Rarely does a novel from Yugoslavia take the European reading public by storm, as has Milorad Pavic's Dictionary of the Khazars. The fact that Pavic's work has done so is a tribute to his brilliant mix of narrative voices: those of the historian, the poet, the folklorist, and the comedian. But more than that, his novel allows readers to recover a world totally lost to the hidebound, scrupulously logical, scientific observer. What kind of world? One in which the claims of religion, legend, myth, and tradition have equal merit with facts, in essence, one in which a pre-enlightened view of man and nature prevails.
The novel is presented as the reconstruction of a lost text about a lost people—the ninth-century Khazars of Transcaucasia. Its unique format consists of three component dictionaries purporting to be fragments of a reconstituted seventeenth-century text about the Khazars, five sets of explanatory notes, and two appendixes. To complicate matters, the book comes in two editions, one male, one female, wherein the difference consists of 17 lines on a single page.
To allow the reader to sample the interpretive challenge of Pavic's novel, The World & I has reprinted the dictionary entry for Khazars as it appears in each of the three component dictionaries, one Christian, one Muslim, and one Jewish. Superscript symbols over certain terms mean that these terms are fully explained in the Christian, Muslim, or Jewish source, respectively. Entries marked with the sign are to be fund in all three dictionaries.
Following the excerpts are four essays that respond to Pavic's new novel and explore its various meanings. First, Peter Golden ("The
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