LANDSCAPE PAINTED WITH TEA by Milorad Pavic

I simply couldn't get my hands around this complex, dense, ambitious, playful 1988 novel (translated 1990). So, I decided to look at what some critics and reviewers had to say. Well, I dug into some databases and couldn't get beyond any simple reviews. However, it was interesting that the reviewers didn't all agree on what happens at the end of the book, at what the solution to the crossword, at the center of the book, is.

The story centers around Atanas Svilar and his second wife, Vitacha Razin. A brilliant but failed architect, Svilar searches for where his father was killed in WWII. He finds out he was betrayed in a monastery. While there Svilar also learns that he is not fated to be an architect.

At this point, the book becomes a crossword. The reader can choose to read it across -- straight through in a conventional manner -- or down.

In this section Atanas leaves his wife and children for his first love, Vitacha Razin, and they put down roots in California where Svilar changes his name to Razin and makes millions of dollars selling a toxic defoliant to the government.

What characterizes his prose more than anything else is his magical, agrarian images supporting stories loaded with digressions. One of the most fascinating digressions concerns the monk who actually turned in his father. He frequently wears his clothes backwards.

There is one critical article on this book that I came across. It is by Jasmina Mihalovic and entitled "Landscape Painted With Teas as an Ecological Novel." It is fascinating the way the article sees this book as a call away from alienation and back to "the art of living." It sees the book as cautiously optimistic, I think it would be safe to say, even if it is a highly stylized Satan, in this topsy-turvy world, who ends up as Savior.

"The picture in Landscape Painted with Tea of the upside down world of historical and perverted reality is the reflection of our own selves. The cathartic power of the book as a mirror should prevent the headlong plunge into nothingness and should return to the world its lost essence and internal balance." (The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Summer 1988)

It's interesting that this apparently Slavic author of this article believes in such things as "internal balance." It would seem to be the furthest thing from what a Postmodernist would believe. Pavic collage and montage techniques are both Modernist and Postmodernist, but I don't know if his ultimate sensibility is. In an interview with Thanassis Lallas, Pavic describes himself as "always trying to act as an ancient epic poet...To me the best literature is oral...To understand how someboy writes a novel, you must feel the breath of the book." (Review of Contemporary Fiction, Summer 1988)

Could it be translation difficulties that are bringing these seeming incongruities up? I don't think so. Here I point out Pavic's imagery, something that is easy to translate. Yes, it is often magical, but the magical elements are made up of agrarian elements. There is a nostalgia in Pavic's writing, that is sometimes explicitly stated. It's not naive. It's not conservative. It feels as if we need to get back to our own, specific,  historical moment when reading him.

I'll repeat that:

It feels as if we need to get back to our own, specific, historical moment when reading him.

I am not entirely sure what that means. But it feels so accurate, I'm going with it. Obviously, we feel many other things when reading him. For me, this is predominate.

Close Read of Passage from Pavic's LANDSCAPE PAINTED WITH TEA

The character of Amalia Riznich is introduced as follows:

"'October has never come as often as this year; every time you turn around, there it is again. At least three times ahead of schedule...'

Thus whispered Miss Amalia Riznich in German into her Sévres cup. For the past one hundred years, her family had spoken German in autumn, Polish or Russian in winter, Greek in Spring and Serbian only in summer, as befits a family of grain merchants. All past and future seasons thus blended in her consciousness into a single eternal season, resembling itself as hunger does hunger. Spring merged with spring, Russian with Russian, winter with winter, and only summer, which was enclosing Miss Riznich now, broke step with this sequence to take for a moment, but only a moment, its temporary calendar place between spring and autumn, between Greek and German."

My overriding response to this passage is perplexity. Why does it befit a family of grain merchants to speak a variety of languages over the course of a year? Why would all seasons blending into one another resemble "itself as hunger does hunger"? Why is it that only when speaking Serbian does she "break step with this sequence"?

