A New York Review Books Original
Writers are professional killers of conceptions. The logic of the
Letter Killers Club, a secret society of "conceivers" who commit
nothing to paper on principle, is strict and uncompromising. Every
Saturday they meet in a fire-lit room hung with blank black
bookshelves to present their "pure and unsubstantiated"
conceptions: a rehearsal of Hamlet hijacked by an actor who
vanishes with the role; the double life of a medieval merry 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. The overarching scene of
this short novel is set in Soviet Moscow, in the ominous 1920s.
Known only by pseudonym, like Chesterton's anarchists in
fin-de-siecle London, the Letter Killers are as mistrustful of one
another as they are mesmerized by their despotic president.
Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky is at his philosophical and fantastical
best in this extended meditation on madness and silence, the word
and the soul unbound.