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Autobiography of a Corpse

by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky , Joanne Turnbull (Translation) , Nikolai Formozov (Translation) , Adam Thirlwell (Introduction)

3.95 of 5 stars 3.95 · rating details · 307 ratings · 50 reviews

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 autobiogra ...more

Paperback , 230 pages

Published December 3rd 2013 by NYRB Classics (first published January 1st 2013)

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Community Reviews

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Jan 28, 2014 Tony rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: nyrb-classics , russian

This is like fables on acid, man.

Wait. Wait a minute. I mean, honestly, I've never actually been on acid. I've never even been remotely close to being on acid. So just strike that. That was me trying to be hip, which is silly and pretentious and fraudulent.

This is like fables on hashish, man.

There. That's better.

This book is a collection of stories - fables, parables - written by Krzhizhanovsky (yes, it's pronounced just like it looks) in the '20s and '30s and with enough 'Is he talking about us ...more

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Jun 05, 2015 Mala rated it 5 of 5 stars

Recommends it for: Fans of Borges, Kafka, & Poe

Shelves: interesting-crazy-weird , read-in-2015 , short-stories

Wow!
Eleven stories—eleven different faces of paranoia, whimsy, stunted desires, manias, in varying degrees of the bizarre & the fantastical. It's hard to choose a favourite here; almost all of them register high on the novelty meter. Krzhizhanovsky chooses unconventional subjects ( e.g. The Collector of Cracks, now who would've thought of that!) & gives them a unique treatment.
Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (1887-1950) was one of history's deleted characters; just like the 0.6 person of his st
Wow!
Eleven stories—eleven different faces of paranoia, whimsy, stunted desires, manias, in varying degrees of the bizarre & the fantastical. It's hard to choose a favourite here; almost all of them register high on the novelty meter. Krzhizhanovsky chooses unconventional subjects ( e.g. The Collector of Cracks, now who would've thought of that!) & gives them a unique treatment.
Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (1887-1950) was one of history's deleted characters; just like the 0.6 person of his story: a tragedy of being in the wrong place at the wrong time writing the wrong kind of books.
But there's justice in the world even though the wheels of justice take forever to move. All of Krzhizhanovsky's books were published posthumously & thanks to the literature in translation we are now able to read and celebrate this neglected writer.
Like Poe & Kafka, he had looked into the abyss & his stories take you right to that point: "psychorrhea," i.e. "soul seepage," loneliness & problem of space in a big city, the nature of identity & reality, musings on space & time, alienation, death, etc, are some of the themes tackled.
But all is not gloom & doom here—there's a talking Toad that quotes Juvenal & Hegel! Postmark: Moscow, a tribute to Moscow in thirteen postmarks is very Walser-like in its rambling thoughts & featherlight touch. This epistolary tale reference many of the ideas present in other stories here, emphasizing the autobiographical elements in K's writing. Then there are delicious Borgesian stories like The Land of Nots &, The Unbitten Elbow, with their metaphysical approach, wrapped in a self-deprecatory, tongue-in-cheek humour that provides necessary emotional distance from the oddities on display. Both pathos & irony run high here: the "bilification of life" spurred by the energy of "Yellow Coal" is funny & sad at the same time. On second thought, I'd call Yellow Coal, Seams, & Thirty Pieces of Silver my favourite tales.
I took it as a filler read before picking up another big fat book—it turned out to be one of the reading surprises of this year! Such serendipities make reading an absolute joy.
*********
Since I'm such a sucker for beautiful eyes, here is a passage from the story, In the Pupil: (view spoiler) [ "One can say with certainty that in love the eyes . . .how shall I put it . . .always run ahead. That’s understandable: They are nimbler and know their business, that is, how to look at and through. While lovers’ bodies, huge and clumsy as compared with their eyes, hide from each other behind the stuff of their clothes, while even their words dither and dally on their lips, afraid to take the leap, their eyes—far out in front—are already surrendering."(46)

How Borgesian are these!
"if a dreamer may not believe in the reality of his dream, then a dream may doubt the existence of its dreamer. It’s all a question of who anticipates whom."
— Bridge over the Styx (156)

