, representing Christian, Islamic, and Hebrew sources respectively, each with its own entries on the same names and events, entries that agree on very little.
Threading through all three books are recurring figures: the dream hunters, a Khazar priestly sect who could slip into other people's dreams and extract fragments of the divine being called Adam Cadmon; Avram Brankovich, a seventeenth-century Serbian diplomat and soldier in Constantinople who sleeps by day and studies Khazar in the night from a parrot; and Samuel Cohen, a seventeenth-century Sephardic Jew in Dubrovnik who assembles his own Khazar dictionary from his room, whose three souls are so disagreeable toward one another that two of them may end up in hell.
The book's fourth dimension belongs to the twentieth century, where three scholars, one Christian, one Muslim, one Jewish, have each dedicated their careers to the Khazar question and arranged to meet in Istanbul at the Kingston Hotel to compare their findings.
Dr. Dorothea Schultz is a Slavicist from Cracow who writes letters to herself in Poland. Dr. Abu Kabir Muawia is a man whose trouser leg, by the novel's final gathering, is already dirty in a way that requires explanation. Dr. Isailo Suk arrives with an egg and a gold key that opens a door it has no business opening.
The three scholars carry the same obsession their seventeenth-century counterparts carried, which is to say each holds a piece of the puzzle the other two require, and each is incapable of simply passing it across the table.
The book was printed in two editions, male and female, identical save for seventeen crucial lines, which is the most economical way a novelist has ever suggested that the two sexes experience the same story differently while preserving the polite fiction that they are reading the same book. I read the female edition.
Milorad Pavic, born in Belgrade in 1929, was a professor of literary history at the University of Belgrade and one of Yugoslavia's most celebrated poets before he turned, at roughly fifty, to prose. "Dictionary of the Khazars" was his first novel, published in Serbian in 1984.
He died in 2009, by which point he had produced a small body of fiction organized around the conceit that a novel is not obligated to proceed in a straight line, though the line he chose to break was the one that separates reading from being read.
The premise is outrageously fanciful, the detail is rendered in the flat, responsible tone of scholarship. The book's reconstructed preface warns the reader not to touch the dictionary unless absolutely necessary, and advises reading it "the way he catches leap-fever, an illness that skips over every other day and strikes only on feminine days of the week." It then adds, with perfect archival serenity, that essayists and critics "are like cuckolded husbands: always the last to find out."
The kaghan keeps changing his mind. The princess Ateh keeps intervening. And the Khazars, having converted to one of the three faiths, or possibly all three, or conceivably none, vanished so thoroughly from history that their graveyard by the Danube does not agree with anyone's preferred account of them. As Dr. Isailo Suk wrote before his own mysterious death: "The cemetery is full of broken menorah-decorated pottery... this is a graveyard of an undone and lost people, which is what the Khazars were at this place and perhaps at this time." Everyone wants the Khazars to be their own. Nobody wants them to be Khazars.
Cyril, who "spent the first half of his life fleeing from icons and the second half carrying them like a shield," argues with the elegance of a man who genuinely believes language is the closest thing to God. Samuel Cohen assembles his own Khazar dictionary from 132 manuscript bags in his rented room, writes in his private papers: "I am missing certain names, and as a result some of the letters will not be filled. How I would love to use only verbs instead of nouns for the entries in my dictionary!"
The Khazars believed that to every person belongs one letter of the alphabet, that these letters converge in dreams to form the body of Adam Cadmon, the primordial being, and that the dream hunters, a Khazar priestly sect, could slip into the dreams of others to collect fragments of this divine body. The dream hunters are also, by the time you have read three hundred pages, a metaphor for every scholar who has ever tried to reconstruct a destroyed text from footnotes and the testimony of people with something to gain from the reconstruction.
Pavic's intelligence operates on several frequencies at once, and the book's comedy is inseparable from its philosophy. Avram Brankovich, the seventeenth-century Serbian diplomat in Constantinople who sleeps by day and studies Khazar from a parrot, is described as a man who "changes languages like mistresses" and speaks Spanish in his sleep but the knowledge melts by the time he wakes. His associate Yusuf Masudi, the lutenist who becomes a dream hunter, "strained to speak, as if trying to urinate after having just peed." The kaghan's dream hunter, when asked to interpret the angel's visit, replies: "God knows nothing of you... the fact that an angel appeared and rambled on in your dream only means that it had nowhere else to spend the night and that it was probably raining outside."
A Khazar envoy, who carried the entire history of his people tattooed on his skin for foreign scribes to copy at night, "lived like a living encyclopedia of the Khazars, on money earned by standing quietly through the long nights," and at the end, "his skin inscribed with the Khazar history began to itch terribly... it was with relief that he died, glad to be finally cleansed of history." The man was a book. The itch was a reading.
The main message, if the book will permit such a reduction, is that truth is not a single document but a multiplicity of contradictory ones, and that the act of assembly is itself an act of creation rather than recovery.
Cohen writes: "Perhaps there are two other people somewhere out there in the world searching for me the way I'm searching for them. Perhaps they are dreaming of me, as I of them, and craving for what I know, because my truth is a secret to them, just as theirs is the hidden answer to my questions."
Each of the three books in the dictionary holds a piece of the puzzle that the other two require. Each faith has assembled a version of the Khazar story that confirms what it already believed. The Khazars themselves, who converted to something and then disappeared, remain stubbornly unresolved, a people whose face was, by legend, impossible to remember.
The dream hunters' competition to reassemble Adam Cadmon from fragments scattered across other people's sleeping minds maps with uncomfortable precision onto the contemporary information environment, where every platform, algorithm, and political tradition maintains its own version of the same disputed event and calls it settled.
Pavic wrote the book in Belgrade, between 1978 and 1983, in a country that would spend the following decade destroying itself over exactly this problem: whose version of the past has the authority to organize the present. He knew, as his Khazar envoy knew, that history is the text written on someone else's back, and that the scribes always copy only the sections that interest them. The rest of the tattooed man walks on, into other territories, carrying dispatches nobody requested.
This has to be my favorite book of all time!
❤️ 🇮🇱