Vitomil Zupan: Levitan

Levitan

Vitomil Zupan

Genre:: Novel
Year of publication:: 1982
Number of pages:: 348
Rights sold:: Czech Republic (Studio Rubato), Germany (Guggolz Verlag), Russia (Rudomino), Serbia (Red Box)
Available reading materials:: English sample translation, French pdf

Written as first-person testimony, Levitan is a semi-autobiographical account of the prisons of Tito’s post-war communist Yugoslavia. The novel (or maybe not) reveals the treatment of political prisoners, prison hierarchies and internal power relations, as well as author Vitomil Zupan’s rapacious libido and his numerous erotic experiences, both in and out of prison. Levitan doesn’t wallow in self-pity or self-flagellation. He is an entertainer, a libertine who would rather talk about sex than about the mistreatment of prisoners. He is not even claiming to be innocent. He ended up in prison after drunkenly phoning one of the heads of the regime and telling him that he’d heard Tito had abdicated and left the country. It was 1948, the Informbiro period, a time of purges and persecution by Tito, following his break with Stalin's Soviet Union. When he woke up in the morning, Levitan found himself staring down the barrels of four handguns. In prison, he comes up with a strategy for survival. He entertains his fellow inmates and writes and writes and writes. He records the events that transpire in prison, as well as his own thoughts, his fight for survival and his battle with the institution. He is a student of ‘the school of prison’. He is internally free to study everything he wants, and finds erotic pleasure in his constant writing, which is then sneaked out through the prison bars.

You know what they say about the Peloponnesian War: that it only happened so that Thucydides could write History of the Peloponnesian War. And that also holds true for Zupan: everything that happened to him only happened so he could write novels about it. – Mladina

Župančič Award, the highest recognition of the City of Ljubljana for outstanding creation in the field of art and culture, 1982

Today, everything that was good about Zupan’s novel thirty years ago, is even better, even more profound and – perhaps most unusually – even more intense. Instead of the intensity dissipating with the passage of time that turns current into not-so-current affairs, instead of the tension in the novel being relieved, Levitan is stronger than ever. Some of its strength perhaps lies in the biological age of the reader, but it’s not just that. By taking the pathos out of his eventual fate, Zupan had left the story to run past the structure and narrative of the novel, to fork and branch into a Mississippi-like delta, into a book whose strength is above any and all ideological and religious particularities.

Croatian writer Miljenko Jergović
If it was once praised as a critique of communist terror, today Zupan’s Levitan is a literary parallel of Italian comic Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful. In his novel, Zupan creates an autobiographic character, a prisoner who understands his incarceration as a school of life. Because he counts on being killed, he is able to overcome his fears. All the while drinking up the days as if he were free.

Mladina
Levitan’s ambition is to be a document of its time, a justification of the writer’s innocence, as well as a reflection of political and social oppression of the individual – all this in the literary form of a rather singular novel.

Slovenian literary historian Vanesa Matajc

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