"One Not adept began thus: “I think, therefore I am.” But existence is not a consequence of thought—thought is a consequence of existence. And since even Not logic strictly forbids arguments in which a premise follows from a conclusion, the Nots, by inferring their existence from their thinking, forbid themselves to themselves with all the premises of their logics. And yet, do many Nots think? Occasional thinkers, a handful of ideationists. And that’s all. I don’t recall any others. So the rest of them not only don’t exist, they don’t even think. Scholarly Nots, immured in their studies and the pages of their books, typically divide their all into “I” and “not-I.” Therefore, given Not A and Not B in their respective studies, A is “not-I” to B, and B is “not-I” to A. In other words, both A and B will always be “not-I” to someone. That constant “someone” (even their sages did not suspect) was I, an Is, journeying through their land."
—The Land of Nots (115)

And how Kafkaesque is this!
"Man, however, must be not only without man but without God; the tenet of divine omnipresence violates his right to solitude; that unblinking eye fixed on his life, peering through its mystical triangle as through a prison-cell peephole, must be removed. Hence the distinctive urban atheism of beings who, after a long day of rushing about among questioners and observers, of struggling frantically to break away from “we” to “I,” crave at least a few minutes of complete isolation, out of sight and reach of everything without."
—Seams (81) (hide spoiler) ] ["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]> ...more

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Dec 29, 2014 Antonomasia added it

Recommended to Antonomasia by: Best Translated Book Award longlist 2014

Shelves: short-stories , central-eastern-europe , btba , 2014 , ukraine , sff , russia , decade-2010s

[2.5] No more books of short stories by early twentieth century East European writers introduced by Adam Thirlwell. That shouldn't be too difficult a resolution to keep.

Almost as much as with the volume of Kafka prefaced by Thirlwell which I read early in the year, I'm in a minority by not being terribly keen on this.

It made fascinating, sometimes prescient ideas remarkably dry. At times I wanted to argue with the illogic of the stories. The philosophy said little that I found new or profound. [2.5] No more books of short stories by early twentieth century East European writers introduced by Adam Thirlwell. That shouldn't be too difficult a resolution to keep.

Almost as much as with the volume of Kafka prefaced by Thirlwell which I read early in the year, I'm in a minority by not being terribly keen on this.

It made fascinating, sometimes prescient ideas remarkably dry. At times I wanted to argue with the illogic of the stories. The philosophy said little that I found new or profound. Moments of satire sometimes fell flat, as in mediocre British comic novels.

I found much of the book skilful yet shallowly whimsical and detached, as if it had been written by a sheltered twenty-year old Williamsburg hipster of prodigious talent and wide reading, but bugger-all life experience and feeling, never having so much as fallen in love or suffered or witnessed significant illness or poverty unlike his Romantic forebears of 200 years earlier. (It's entirely possible that the translation, for a US market which undoubtedly includes plenty such, has produced this effect of superficiality.)

Neither were some of the pieces as fantastical as the write-ups implied; more often they are obviously metaphorical. A few, towards the end, are strongly reminiscent of concepts or openings for Neil Gaiman stories, but, they are, by comparison frustratingly lacking in good plots (plots that from a virtuoso like NG would enhance their underlying meaning) - they don't go anywhere much, tossing and turning and muttering, emitting the occasional damp-squib sound. When I pick this book up, I understand hardcore SFF readers who scorn slipstream, magic realism and 'literary' authors' attempts at the genre. It's like bread with as much butter scraped back off as possible. Stale brown bread at that.

The observations about the dark corners of city life are potentially great, but can come across with all the empathy and contextual understanding of smartarse well-off teenagers overheard on public transport, who implicitly consider the life of the street as a theatre existing for their amusement. (And who will, 15 years later, most likely cringe at their future counterparts...)