There is something magical here, suggesting that the Riznich family traces its origins to the agrarian rhythms of the seasons, and their suborning language to these rhythms. They are grain merchants, and dependent on this agrarian rhythm.

But why aren't they farmers? Aren't they more agrarian than merchants? Yes, but they are not rich. Pavic needed to create a rich family in order to give this, at times, fairy tale-like story the necessary gravitas. These are ancient people from ancient lines coming together fully only in summer, in the Serbian present, when their own language spills from their lips as they live the most carefree season.

This book was published in 1990. Could he have been asking for Yugoslavia to stay together? It broke up a couple years after the publication of the Landscape Painted With Tea. By this time, Pavic was an important voice that people heeded. We learn elsewhere that these notebooks are filled with information about Tito, the Yugoslavian Communist strongman.

I suspect both readings hold up: the magical, fairy tale agrarian one and the political one. I prefer the former because it seems less tethered to a specific time and place. 

Pavic's LAST LOVE IN CONSTANTINOPLE: A Tarot Novel For Divination

For background on Pavic, see my many entries on him by looking him up in the list of topics to the right or by going to this webpage: Milorad Pavic Homepage.


One of Pavic's last works, this fascinating book can be read one of two ways: straight through from beginning to end or based on various tarot readings. A pack of tarot cards is provided, and as well as models of the various ways of laying out the cards. Every chapter of the book coincides with one of the cards, so it is possible to read the book in the order demanded by the tarots rather than front to back.

I read the book twice: once front to back, and once using the tarot method. I suggest that anyone who wants to tackle the book do as I did because things get confusing if you don't have a overall, global sense of the book. This may, in fact, be a criticism of Pavic because it means that the book is difficult, if not impossible, to be read in a wholly reversible manner. By 'reversible' I refer to Pavic's wanting to write novels that were like sculptures or paintings in that there was no linearity to how viewers work their way around the art object. But this is hardly damning.

The book is about the hostile and friendly interactions between three families, the Opujic's, the Tenecki's, and the Kalopervic's around the turn of the 19th century. The hostile aspect has to do with them fighting on different sides of a war between Serbia (I think), and France. The friendly aspect has to to with intermarriages.

Each chapter is a fairly self-contained story about members of these families. They are replete with magic: a woman growing out of a tail, a man having three deaths, an ability to hear below ground, and so on.

Randomness, of course, is at the structural heart of the book. In a way, it takes the place of the traditional plot. With all the magic and the wild characters it adds up to a book that presents us with a world that is in many ways ordered according to our imaginations. Yes, it is true that the cards we are dealt are random and we have no control over them. But we do have control over how we respond to them and interpret them.

There is a bouyancy and ebullience to this book. It revels in how magical stories can be and, in addition, how magical we can be if we let ourselves.

A Critique of Milorad Pavic

I am surprised at how many well-informed people remain unfamiliar with Milorad Pavic's brilliant 1984 novel Dictionary of the Khazars, English translation 1988 by Christina Pribcevic-Zoric. The book is about determining the Khazar Polemic, or which of the Abrahamic religions the lost people known as the Khazars ultimately converted to. This provides the platform for Pavic's wildly imaginitivate leaping across centuries, across fact and fantasy, from reality to myth. Charles Fenyvesi actually said that Pavic "writes with such imaginative cultural extension as to make Garcia Marquez seem like James Mitchener."

The book is a cross-referenced dictionary of events and people divided into three parts: Christian, Jewish, and Muslim. Readers are literally encouraged to read the book in any order they prefer. Pavic wants his novels to be "reversible art," meaning that it does not have a beginning or ending. It is like sculpture or painting: it can be seen from different angles, and the viewer moves about it freely.

What's more, the book comes in two versions, the male and the female. One crucial paragraph is different in the two. Thereby, Pavic forces the book to remain open, to always invite another reversible reading.

A very interesting, although very unconvincing, critique of Pavic is developed by Andrew Wachtel in his article "Postmodernism as Nightmare: Milorad Pavic's Literary Demolition of Yugoslavia" in a 1997 issue of The Slavic and East European Journal. Now I am not interested in writing a boring entry that critiques an obscure academic article. Rather, I find myself challenged by the ideas Wachtel brings forth. He should be heard.

