Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky – författare

An NYRB Classics OriginalWinner of the  2014 PEN Translation Prize Winner of the 2014 Read Russia PrizeThe stakes are wildly high in Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s fantastic and blackly comic philosophical fables, which abound in nested narratives and wild paradoxes. This new collection of eleven mind-bending and spellbinding tales includes some of Krzhizhanovsky’s most dazzling conceits: a provincial journalist who moves to Moscow finds his existence consumed by the autobiography of his room’s previous occupant; the fingers of a celebrated pianist’s right hand run away to spend a night alone on the city streets; a man’s lifelong quest to bite his own elbow inspires both a hugely popular circus act and a new refutation of Kant. Ordinary reality cracks open before our eyes in the pages of Autobiography of a Corpse, and the extraordinary spills out.

“I’m not on good terms with the present day,” Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky once mused, “but posterity loves me.” Virtually unknown during his lifetime and unpublishable under Stalin, he now draws comparisons to Beckett, Borges, Gogol, and Swift. This book presents three tales that encapsulate Krzhizhanovsky’s gift for creating philosophical, satirical, and lyrical phantasmagorias.“Stravaging ‘Strange’” details the darkly comic adventures of an apprentice magus: lovesick, he imbibes a magic tincture to reduce himself to the size of a dust mote, the better to observe the young lady in question. He stumbles across a talkative king of hearts, a gallant flea, a coven of vindictive house imps, and his romantic rival along the way to a cinematic dénouement. “Catastrophe” wryly parodies Kant’s philosophy: an old sage decides to extract the essence from all things and beings in a ruthless attempt to understand reality—and chaos ensues. “Material for a Life of Gorgis Katafalaki,” set in Berlin, Paris, London, and Moscow, recounts the absurd trials of an otherworldly outsider of uncertain nationality and unfixed profession with boundless curiosity but scant means.This book also includes excerpts from Krzhizhanovsky’s notebooks—aphoristic glimpses of his worldview, moods, humor, and writing methods—and reminiscences of Krzhizhanovsky by his lifelong companion, Anna Bovshek, beginning with their first meeting in Kiev in 1920 and ending with his death in Moscow in 1950.

“I’m not on good terms with the present day,” Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky once mused, “but posterity loves me.” Virtually unknown during his lifetime and unpublishable under Stalin, he now draws comparisons to Beckett, Borges, Gogol, and Swift. This book presents three tales that encapsulate Krzhizhanovsky’s gift for creating philosophical, satirical, and lyrical phantasmagorias.“Stravaging ‘Strange’” details the darkly comic adventures of an apprentice magus: lovesick, he imbibes a magic tincture to reduce himself to the size of a dust mote, the better to observe the young lady in question. He stumbles across a talkative king of hearts, a gallant flea, a coven of vindictive house imps, and his romantic rival along the way to a cinematic dénouement. “Catastrophe” wryly parodies Kant’s philosophy: an old sage decides to extract the essence from all things and beings in a ruthless attempt to understand reality—and chaos ensues. “Material for a Life of Gorgis Katafalaki,” set in Berlin, Paris, London, and Moscow, recounts the absurd trials of an otherworldly outsider of uncertain nationality and unfixed profession with boundless curiosity but scant means.This book also includes excerpts from Krzhizhanovsky’s notebooks—aphoristic glimpses of his worldview, moods, humor, and writing methods—and reminiscences of Krzhizhanovsky by his lifelong companion, Anna Bovshek, beginning with their first meeting in Kiev in 1920 and ending with his death in Moscow in 1950.