I disconnected from the book quite early on, and it never really won me back, even when trying it again, and finishing it, months later.
Still, there were a couple of exceptions to the meh:
- 'The Runaway Fingers': Short tale of the escaped hand of a concert pianist, reminiscent of unsettling fairy-tales for grownups by the likes of James Thurber.
- 'Postmark Moscow': Whilst many of the preceding stories feel pointless to read, like ragged shadows of things done better elsewhere, there's every point to this last piece, which saves the book from the ignominous 2 stars - a realist series of letters from a Kievan writer visiting Moscow, which barely belongs with the rest of the volume. At times the atmosphere is marred by contemporary litfic tics (which add to my suspicion that it's the work of the translators I have a problem with more than Krzhizh himself). Regardless, it's full of reflections about the contemporary, i.e. 1920s, environment and Muscovite history, with a trove of little observations about words and their significance (a handful more added fleeting sparkle to other stories in this volume). e.g Moscow was subject to frequent major fires from the fourteenth to eighteenth century and Russian has a single word for "a person who has lost everything in a fire". Places whose names changed over time, different meaning but similar sounds: the church of Nikolai w Klennikakh [Maples]/ Klinnikakh [Blades - an armourer set up nearby] /Blinnikakh [Blinis - a blini shop]. The author takes a greater delight in words than the average writer of history or guidebooks, making these observations all the more loveable. This piece even made me want to look things up, not get it over and done with like the others.

Autobiography of a Corpse has done nothing to change my aversion to NYRB Classics - made me more wary if anything, as I dislike American translations. It also uses that archaic and pointlessly frustrating structure of having endnotes but no pointers in the text: the best - and least petty - reason I've found to avoid the imprint where other editions are available. And now I know to try and avoid NYRBs in paper form, as the print was too small and closely packed to be really comfortable. At least the cover is decent - they've used an abstract Kandinsky, not the usual dreary post-Impressionist blur, and as it's a diffuse pattern, the central placement of the title box for once doesn't ruin the picture.

Oh, never mind, you'll probably love all of it. (A handful of friends/following - who aren't glib twenty year olds - already do.) ...more

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view all 8 comments

Ted **laughs**
May 07, 2015 11:48PM

Antonomasia I just get frustrated by the way some people are prepared to hail any minor ‘foreign’ work as a neglected masterpiece if you slap an arty picture on t ...more
updated May 08, 2015 01:48AM

Jan 22, 2014 David rated it 5 of 5 stars

I've read Krzhizhanovsky before (Memories of the future), and didn't care for his writing style or material in that volume. However, I can say without a doubt, this is one of my favorite collections of short stories that I have ever read. First off, I would reccomend the Kindle version, as it makes it much easier to keep track of all the various footnotes, as Krzhizhanovsky makes numerous references to philosophers, philosophical teachings, religions, latin, various Russian folklore, locations, I've read Krzhizhanovsky before (Memories of the future), and didn't care for his writing style or material in that volume. However, I can say without a doubt, this is one of my favorite collections of short stories that I have ever read. First off, I would reccomend the Kindle version, as it makes it much easier to keep track of all the various footnotes, as Krzhizhanovsky makes numerous references to philosophers, philosophical teachings, religions, latin, various Russian folklore, locations, and plays-on-words, and much more, which would have caused me a great deal of annoyance to constantly flip to the back of the book to locate.

The stories in this volume are bizarre and fantastic, and also, from my outside perspective towards the Soviet Era, show the loneliness and non-person status of Krzhizhanovsky as an author, and a Soviet Citizen. It really is hard to explain without quoting at length from the book, so I'll leave it up to you to explore and learn.

Some of my favorite short stories in the collection are: "In the Pupil," about memory, and little people living in the reflections of their lover's eyes, "The Collector of Cracks," a fascinating and mind-bending tale, "The Land of Nots," "The Runaway Fingers," about a pianists fingers which leap off his hand mid concert and go on an adventure, "Thirty Pieces of Silver," about the travels of the 30 coins which Judas received for selling out Jesus Christ, and finally, my absolute favorite, "The Unbitten Elbow," about a man whose sole goal in life is to be able to bite his own elbow and the ways people try to rationalize it.

It is an AMAZING collection of short stories for those who like particularly strange stories, or who have a fascination with Soviet Era fiction (published, or in this case, suppressed). ...more

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Jan 03, 2014 Chuck LoPresti rated it 4 of 5 stars

Not to be read prior to Memories of the Future or Letter Killers Club, this collection of short works does the same as NYRB's previous two editions of K's short stories; it shows the fusion of engineering and literature in short outbursts of Soviet-era stories. Think something like Zoschenko's social satire meets Verne's love of machination and you've arrived at this point. Grin's dreamy adventure lit is also a salient point of comparison and K. makes it clear he's read his Grin. I must admit th ...more

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Sep 29, 2014 Leah rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2013 , literary-fiction , short-stories

