Three imaginative tales showcase Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky's talent for weaving philosophical, satirical, and lyrical narratives. The book also features excerpts from his notebooks, offering insights into his worldview, humor, and writing techniques. Additionally, reminiscences by his lifelong companion, Anna Bovshek, provide a personal glimpse into the author's life and thoughts, enriching the reader's understanding of his unique literary style and influence.
Almost unknown during his lifetime, Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky is now hailed as
a master of Russian prose. Countries That Don't Exist showcases a selection of
Krzhizhanovsky's exceptional nonfiction, which spans a dizzying range of
genres and voices.
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.Contents:QuadraturinThe BookmarkSomeone Else's ThemeThe Branch LineRed SnowThe Thirteenth Category of ReasonMemories of the Future
The 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.Contents:Autobiography of a corpse --In the pupil --Seams --The collector of cracks --The land of nots --The runaway fingers --The unbitten elbow --Yellow coal --Bridge over the Styx --Thirty pieces of silver --Postmark: Moscow.
A New York Review Books Original The Letter Killers Club is a secret society of self-described “conceivers” who, to preserve the purity of their conceptions, will commit nothing to paper. (What, after all, is your run-of-the-mill scribbler of stories if not an accomplished corruptor of conceptions?) The logic of the club is strict and uncompromising. Every Saturday, members meet in a firelit room filled with empty black bookshelves where they strive to top one another by developing ever unlikelier, ever more perfect conceptions: a rehearsal of Hamlet hijacked by an actor who vanishes with the role; the double life of a merry medieval cleric derailed by a costume change; a machine-run world that imprisons men’s minds while conscripting their bodies; a dead Roman scribe stranded this side of the River Acheron. But in this book set in an ominous Soviet Moscow of the 1920s, the members of the club are strangely mistrustful of one another, while all are under the spell of its despotic President, and there is no telling, in the end, just how lethal the purely conceptual—or, for that matter, letters—may be.
Anthology of 11 stories by writers mostly of the post-Revolutionary period,
including V. Bryusov, M. Bulgakov, A. Grin, S. Krzhizhanovsky, A. Chayanov et
al., using a forbidden genre to explore the dark underside of the machine age
and the new political order. First English translations (exc. Bryusov's In the
Mirror and Bulgakov's Red Crown).
Die Figur des Hieronymus Carl Friedrich Freiherr von Münchhausen – auch bekannt als Lügenbaron – und seine phantastischen Geschichten faszinieren seit Jahrhunderten. Sofort denken wir an den berühmten Ritt auf der Kanonenkugel oder an seine Wunderbaren Reisen zu Wasser und zu Lande von 1738, die ihn auch nach Russland führen. Sigismund Krzyzanowski erlaubt sich seine eigenen Freiheiten mit dem Baron. In seinem phantastischen Roman, der in den 1920er Jahren in Berlin, London und Moskau spielt, erzählt er von der Rückkehr Münchhausens. Der 200 Jahre alte Baron und selbsternannte Philosoph fällt vom Zeiger der Zeit direkt in die Bibliothek von Schloss Trianon ins Jahr 1919, wo er in die Versailler Konferenz gerät. Und noch einmal bricht Münchhausen auf, um als Geheimagent ins Land der Sowjets zu reisen.