This is his argument in skeletal form:
--He takes his definition of postmodernism from Lyotard, profound skepticism about metanarratives.
--He says that postmodernism developed in stable states in Western Europe and North America where such skepticism would not bring down "the whole house of cards." In Yugoslavia during the 80's it did a lot of harm by being one factor in causing the metanarrative that made Yugoslavia possible become questioned. The result was civil war.
--The Enlightenment inspired meta-narrative proved a necessity for Yugoslavia; it was a luxury for what Wachtel implies are Ivory Tower intellectuals of the West.
--Postmodernism appeared in Yugoslavia just as the country started to disintegrate.
--In Yugoslavia, imaginitave literature was a high-status activity that provided the country with its narratives. In such a cultural milieu, it's not an exaggeration to say that a work of fiction played a role in causing a country to fail.
--Early in Yugoslavia's history, emphasis was placed on the unity of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, not their differences. Intellectuals at the time saw the importance of cultural figures in forming the notion of a Yugoslav and a Yugoslavian state. Conversely, Postmodernism lauds difference over unity.
--By the 60's, ethnic difference was being emphasized more. What kept the country together was supra-national Communism, i.e. ideology, and cultural concerns were secondary.
--A number of novelists began to question and unravel the metanarrative of nationalist unity. This article will look at Pavic's novel.
--The purported structural complexity of Pavic's novel is actually a gimmick. It actually has a conventional plot centering around two questions: What religion did the Khazars convert to in the 9th century and why do representatives of the various religions come together to try to solve the problem?
--When investigating in later centuries, each religion is convinced that their religion was chosen by the Khazars.
--This is Wachtel's crucial point: this is a radically relavitizing vision of history that leaves us with only language games and not unifying narratives.
--Wachtel prefers the novelist Ivo Andric's novel The Bridge over the Drina to Pavic's because it acknowledges the various views of history held by the Muslims, Christians and other groups in Yugoslavia, but then it worked to find, and did find, the truth.
--Pavic's novel was hugely popular and influential in Serbia. It helped to deligitimize any claim for truth, leading to disunity and, Wachtel implies, ultimately a might is right situation.

What I find most intriguing about this argument is that Wachtel is arguing that various cultures can withstand postmodernist critique better than others. I also really appreciate that he takes literature so seriously.

I don't know that Pavic would call himself a Postmodernist. Based on an interview in the Review of Contemporary Fiction, he would seem to be a theist! In addition, by placing the truth, ie what the Khazars converted to, in an impenetrable, agrarian past of myth-like and folkloric stories, his book is a lot more like Genesis than it is like Federman's Double or Nothing.

What makes the novel seem so innovative is its structure. It is innovative, but not as much as it might seem. Essentially, it is an episodic novel put together so that readers can encounter the sections in the order they choose. It's Cervante's gone choose your own adventure.

However, the real reason to read Pavic isn't his structural innovation. It's the magically fertile nature of his mind, that leads to some of the most surprising sentences and passages imaginable. See my March 24 post to see examples of these sentences.

Back with Pavic and Mackey

I've been away for a month. I wrote a story that I then decided to expand into a novel. It was going to necessitate some serious research. Ultimately, I decided I could not adequately contextualize the material. So now I am going to cotinue working on Milorad Pavic's Dictionary of the Khazars by exploring quotations and using it as the springboard for my own writing. I will also take a look at some of the lit. crit. on the book, some of which is interesting. He was featured in a Review of Contemporary Fiction.

I am also going to continue discussing Nathaniel Mackey's poetry series, Song of the Andoumboulou. I will take a different tack, however. I will begin to compare and contrast poems more rather than discuss them one at a time. I feel that I've gotten all I can hope to get going in that direction.

Milorad Pavic's DICTIONARY OF THE KHAZAR'S #4

[This is one of a series of entries on Milorad Pavic's writings, click for the first post in the series.]