“Man is to man a ghost”

This is a collection of short stories written by surely the most difficult to spell author of all-time, Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky. Writing under the Soviet regime in the early part of last century, most of his work didn’t get past the censors and remained unpublished until the period of Glasnost in the late ’80s. The stories are quirky and imaginative, sometimes fantastical, usually satirical, and often witty; and there are common themes of individual and social identity, r ...more

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Mar 02, 2014 Charles Dee Mitchell rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: modern-fiction

These intellectual fantastic tales can be heavy going, as they should be coming from an author whose name is so exquisitely unpronounceable. Krzhizhanovsky came to Moscow in the 1920’a from Kiev via a European tour that introduced him to the avant garde movements of the day. He worked in the theater and became a member of the writers’ union, but his fiction was unpublishable under the reign of Soviet censorship. His stories first met the public in 1989.

His work reminds me most of Edgar Allan, bu ...more

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May 11, 2015 Jonathan rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: russia , nyrb , wonderfully-weird , kindle-ebook , absolutely-fabulous , group-read , 20th-century , male-author

Though Krzhizhanovsky wrote these stories in the 1920s and 1930s they weren't actually published until the Soviet Union was on its last legs. It's no wonder then that he is not a well-known writer in the west. I hadn't heard of him until a few months ago.

The stories in this volume are surreal, fantastic tales; they remind me of E.T.A. Hoffmann and Franz Kafka as well as others - at times he's like Samuel Beckett . But Krzhizhanovsky has his own very distinctive style; he's obsessed with topics su ...more

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Jan 21, 2014 Catriona Macaulay rated it 4 of 5 stars

Whereas Perec and his intellectual games leave me cold, these have me page turning like a thriller. OK I'm not sure how much you get out of these if you haven't read much philosophy, but for lovers of fantasy, mind games and stories that want you to work a little at them, these are fantastic. As a couple of reviewers have mentioned it takes a while for the collection to get moving - The Collector of Cracks did it for me. In fact for a newbie it might be best to start with one of the earlier coll ...more

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Feb 23, 2014 Sharon rated it 4 of 5 stars

This was my first introduction to Krzhizhanovsky and, to be honest, the collection started off incredibly slow for me. Many of these feel like tales of lonely weirdos wandering through Moscow wondering about existence vs. the Void. I'm not a philosophy expert, so even with the footnotes, most of the headier themes were lost on me. Still, "The Unbitten Elbow" is one of my new favorite stories of all time, right up there with Kafka's "The Hunger Artist". "Yellow Coal," "The Collector of Cracks" an ...more

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May 16, 2015 Greg rated it 5 of 5 stars

I highly recommend this collection to my philosopher friends. The stories "The Collector of Cracks" and the "The Unbitten Elbow" are especially interesting; the former is a kind of parable of deconstruction, avant la lettre, and the later is a funny "critique" of Kant that include an explanation of the "the principles of unbiteability." Insightful references to Descartes, Leibniz, and especially to Kant are woven through many of the stories.

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Jun 23, 2014 Tuck rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: nyrb , oh-loyd-i-wanna-be-hearkbroken , chechnya-russia-ussr , wwii , western-rural-with-tractors-horse , pre-wwi

modernist, involved short stories to author's lover, moscow, and shes a cold bitch he can't leave. so how to live in the city on 10 kopeks a day (no booze, tobacco, or mass trans for you, just walk until you hallucinate)
amazing that his stories were never published, never. until after gorbachev. they stayed in his lover;s closet for all those years. god blees her.

(see aidans reivew for some of the zingers of this collection, just when you thought you have read it all, read krxhizhanovsky ) https ...more

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Jan 01, 2014 Lois rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: book-clubs

When Krzhizhanvosky described the Imaginists in the final story, it all made sense: what he excels at in these stories is creating fully developed fantastical images and following them down the rabbit hole. It would take me a while to get into each story (there is a lot of disbelief to suspend!) but I was eventually sucked in every time. My favourites were, I think, 'Yellow Coal'—such an interesting exploration of a fantastical idea that feels strangely realistic—and 'Postmark: Moscow', which ju ...more

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Jun 09, 2014 Full Stop added it

Shelves: fall-2013

http://www.full-stop.net/2014/01/09/r...

