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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.
"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 denouement. "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 denouement. "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.
An NYRB Classics Original. Virtually unpublished during his
lifetime, Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky's fantastic and blackly comic
philosophical fables have since 1989 earned him a reputation as one
of the greatest Russian writers of the twentieth century. Included
in this collection of eleven newly translated tales are some of his
strangest and most brilliant conceits: a provincial journalist who
moves to Moscow finds his existence consumed by the autobiography
of his room's previous occupant, a suicide who vacated his hundred
square feet in exchange for his successor's consideration of his
manuscript; the fingers of a celebrated pianist's right hand run
away to spend an abrasive night alone on the city streets; a man's
lifelong quest to bite his own elbow inspires both a wildly popular
circus act and a new refutation of Kant; a desperate energy crisis
is resolved through the systematic exploitation of the one
substance to reliably increase along with the dysfunctions of
modern life: bile, or "yellow coal." Abounding in nested
narratives, wild paradox, and improbably high stakes-what would you
do if a Stygian toad landed on your pillow one night and asked for
help in saving the world by building a bridge to death?-the
unlikely stories in Autobiography of a Corpse ask you to take a
second look at the cracks in everyday reality.
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.
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.
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