These are lists of quotations from the book that are quite beautiful, I think. I am quoting them in order to share my enthusiasm and to hope the magic rubs off, a little.

Note: At some point I will need to discuss Pavic's use of nonsequitars in paragraphs and even, occasionally, in sentences. His paragraphs are often difficult to digest because they drift through a series of topics, often without transitions, rather than developing one or two carefully defined ones. At times, even his sentences shift topic half way through. I don't yet know what to make of this, but I am noting when it happens and will discuss it later.

Below are some more interesting quotations:

The he yielded and picked one her breasts like a peach. 43

I, who have experience with colors, inks, and letters, recognize each letter by its smell in the damp night, and, lying in my corner, I read by the smells entire pages of the sealed and rolled scrolls that lie somewhere in the attic of the castle. 45

Kyr Avram prefers to read in the cold, clothed only in a shirt, subjecting his body to shivers, and the only part of his reading he considers worth remembering and noting in the book is what penetrates the shivering to reach his attention. 45

One night in Gyüla, Father came across an enormous snowman seated on the latrine. He struck him with the lantern, killed him, and went to dinner. 51

It is only an illusion that our thoughts are in our heads...Our heads and we as a whole are in our thoughts. 61

He was creating the first letters of the Slavic alphabet. he started with rounded letters, but the Slavic language was so wild that the ink could not hold it, and so he made a second alphabet of barred letters and caged the unruly language like a bird. 64

for at the bottom of every dream lies God. 68

Pavic's "Dictionary of the Khazars" #3

[This is one of a series of entries on Milorad Pavic's writings, click for the first post in the series.]

These are lists of quotations from the book that are quite beautiful, I think. I am quoting them in order to share my enthusiasm and to hope the magic rubs off, a little.

"During his long life he and a monk from another monastery played chess without a board or pieces." 190

"He took off his uniform in a hotel and for the first time saw his scars in a copper mirror. They smelled of bird-droppings." 191

"For, as they caressed the rocks, slipped through their crevices, and skirted their tops, the winds always played a different tune, until the marble and the masons disappeared forever, washed away by the rains, whipped by the glances of passersby, and licked by the tongues of rams and bulls." 199

"Contemporaries say that Mutsaf Beg Sablak could not keep food down and that, like a turtledove, he ate and secreted simultaneously." 200

Because the book does not have to be read in strict order, these quotations jump back to early in the book now.

"At night she wore a letter inscribed on each eyelid...each letter kills as soon as it is read. They were written by blind men, and the ladies-in-waiting shut their eyes when they attended to the princess in the morning, before her bath. Thus, she was protected from her enemies while she slept." 21

"Every morning she would create a hitherto unseen image of her own face." 21

"'Khazar face' referred to ... starting each day as someone else, with a completely new and unfamiliar face, so that even the closest of kin were at pains to recognize each other." 22

"Family inheritances are meted out according to the color of one's beard." 26

"Years passed like turtles." 27

"He has a broad chest the size of a cage for large birds or a small beast, and is often the target of murderers, for there is a popular poem saying that his bones are made of gold." 28

"I saw him stand beneath a tree, his saber drawn, waiting for the wind to blow; as the first fruit dropped, he slashed it with his saber in mid-air." 30

"A look that fells birds" 31

Milorad Pavic, DICTIONARY OF THE KHAZARS, Post #2

[This is one of a series of entries on Milorad Pavic's writings. Here is the first post in the series.] Here is a list of some of Pavic's remarkable sentences. I am copying them down simply to share their wildness and weirdness, and, to fess up completely, in the hope that some of his tremendous skill might rub off on me:

"It is impossible to tell what the 1691 Daubmannus edition of The Khazar Dictionary looked like, since the only remaining exemplars, the poisoned and the silver (companion) copies, were both destroyed, each in it own part of the world." (8)

"Only fragments of the Daubmannus edition have reached us, just as sleep leaves a dusting of sand in the eye." (9)