Review by Helen Stuhr-Rommereim

Soviet author Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s stories are so effusively strange that it seems a small miracle they ever made their way to publication at all. Admittedly, it was a long road. The Polish-Ukrainian transplant to Moscow wrote prose deemed too dangerously absurd to be published under Stalin in the 1920s and 30s, and his work wasn’t made publicly available until 1989 and the thaw of Soviet power. Autobiography of a Corps http://www.full-stop.net/2014/01/09/r...

Review by Helen Stuhr-Rommereim

Soviet author Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s stories are so effusively strange that it seems a small miracle they ever made their way to publication at all. Admittedly, it was a long road. The Polish-Ukrainian transplant to Moscow wrote prose deemed too dangerously absurd to be published under Stalin in the 1920s and 30s, and his work wasn’t made publicly available until 1989 and the thaw of Soviet power. Autobiography of a Corpse, a collection of eleven short stories with interlinking themes, is the third work of Krzhizhanovsky’s to be published in English translation by New York Review Books, and it is one of the most confounding and rewarding books I encountered in 2013.

Krzhizhanovsky comes across as a kind of Bulgakov on drugs. He’s less cogent and precise than the great Soviet satirical surrealist, more feverish and unfocused, but the two were contemporaries, and their writings share a sense that the “real” of their time — the years of burgeoning Stalinist power — was unreliable. In Autobiography of a Corpse, a dreamed up toad lost on its way to death confronts his dreamer, a man falls into a chasm through the pupil of his lover only to find her previous lovers also lost in its depths, and a man who’s “goal in life” is to bite his own elbow becomes a hero for “sociopathic dreamers and fanatics searching in our realistic and sober century for the impossible and impracticable” and garners legions of “elbowist” followers (true to Soviet form there are many improbable “-ists” in this book). The world of these stories is one of extreme instability: everything dissolves into component parts, whether it is language or time or space or the self.

Read the rest here: http://www.full-stop.net/2014/01/09/r... ...more

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Feb 24, 2014 Emily rated it 4 of 5 stars

Although Krzhizhanovsky's short stories were written in the Soviet Union in the 20s and 30s, some of his stories are just now finding audiences.

His stories relied on the surreal and bizarre: a pianist's fingers running detaching and running away, mysterious creatures living inside pupils, actually a lot of different grotesque scenarios involving eyes. My favorite was a more subdued commentary on the nature of greed: a story about the path of destruction that results from the coins Judas Iscario ...more

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Mar 01, 2014 Cooper Renner rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Krzhizhanovsky died in 1950, and these stories are mostly from the '20s, i.e. the very early years of the Soviet Union. Obviously he was not exactly the kind of writer Stalin wanted, and he was apparently not terribly widely published during his life. There is a light, comic tone to these tales, even if the subjects are sometimes more serious. Interesting, entertaining, but not exactly my cup of tea, and I wouldn't compare him to Borges--though some do--except perhaps for the "speculative" natur ...more

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Apr 18, 2014 Anna rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: nyrb-classics , nyrb-n-nook-april , novellas-short-stories

I’ll admit, there were several of these short stories were wayyyyy over my head (my philosophy-reading days, like my drinking-all-night days, are far behind me). But the ones I did get were appealingly weird: “The Runaway Fingers,” where the right hand of a concert pianist has adventures of its own, a la Gogol’s “The Nose”; “In the Pupil,” where the forgotten images of a woman’s lovers have nightly meetings behind her eye; my favorite, “Yellow Coal,” which solves a prescient energy crisis by har ...more

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Mar 07, 2014 Kris McCracken rated it 2 of 5 stars

Krzhizhanovsky was largely unpublished in his lifetime.

I expect that I know why...

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Nov 14, 2014 Joseph rated it 4 of 5 stars

The stories here range from good to excellent. If you like Kafka, Beckett, Calvino or Borges, you will appreciate this book, though Krzhizhanovsky cannot with precision be compared directly to any of those writers. If you're familiar with the history of Western philosophy, even better. If, in addition to those qualifications, the first 20 years after the Russian Revolution hold a special fascination for you, then some of these stories will insinuate themselves into the folds of your cerebral cor ...more

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Dec 30, 2014 dusty.rhodes rated it 5 of 5 stars

A very strong collection of short fictions from an author I was previously wholly unaware of.

