[The] Republic of Sarmeda is located somewhere outside the geography of history. It is the setting of Dan Jacobson's The Confessions of Josef Baisz, an account of a systematic traitor and police-spy whose confession of "my days as a petty functionary" is, at least partly, an allegory of the artist as political Judas. Like Judas, Josef Baisz "can love only through betrayal", and his justification of his sins contains occasional insights into the psychology of disloyalty. Baisz is disloyal to the bureaucrats who employ him, and his autobiography is offered as a translation…. It's a witty parody of the standard academic preface, and as Dan Jacobson lectures at an English university there are sound reasons for thinking that The Confessions of Josef Baisz is on one level an account both of the situation of a writer employed by an academic institution and of the spirit that now pervades...