Almost unknown during his lifetime, Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky is now hailed as a master of Russian prose. His short stories and novels, unpublishable under Stalinism but rediscovered long after his death, have drawn comparisons to the works of Jorge Luis Borges for their distinctive blend of metafictional play and philosophical thought experiment. Like Borges, Krzhizhanovsky also wrote dazzlingly unconventional essayistic pieces as a slippery extension of his fictional project.Countries That Don’t Exist showcases a selection of Krzhizhanovsky’s exceptional nonfiction, which spans a dizzying range of genres and voices. Playful fantasies dwelling in the borderlands between essay and fable, metaphysical conversations and probing literary criticism, philosophical essays and wartime memoirs—in all these modes Krzhizhanovsky’s writing bristles with idiosyncratic erudition and a starkly original vision of literary creation. Krzhizhanovsky comes across as a strange voice from another past, at once utterly novel yet unmistakably belonging to the high modernist 1920s and 1930s. Taken together, these works present to the English-speaking world a fresh aspect of a newly canonized author.Countries That Don’t Exist also features critical commentary that places these texts in the context of Krzhizhanovsky’s other writings and illuminates their relationship to the philosophical and aesthetic ferment of Russian and European modernism.

Almost unknown during his lifetime, Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky is now hailed as a master of Russian prose. His short stories and novels, unpublishable under Stalinism but rediscovered long after his death, have drawn comparisons to the works of Jorge Luis Borges for their distinctive blend of metafictional play and philosophical thought experiment. Like Borges, Krzhizhanovsky also wrote dazzlingly unconventional essayistic pieces as a slippery extension of his fictional project.Countries That Don’t Exist showcases a selection of Krzhizhanovsky’s exceptional nonfiction, which spans a dizzying range of genres and voices. Playful fantasies dwelling in the borderlands between essay and fable, metaphysical conversations and probing literary criticism, philosophical essays and wartime memoirs—in all these modes Krzhizhanovsky’s writing bristles with idiosyncratic erudition and a starkly original vision of literary creation. Krzhizhanovsky comes across as a strange voice from another past, at once utterly novel yet unmistakably belonging to the high modernist 1920s and 1930s. Taken together, these works present to the English-speaking world a fresh aspect of a newly canonized author.Countries That Don’t Exist also features critical commentary that places these texts in the context of Krzhizhanovsky’s other writings and illuminates their relationship to the philosophical and aesthetic ferment of Russian and European modernism.

This collection of theater writings by the Russian modernist Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky brings his powerful, wildly imaginative vision of theater to an English-language audience for the first time. The centerpiece is his play That Third Guy (1937), a farce written at the onset of the Stalinist Terror and never performed. Its plot builds on Alexander Pushkin's poem Cleopatra, while parodying the themes of Eros and empire in the Cleopatra tales of two writers Krzhizhanovsky adored: Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw. In a chilling echo of the Soviet 1930s, Rome here is a police state, and the Third Guy (a very bad poet) finds himself in its dragnet. As he scrambles to escape his fate, the end of the Roman Republic thunders on offstage.The volume also features selections from Krzhizhanovsky's compelling and idiosyncratic essays on Shakespeare, Pushkin, Shaw, and the philosophy of theater. Professionally, he worked with director Alexander Tairov at the Moscow Kamerny Theater, and his original philosophy of the stage bears comparison with the great theater theorists of the twentieth century. In these writings, he reflects on the space and time of the theater, the resonance of language onstage, the experience of the actor, and the relationship between the theater and the everyday. Commentary by Alisa Ballard Lin and Caryl Emerson contextualizes Krzhizhanovsky's writings.

Written in Soviet Moscow in the 1920s—but considered too subversive even to show to a publisher—the seven tales included here attest to Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s boundless imagination, black humor, and breathtaking irony: a man loses his way in the vast black waste of his own small room; the Eiffel Tower runs amok; a kind soul dreams of selling “everything you need for suicide”; an absentminded passenger boards the wrong train, winding up in a place where night is day, nightmares are the reality, and the backs of all facts have been broken; a man out looking for work comes across a line for logic but doesn’t join it as there’s no guarantee the logic will last; a sociable corpse misses his own funeral; an inventor gets a glimpse of the far-from-radiant communist future.