The style of stories here seems to vary from those fairly straightforwardly foretold in the title "Autobiography of a Corpse" or "The Runaway Fingers" to things which are described but which go to unexpected places like "The Collector of Cracks", "The Land of Nots", or "The Unbitten Elbow".

These, like each of Krzhizhanovsky's fictions, have excellent phrases and notions hidden in plain sight:

"...just as ...more

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May 20, 2014 Melinda rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2013

Krzhizhanovksy an imaginative writer beyond comprehension passed away before his writings were known to the world. Soviet censors and WWII prevented publication of his works. Not hindered by obstacles Krzhizhanovksy secretly continued his writing. In 1989 Krzhizhanovksy's writing were discovered.

Autobiography of a Corpse is a collection of short stories with varying content. A philosophical edge, humorous, satirical and even bits of science fiction along with fantasy aspects are found in this ...more

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Mar 03, 2014 Jeff Scott rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: soviet-literature , russian-literature , fiction , short-stories , short-books

Krzhizhanovsky’s stories are filled with existential angst and desperation. These surreal stories have been compared to Kafka and Gogol. SK’s twist casts a shadow upon living in Soviet Russia wheras one who is not a party member is less than nothing, a minus one. Even though he doesn’t explicitly state this, the idea is peppered through most of the stories. It’s a sharp contrast as these lonely and isolating stories take place in the heart of Moscow. There is an erasure of identity, people who d Krzhizhanovsky’s stories are filled with existential angst and desperation. These surreal stories have been compared to Kafka and Gogol. SK’s twist casts a shadow upon living in Soviet Russia wheras one who is not a party member is less than nothing, a minus one. Even though he doesn’t explicitly state this, the idea is peppered through most of the stories. It’s a sharp contrast as these lonely and isolating stories take place in the heart of Moscow. There is an erasure of identity, people who don’t see or acknowledge you.

In the titular story, a man moves into a flat in Moscow only to find a note from the previous tenant documenting his last three days alive. His mad ramblings explore how men are reduced to points, to parts of a person, 0.6 to be exact, by government entities and by society. In Pupil, a man sees himself in the pupil of his lover and wonders why people are afraid of the dark, where dreams reside. Seams, Collector of Cracks, and Land of Nots all continue the theme of Autobiography of a Corpse with the focus on the “not there” the places in between, unseen. Runaway Fingers is definitely homage to Gogol’s The Nose (the fingers run away leaving the pianist less than). Some of the stories later in the book don’t seem to have the same punch as the earlier ones. The stories mix from 1922 to 1939.

This is one of a few Soviet-era books I’ve read. I’m more fascinated by those authors who are able to criticize the government and get published at the same time. Master and the Margarita is a very prominent example probably moreso that they didn’t know what to make of it. The other would be Envy by Yury Olesha, less prominent but still a clever critic. I can only imagine how frightening it would have been to not get published and face repercussions. SK read is material to small groups and people knew of it, but he was never published. This collection of work adequately conveys the feeling of being a non-person in the midst of a scared society.
...more

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Jul 21, 2014 Kevin Gross rated it 5 of 5 stars

A collection of short stories that are wonderful but at times difficult to read. The writing reminds me at times of Borges' imaginative alternate worlds. But for Krzhizhanovsky instead of world systems, it's aspects like cracks, shadows, fingers, and logical propositions that take on life and primacy. There are also flavors of Steve Erickson's early, lyrical writing and Dostoyevsky's lonely intellectualism.

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Apr 29, 2014 Andrew added it

Shelves: russian-fiction , soviet-era-fiction

I saw a New York Review-published book called "Autobiography of a Corpse" written by a guy with an absolutely unpronounceable Slavic last name, and more or less got a semi.

Yes, Krzhizhanovsky is standing in Gogol's shadow (-1 missing nose, +10 missing fingers, -1 czar, +1 Stalin, equal proportions of vodka and misery), but I don't have a problem with this. It's weird and fun and speculative and Russian, so naturally I love it.

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Sep 15, 2015 Daniel Polansky added it · review of another edition

Strange, sad, funny, the back of my book compares this to Borges and Beckett and that sounds about right. About half of the stories missed me, but about half of them – one about a priest given control over all of the world's cracks, one about a man who tries to bite his own elbow, and the societal rage this sets off – I absolutely adored. Definitely recommended.

