Enchanting Folly

By Paul Gray

DICTIONARY OF THE KHAZARS: A LEXICON NOVEL by Milorad Pavic

Translated by Christina Pribicevic-Zoric; Knopf; 338 pages; $19.95

History has recorded traces of a people known as the Khazars, who thrived in the Caucasus region sometime between the seventh and eleventh centuries A.D. and then disappeared. They are not necessarily the subject of Dictionary of the Khazars. Instead, this novel disguised as a reference book seems to be dealing with some different Khazars, who occupied roughly the same space and time but who also possessed some otherworldly abilities. They numbered among their midst, for example, a cult of dream hunters, who could invade and move freely through the night thoughts of others. Unfortunately, these Khazars began to come to grief when their kaghan (ruler) decided in the eighth or ninth century that they should convert to Christianity, Judaism or Islam. Representatives of these religions were invited to present their cases before the kaghan. The debate, known as the Khazar polemic, led to controversy. Conflicting records awarded victory to each of the contending faiths; the Khazars, meanwhile, vanished. In 1691 the surviving documents of this dispute were published as a dictionary, in an edition of 500 copies. All but two were destroyed by the Inquisition.

Those who like their fiction accompanied by a good deal of bookish impedimenta will find almost more than they can handle in Dictionary of the Khazars. Not only does it pretend to reassemble and update its imaginary 1691 predecessor, but it also comes in two forms, a male and a female edition, which differ in only one passage of just under 15 lines of text. Most astonishingly, this novel, translated from the original Serbo-Croatian, has ) become a best seller in France and Germany; its Yugoslav author, Milorad Pavic, 59, a professor of literary history at the University of Belgrade, is well on his way to international fame.

Whether English-speaking readers adopt the Khazars with equal fervor remains to be seen. The runaway success of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose (1983) may be a precedent, since both novels offer murders mixed with medieval arcana. But Pavic does not convey anything resembling the suspense generated by Eco's relentlessly straightforward, deductive progress toward the darkness at the heart of an obscure monastery. Instead, in the "Preliminary Notes" to this presumptive dictionary, readers are advised to proceed in any manner or order they choose: "No chronology will be observed here, nor is one necessary."

This is actually true. Browsing through the alphabetized entries in this novel is not only possible but pleasurable. Under "Brankovich, Avram," for example, a figure of speech is given new life: "The daughter had taken all her best features from her mother, who after birth remained forever ugly." The definition of kaghan includes the following detail: "The kaghan always shared power with a coruler and was senior to him only to the extent that he was the first to be wished a good day." And then there is "Cyril," which sets forth its subject's illustrious life, including his attempt to create a written form for Slavic: "He started with rounded letters, but the Slavonic 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 in them like a bird."

This profusion of detail whimsically masks a rather more serious agenda. Pavic's simulacrum of historical research portrays a gallery of people madly pursuing the truth of an event that may never have occurred. And those who enter the claustrophobic world of this novel will find themselves involved in the same folly. They will want to know what really happened, and they will fail. But the impression of frustration fades before the enchantment of the quest.