{"id":62351,"date":"2013-11-15T11:27:51","date_gmt":"2013-11-15T16:27:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=62351"},"modified":"2013-11-18T15:13:44","modified_gmt":"2013-11-18T20:13:44","slug":"the-known-unknown-on-sigizmund-krzhizhanovsky","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2013\/11\/15\/the-known-unknown-on-sigizmund-krzhizhanovsky\/","title":{"rendered":"The Known Unknown: On Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Sigizmund<\/a>

Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky on holiday in Italy in 1912.<\/p><\/div>\n

Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky was born in Kiev to a Polish-speaking family on February 11, 1887. At university, he studied law. In 1912, age twenty-five, he traveled through Europe, visiting Paris, Heidelberg, and Milan\u2014for the young Krzhizhanovsky was the pure apprentice intellectual. After the First World War, and the 1917 Russian Revolution, he returned to Kiev, where he taught at the Musical Institute and the Theatrical Conservatory. In 1922, age thirty-five, he left Kiev for Moscow, where he lived for the rest of his life. In Moscow, Krzhizhanovsky wrote articles and gave lectures, in particular at Alexander Tairov\u2019s Drama Studio. He also worked as a consultant to Tairov\u2019s Chamber Theater. Meanwhile, he wrote novellas and stories, which were never published\u2014either due to economic problems (bankrupt publishers) or political problems (Soviet censors). Twenty years passed in this way until, in 1941, with Krzhizhanovsky now fifty-four, a collection of stories was finally scheduled for publication\u2014but then the Second World War intervened, preventing even that collection from appearing. In May 1950 he suffered a stroke and lost the use of speech. He died at the end of the year. (His works\u2014almost all of them unpublished\u2014were stored by his lifelong companion, Anna Bovshek, in her apartment: in her clothes chest, under some brocade.)<\/p>\n

Almost no one knew that Krzhizhanovsky was writing fiction, since the state never allowed its publication. They knew him in other guises\u2014as a lecturer on theater, or essayist, or occasional playwright. In 1939, Krzhizhanovsky, despite his restricted publication history, was nevertheless elected to the Writers\u2019 Union\u2014which meant that posthumously he was eligible for the process of \u201cimmortalization.\u201d In 1953, Stalin died, and three years later Khrushchev\u2019s \u201cSecret Speech\u201d to the Twentieth Party Congress instituted a revisionist anti-Stalinist thaw. In 1957\u2014the same year as Pasternak\u2019s Doctor Zhivago<\/i>\u2014a commission was set up to examine Krzhizhanovsky\u2019s literary legacy. It lasted two years and was then disbanded, having drafted a publishing plan that was never implemented. Then, in 1976, Vadim Perelmuter, a poet, literary historian, and essayist, discovered Krzhizhanovsky\u2019s archive. He had to wait until 1989 and the full thaw of perestroika before he could publish one of Krzhizhanovsky\u2019s stories. Between 2001 and 2008, Perelmuter finally edited a handsome five-volume edition of Krzhizhanovsky\u2019s works. <\/p>\n

Alone in the cube of his room, Krzhizhanovsky wrote stories where people invent time machines or drift onto a branch line to a republic of dreams. In other words, the fantastic<\/i> is the genre in which Krzhizhanovsky worked. (In a story written in 1927, he mentions in passing his general scheme\u2014a \u201cprojected cycle of \u201cfantastic\u201d stories.\u201d) This was not, perhaps, so eccentric. Like the Soviet state, he liked to play with the nature of the real. For although his library could not contain the high-tech innovations of his contemporaries, like Borges or Platonov or Kafka, it could still contain the fictions of Poe and Pushkin and Stevenson and Gogol\u2014these stories where noses could detach themselves from faces, or authors could run after their own characters. And if this term fantastic<\/i> seems to imply a B-movie, lurid kind of aura, a downmarket mode with ghouls and ghosts, I think the reader should reconsider. Really, the fantastic was the most useful vehicle available for the most intricate philosophy\u2026<\/p>\n

For the anxiously prospective reader, it\u2019s maybe useful to propose a miniature classification to the stories Krzhizhanovsky wrote. Roughly they can be divided into two modes. The first kind fit happily, like Lego, into the old fantastic tradition\u2014like the early story \u201cThe Runaway Fingers,\u201d where a pianist\u2019s fingers detach themselves and make their escape. But in Krzhizhanovsky\u2019s second mode the subject becomes more abstract: it is no longer a description of the fantastic, but a description of how the fantastic could be described at all. And his method for this investigation is to treat language very seriously and very flatly. Perhaps, for instance, you think you can distinguish between abstract nouns and proper nouns? Krzhizhanovsky democratically erases such a distinction, so that whereas in the old tradition things were personified that could not be really personified, like noses or fingers, in these extraordinary stories much smaller elements can now take on uncanny life\u2014like \u201csolitudes,\u201d or literary terms \u2026 Or, in his great novella The Letter Killers Club<\/em>, it is a role in a play that somehow acquires its own existence, separate both from a character and from its actor.<\/p>\n