"The hierarchy of death is, in fact, the only thing that makes possible a system of contacts between the various levels of reality in an otherwise vast space where deaths endlessly repeat themselves like echoes within echoes." 127

"He left behind his lute of white tortoiseshell, which that very same day began walking, turned back into an animal, and swam off into the Black Sea." 128

"After that, they never really abandoned Islam, although they went on to convert to Christianity and then to Judaism." (135)

"They are so resourceful they have oysters growing on trees." (144)

"The river that flows through the Khazar Empire has two names, because in the same riverbed half of its course runs from east to west and the other half from west to east." 144

"He was fond of saying that this revelation had come to him once when a fly was drowning in his eye as he watched a fish, and thus the fish fed on the fly." (154)

"He had a horse so swift that its ears flew like birds, even when it stood in place." (156)

"hot bread which has the dark face of your father and the navel of your mother." (159)

"He would string and tune his lute by the stars." (161)

"If all human dreams could be assembled together, they would form a huge man, a human being the size of a continent." (165)

"she with the dappled eyes that changed color in the cold like flowers" (161)

"She traveled thousands of miles to die in your dream" (163)

"In dream hunting the words of the Khazar dictionary are like a lion's tracks in the sand to the ordinary hunter." (165)

"He was a feminine key with a hole in its shaft, looking for a masculine lock with a bolt in its keyhole." (170)

"She suffered from an unusual disease: her left hand was faster than her right. She claimed her left hand was so fast that it would die before she did." (173)

"Darkness was falling in reddish flakes." (177)

"His deaths tore him into such shreds that nothing was left of him except this story." (181)

More Later

Pavic's "Dictionary of the Khazars"

The Serbo-Croation novel Dictionary of the Khazars, by Milorad Pavic, stands out, for me, as the single most memorable novel of the last quarter century. It is a book about reading, about linearity and non-linearity, the nether world of dreams, poetry, and art.

After a short introduction, it takes the form of three "books" — Christian, Islam, and Jewish. Each loosely pertains to a time when the Khazars worshiped that particular Abrahamic faith. Pavic informs us that there is no need to read the books in order. You could start with the Jewish and end with the Christian, or even jump around a lot more than that. In addition, Pavic has provided an index so that readers can trace characters and events as they appear in the various books.

The Khazars existed as a nomadic tribe of the southern Caucasus who came to their greatest power in the 6th and 7 centuries CE. However, the novel focuses on the scholarship on the Khazars that was written in the 17th century. It was at that time that the original dictionary was written. However, through various happenstance — from one copy being poisoned to another that was used for fire, the dictionary only survived in scraps. That's what we have today: scraps written in the 17th century in various languages about a people who lived a thousand years before.

Obviously, Pavic is asking us to move into the realm of representation. He is eliminating the origin, the historical Khazar people, and even much of the representation of them, the dictionary. What's left are signs, many decontextualized. This does sound like standard post-modernism.

But it doesn't stop there. For me Pavic is more than the play of signs and representations. After all, there is a dark side to the stories here. And a randomness. In one, for instance, "dream hunters" pursue a certain precursor. "If we follow our angel precursor when he is ascending the heavenly ladder, we approach God Himself, and if we have the misfortune to follow him when he falls, we move away from God, but we can know neither one nor the other." Then, in the next paragraph, he says that it "is a matter of technique."

Pavic has moved us into a field where he takes back what he gives, refuses to assert how much of our most important efforts can be attributed to luck or technique, and goes on his merry way. This is a book of magic. But underneath the surface, always, it is a horror novel. Is it stretching it to say that Pavic wrote this book as Yugoslavia was disintegrating, and the political events had an impact? I don't know. Writers living in political upheaval are as likely to use writing to escape from such horrors as to explore them, however obliquely.

What is certain is that we can just imagine Milorad Pavic's twinkling, mischievous eyes throughout our reading of this book. But I also imagine them to be rimmed with a red sadness.

We already are and never will become fully what we are.