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Oct 24, 2014 Fiona Caccese marked it as to-read

Fascinating start. A really rich story that will take more mental where-with-all than I have right now. Check it out: A man rents a room and the next day a document is delivered. The document claims to have been written by the former tenant of the room. He chose the new wallpaper and admitted that he hung himself behind the door. He obligates the reader to read his story. Will get back to this.

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Apr 05, 2014 Clark rated it 3 of 5 stars

I liked the ideas behind these stories more than I actually enjoyed reading then. I dunno, maybe I just wan't in the mood. Here's a thing I wrote about it for The Best Translated Book Awards 2014 though: http://www.rochester.edu/College/tran...

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Feb 03, 2015 Prose rated it 3 of 5 stars

The strain of intellectualism in the book is a little heavy at times; much of the short stories are concerned with failing theoretical attempts to describe the world. But the stories still shine, particularly as they become more plot-based; or, rather, more absurd.

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Jan 21, 2015 Sam rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 4-non-uk-foreign-fic , 7-classics , 5-translated , nyrb-classics , read-2014 , short-stories , reviewed , setting-russia-ussr

In this book, the NYRB brings together 11 of Krzhizhanovsky’s short stories written in 1922-39. There’s a good heaping of metaphysical questions he’s exploring here, and sometimes the overly ponderous way he works through them was a chore to get through. But for the most part, the stories—fantastical with sharp insight and witty wordplay—just charmed the socks off me. My favorites included the ones about a society that’s relegated to using people’s spite as its energy source; a man who devotes h ...more

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Jun 14, 2014 Charlotte rated it 1 of 5 stars

Major disappointment. Supposed to be the Russian forerunner of Magic Realism, wild philosophical tales that thrill, puzzle, and make you think. I just could not dig in, could not find a single thread of interest, where I had expected to find a new favorite writer.

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About Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

Сигизмунд Кржижановский

Sigizmund Dominikovich Krzhizhanovsky (Russian: Сигизмунд Доминикович Кржижановский) (February 11 [O.S. January 30] 1887, Kiev, Russian Empire — 28 December 1950, Moscow, USSR) was a Russian and Soviet short-story writer who described himself as being "known for being unknown" and the bulk of whose writings were published posthumously.

Many details of Krzhizhanovsky's lif

Сигизмунд Кржижановский

Sigizmund Dominikovich Krzhizhanovsky (Russian: Сигизму́нд Домини́кович Кржижано́вский) (February 11 [O.S. January 30] 1887, Kiev, Russian Empire — 28 December 1950, Moscow, USSR) was a Russian and Soviet short-story writer who described himself as being "known for being unknown" and the bulk of whose writings were published posthumously.

Many details of Krzhizhanovsky's life are obscure. Judging from his works, Robert Louis Stevenson, G. K. Chesterton, Edgar Allan Poe, Nikolai Gogol, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and H. G. Wells were major influences on his style. Krzhizhanovsky was active among Moscow's literati in the 1920s, while working for Alexander Tairov's Chamber Theater. Several of Krzhizhanovsky's stories became known through private readings, and a couple of them even found their way to print. In 1929 he penned a screenplay for Yakov Protazanov's acclaimed film The Feast of St Jorgen, yet his name did not appear in the credits. One of his last novellas, "Dymchaty bokal" (The smoky beaker, 1939), tells the story of a goblet miraculously never running out of wine, sometimes interpreted as a wry allusion to the author's fondness for alcohol. He died in Moscow, but the place where he was buried is not known.

In 1976 the scholar Vadim Perelmuter discovered Krzhizhanovsky's archive and in 1989 published one of his short stories. As the five volumes of his collected works followed (the fifth volume has not yet reached publication), Krzhizhanovsky emerged from obscurity as a remarkable Soviet writer, who polished his prose to the verge of poetry. His short parables, written with an abundance of poetic detail and wonderful fertility of invention — though occasionally bordering on the whimsical — are sometimes compared to the ficciones of Jorge Luis Borges. Quadraturin (1926), the best known of such phantasmagoric stories, is a Kafkaesque novella in which allegory meets existentialism. Quadraturin is available in English translation in Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida, Penguin Classics, 2005.

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