Krzhizhanovsky\u2019s fiction is based on the fact that language makes things possible that are not possible in reality. If there is a word for \u201crole\u201d and a word for \u201ccharacter,\u201d then naturally, it follows, according to this method, that the two could possess separate existences. Or, to put this maybe more precisely, he investigated whether the distinction between what is possible in language and reality is even tenable at all. And so the central mechanism of this writing is metaphor (\u201ca three-by-four-inch slip of paper torn out of the notebook had miraculously turned into lodgings measuring one hundred square feet\u201d)\u2014the hinge between animate and inanimate objects, which allows figures of speech to acquire a strange kind of life.<\/p>\n

While this attention to the act of writing could, I suppose, be defined as metafiction, Krzhizhanovsky\u2019s real subject is not the gap between fiction and reality so much as the gaps inside the real itself. The metafiction is really metaphysical. So that it should be no surprise if a corpse, in \u201cAutobiography of a Corpse,\u201d reasons in this manner, arguing that space \u201cis absurdly vast and has expanded\u2014with its orbits, stars and yawning parabolas\u2014to infinity. But if one tucks it inside numbers and meanings, it will easily fit on two or three bookshelves.\u201d It is just one more example of Krzhizhanovsky\u2019s exploration of language\u2019s tricks.<\/p>\n

In this way, he maps one of the strangest and yet most logical topographies in literature: \u201cI am neither \u2018here\u2019 nor \u2018there,\u2019 but in a between\u2014in a seam.\u201d And it\u2019s in the story called \u201cSeams\u201d where Krzhizhanovsky gives the most complete account of his new domain.<\/p>\n

\n

People whom Moscow has tried in its courts and banished from the city are said to have been: sentenced to \u201cminus 1.\u201d No one has passed sentence on me: 0\u20141. I am still here, in the hotchpotch and hubbub of the capital. Yet I am fully and firmly aware: I have been banished forever and irrevocably from all things, from all joys, from all truths: though I walk, look and listen beside others settled in this city, I know: they are in Moscow and I am in minus-Moscow. I am permitted only the shadows of things.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In this inverted world, everything that seemed marginal is in fact revealed as central\u2014the crack, the seam, the dream, the reflection, the shadow:<\/p>\n

\n

It will do me no good, you see, no good at all to repeat after others: things cast shadows. No, in my minus-city, in my ghostly, minusy little world, only minus-truths make sense\u2014only facts that have fallen on their heads. Therefore: shadows cast things.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It is a fiction, therefore, devoted to what is most miniature and evanescent. (A philosophy that comes with its own inverted poetics, where everything that seems peripheral to a literary work\u2014details, titles, epigraphs, stage directions\u2014is what Krzhizhanovsky most likes to examine.)<\/p>\n

And so, to perform a trick of retrospective history for a moment, it\u2019s perhaps not outlandish to notice how Krzhizhanovsky can sometimes recall the writings of Marcel Duchamp\u2014and in particular Duchamp\u2019s idea of the infra mince<\/i>. Duchamp\u2019s list of what he wanted to express by this idea of the infra thin<\/i>\u2014the way the smell of tobacco smoke combines with the smell of the mouth which exhales it; the sound corduroy trousers make as one walks; the distance between the front and back of a thin sheet of paper\u2014seems strangely reminiscent of Krzhizhanovsky\u2019s oblique obsessions, always trying to track the gaps in one\u2019s field of vision, or one\u2019s momentary self-reflections in other people\u2019s pupils. His stories are explorations of infra thin edges that are usually ignored. \u201cA thought thought either no further than \u2018I,\u2019 or no closer than the \u2018cosmos.\u2019\u201d On reaching the \u201cthreshold of consciousness,\u201d the line between \u201cI\u201d and \u201cwe,\u201d it would stop and either turn back or take a monstrous leap into \u201cthe starry beyond\u201d\u2014the transcendent\u2014\u201cother worlds.\u201d<\/p>\n

Adam Thirlwell\u2019s most recent novel is The Escape<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Excerpted from Adam Thirlwell\u2019s introduction to <\/em>The Autobiography of a Corpse<\/a> by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, a New York Review Books Classics Original that will be published December 3, 2013.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky was born in Kiev to a Polish-speaking family on February 11, 1887. At university, he studied law. In 1912, age twenty-five, he traveled through Europe, visiting Paris, Heidelberg, and Milan\u2014for the young Krzhizhanovsky was the pure apprentice intellectual. After the First World War, and the 1917 Russian Revolution, he returned to Kiev, where […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":280,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[489],"tags":[10704,71,5410,696,9959,447,448,12186,12187],"class_list":["post-62351","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-2","tag-boris-pasternak","tag-fiction","tag-franz-kafka","tag-marcel-duchamp","tag-nikita-khrushchev","tag-russia","tag-russian-literature","tag-sigizmund-krzhizhanovsky","tag-vadim-perelmuter"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Known Unknown: On Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"An excerpt from Adam Thirlwell\u2019s introduction to The Autobiography of a Corpse by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2013\/11\/15\/the-known-unknown-on-sigizmund-krzhizhanovsky\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Known Unknown: On Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky by Adam Thirlwell\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"November 15, 2013 \u2013 Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky was born in Kiev to a Polish-speaking family on February 11, 1887. 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