ДАНИЛО КИШ И ГНОСТИЦИЗАМ
DANILO KIŠ AND GNOSTICISM

Summary/Abstract: Despite the awareness of the significant influence of gnosticism on the mature po-ethics and life philosophy of Danilo Kiš, in the ample literature about his life and work no piece of writing is dedicated to this subject matter. In order to clarify the writer’s attitude towards the spiritual movement and its contemporary heritage, the author draws attention to the texts which cannot be understood outside the context of the widespread gnostic teaching: the story “Simon Magus”, the essays “The Exile and Kingdom of Maria Čudina” and “About the Marquis de Sade” as well as the writer’s explicit statements and fragments from the legacy which additionally prove Kiš’s gnostic attitudes and stances. The greatest attention is dedicated to the story “Simon Magus”, its documentary and historic sources (in which the truth and the legends about a gnostic teacher Simon Magus and Simonian teaching are interlaced), and the ideological discourse of the story. The author reveals its prototext in the essay “The Highroads of Samaria” from the book The Gnostics by Jacques Lacarrière, indicating at the same time the intertextual procedures and narration techniques used by Kiš as well as the common stance shared by the two authors regarding the historical persecution of gnostics by the victorious Christian religion. Nonetheless, Kiš does not adopt Lacarrière’s attitudes, but remains faithful to his po-ethical conviction that literature corrects the injustices of history and in that sense it is “The Book of the Dead”.

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