Review by New York Times Review
the stories in this collection by the early Soviet writer Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky are nearly as fantastic as the crashing combination of consonants at the beginning of his surname. In one, the reflection of a man in his girlfriend's eye vanishes down the dark corridors of her pupil and falls into a deep well, where it joins the lonely, miserable reflections of her previous lovers. There the reflections debate their mistress's charms and caprices, as well as their own deficiencies of character. And they plot their escape. The hero of another story, a writer, composes a tale about a hermit whose prayers temporarily close all the cracks in the world - potholes, mountain gorges, facial wrinkles, even "the cranial seams hidden under the skin on people's heads." After reading the yarn to some indifferent friends, the writer is visited by an enthusiastic scientist, a reincarnation of the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who claims that reality itself, the entire space-time continuum, is no less cracked than our everyday world, riddled with gaps and intermittencies. Krzhizhanovsky (1887-1950) was from the generation of Soviet writers who came to Moscow in the 1920s, a time of explosive literary ferment. Mikhail Bulgakov, Yuri Olesha, Andrei Platonov and others, while working on revolutionary newspapers and in avant-garde theaters, were often appalled by the headlong modernization, mechanization and collectivization of the society they saw around them. Their best work, much of it satirically fabulous, expressed their disquiet without putting themselves in opposition. At least they didn't think they were in opposition. The Bolsheviks were still establishing the parameters of accepted artistic and political speech. Stalinist repression had not yet lowered the boom. Among the most alienated of the bunch was Krzhizhanovsky, who occupied a cell-like room on Arbat Street. Born to Polishspeaking Roman Catholics in polyglot Kiev, he had apparently gone to Moscow with few contacts or affiliations. He found some odd literary jobs, but his stories, plays and novels went unpublished. Only nine of his short stories appeared in print in his lifetime, and he never saw any of his plays produced. It was not until 1989 that the liberalizing Soviet authorities allowed Krzhizhanovsky's work to be published. "Autobiography of a Corpse" is the third volume of his fiction to appear in the United States. Although his work was not directly dissident, it's easy to see why these stories, most of them written in the 1920s, had difficulty finding publishers. Krzhizhanovsky expressed no interest in joining or contributing to socialist society; rather, he stressed his isolation from it. His protagonists are invariably soul-sick or, as he memorably put it, "desoulerated." They suffer from "psychorrhea," or "soul seepage." Most subversively, he suggests that this alienation is not the perversity of a single individual but a general response to society. In a muted but potent challenge to the commissars, he argues that the "mental deadening could be creeping - from skull to skull, from an individual to a group, from a group to a class, from a class to an entire social organism." The most transparent expression of this alienation appears in his 1922 fable, "The Land of Nots," about a nation whose people are defined by a fragment of text from a late-17th-century census report: "Those come to serve the Great Sovereign count as Ises, others mark down as Nots." Krzhizhanovsky clearly identifies with the Nots, even as he recognizes that the era's politics won't accept the reality of nonconformist individuals. "Not scholars shut up in their studies spend endless years trying to prove to themselves and others - with the help of letters - that they exist; this is a favorite theme in their tracts and dissertations; the letters comply, but the truth always tells the Not: no." The Russian word for truth is "pravda," the same as the name for the Communist Party newspaper. Even with the skillful labor of the collection's translators, Joanne Turnbull and Nikolai Formozov, contemporary readers will find much of Krzhizhanovsky's writing excessively talky and his philosophizing sophomoric. Occasionally, however, readers will glimpse their own anxieties and anomie in those of his century-old "desoulerated" Russians. They may also discover that the cracks in the fabric of Krzhizhanovsky's spacetime continuum - those furrows and rifts generated by headlong modernization, digitalization and globalization - resemble those that alienate us from our own. KEN KALFUS is the author of "The Commissariat of Enlightenment" and "Pu-239 and Other Russian Fantasies." His most recent novel is "Equilateral."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [November 24, 2013]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Sly, vibrant, and often very funny, Krzhizhanovsky's stories, originally written in the 1920s and '30s (though virtually unpublished during the author's lifetime), are a joy. In "In the Pupil," the narrator's reflection in his lover's eye leads to all kinds of drama. "Postmark: Moscow" consists of 13 letters to a friend and gives a finely rendered sense of place and time: "Moscow is a mishmash of utterly unrelated (logically and optically) building ensembles..." In "The Collector of Cracks," a fairy tale leads to musings of great importance. The title story records a personal history related to a room. In "Yellow Coal," human spite is harnessed as an energy source. "The Runaway Fingers" provides both a lesson in the etiquette of proper inquiry and an investigation of artistry. The best of the many exceedingly fine stories here is "The Unbitten Elbow," in which a man's life's goal of trying to bite his own elbow leads to scarcely imagined changes in society. Full of precise detail, this book will instruct, delight, and then leave the reader pondering long after the reading is finished. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Eleven new translations of stories by one of Russia's great writers, virtually unknown in his time. Krzhizhanovsky (1887-1950) was exiled to obscurity under Soviet oppression. To this day, no one knows where he is buried. Just a sampling of the writer's early-20th-century writings (Memories of the Future, 2009, etc.) offers a wealth of strange pleasures. In the title story, a remote journalist becomes obsessed with the autobiography of his room's previous occupant. "In the Pupil" is another odd tale of an affair and a man's journey into his lover's eye. "Human love is a frightened thing with half-shut eyes: it dives into the dusk, skitters about in dark corners, speaks in whispers, hides behind curtains, and puts out the light," Krzhizhanovsky writes. Some stories are both literal and fantastic; in "The Runaway Fingers," a world-class pianist's fingers run off to spend a night sleeping rough in the streets. In "Yellow Coal," the world's energy crisis is resolved by harnessing the world's spite: The titular energy source is bile. Still others are distinctly Russian fairy tales. In "Bridge Over the Styx," an albino Stygian toad asks an engineer to construct a bridge to Hades. This collection isn't quite a revelation but definitely qualifies as buried treasure. Funny and pointed satire from one of literature's lost souls.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
