Rise and Fall of Parkinson's Disease

by Svetislav Basara, Randall Major (Translator)

Overview

Exploring sanity and insanity, truth and untruth, The Rise and Fall of Parkinson’s Disease is Svetislav Basara’s unblinking and unforgettable deconstruction of the Soviet psyche.

Told as an eclectic collection of appropriated testimonies, treatises, missives, and police files, The Rise and Fall of Parkinson’s Disease follows the progression of the contagion’s patient zero, a Soviet citizen (sometimes) named Demyan Lavrentyevich Parkinson, as he ascends from hellish health to the sacred illness.

Hailed as one of Serbia’s most influential living writers, Svetislav Basara’s scathing, irreverent critiques of authoritarianism have twice won him Serbia’s prestigious NIN Award. In The Rise and Fall of Parkinson’s Disease, Basara lives up to this reputation with a book as formally ambitious as it is intellectually sophisticated. His blend of grotesque absurdism and wry humor evokes the paranoid, vexing worlds of Franz Kafka’s novels and the meta-textual assemblages of Paul Auster. Told from a colorful range of perspectives, the novel is a multifaceted, crystalline account of truth, lies, and history, a sprawling case study of humans in an inhuman society.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781628975109
Publisher:	Deep Vellum Publishing
Publication date:	06/10/2025
Series:	Serbian Literature
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Born in 1953, Svetislav Basara is a major figure in Serbian and Eastern European literature. The author of more than twenty novels, essay and short story collections, he is also the winner of numerous awards and honors, including the NIN Prize in 2008. Between 2001 and 2005 Basara served as Serbia and Montenegro's ambassador to Cyprus.

Randall A. Major is a linguist and translator. He teaches in the English department at the University of Novi Sad, and is one of the editors and translators of the Serbian Prose in Translation series produced by Geopoetika Publishing in Belgrade. His translations of Basara’s In Seach of the Grail and Fata Morgana are also available from Dalkey Archive Press.

Read an Excerpt

Demyan Lavrentyevich Parkinson, the inventor of the horrible disease, died of exhaustion in 1947 under the alias of Nikolai Nikolayevich Kuznetsov, in a gulag on the River Kolyma. Under the hackneyed name Parkinson, he was to spend another forty-three turbulent cadaverous years, until perestroika and glasnost and the demise of the USSR; if the facts from the existing chronology and biography are to be believed, Demyan Lavrentyevich (now already rehabilitated) contributed profoundly to that demise. D. L. Parkinson was, thus, rehabilitated along with hundreds of thousands of both real and fictitious internees, and his name—the home of his oozing being—was restored. His illness, however, fell into oblivion, barely scraping by in a humiliating status. It is still morbus Parkinsoni, more popularly known as parkinsonism, but its surviving contemporaries all agree—the symptoms and clinical picture have nothing to do with the original Parkinson’s disease. This is not just a mutation of the illness itself, like tuberculosis, which constantly finds biochemical strategies to adapt to antibiotics; no, parkinsonism, which is incurable anyway, is now a profane collection of syndromes borrowed from several insignificant diseases which, seen together, mostly look like Alzheimer’s. Modern parkinsonism is obviously a fake. However, why would one fake a disease? The same question also bothered F. R. Voznesensky, a historian with access to the archives of the imperial Okhrana, the NKVD, the KGB, and Lubyanka. The only question is: where does one begin? The uninformed—though everyone is uninformed about this issue—are nowhere even close to imagining the enormity of those archives, not to mention the uncountable number of documents stored in them. (According to some accounts, those archives contain a record of all roads, towns, villages, streets, houses, and people, their writings and conversations, encompassing the last three centuries.)