Autobiography of a Corpse Read online

  SIGIZMUND KRZHIZHANOVSKY (1887–1950), the Ukrainian-born son of Polish emigrants, studied law and classical philology at Kiev University. After graduation and two summers spent exploring Europe, he was obliged to clerk for an attorney. A sinecure, the job allowed him to devote most of his time to literature and his own writing. In 1920, he began lecturing in Kiev on theater and music. The lectures continued in Moscow, where he moved in 1922, by then well known in literary circles. Lodged in a cell-like room on the Arbat, Krzhizhanovsky wrote steadily for close to two decades. His philosophical and phantasmagorical fictions ignored injunctions to portray the Soviet state in a positive light. Three separate efforts to print collections were quashed by the censors, a fourth by World War II. Not until 1989 could his work begin to be published. Like Poe, Krzhizhanovsky takes us to the edge of the abyss and forces us to look into it. “I am interested,” he said, “not in the arithmetic, but in the algebra of life.”

  JOANNE TURNBULL’s translations from Russian in collaboration with Nikolai Formozov include Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s Memories of the Future and The Letter Killers Club (both NYRB Classics).

  ADAM THIRLWELL is the author of two novels, Politics and The Escape; a novella, Kapow!; an essay-book, The Delighted States, winner of a Somerset Maugham Award; and a compendium of translations edited for McSweeney’s. He has twice been selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists.

  AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A CORPSE

  SIGIZMUND KRZHIZHANOVSKY

  Introduction by

  ADAM THIRLWELL

  Translated from the Russian by

  JOANNE TURNBULL

  with NIKOLAI FORMOZOV

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Stories copyright © by Éditions Verdier

  Translation copyright © 2013 by Joanne Turnbull and Nikolai Formozov

  Introduction copyright © by Adam Thirlwell

  All rights reserved.

  Cover image: Wassily Kandinsky, Mouvement I, 1935; © 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York /ADAGP, Paris

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  Published by arrangement with Éditions Verdier, which publishes these stories under the following titles: “Autobiographie d’un cadavre,” “Dans la pupille,” “Les Coutures,” “Le Collectionneur des fentes,” “Le Pays des nons,” “Les Doigts fuyards,” “La Métaphysique articulaire,” “La Houille jaune,” “Le Pont sur le Styx,” “Les Trente deniers,” and “Estampillé Moscou.”

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Krzhizhanovskii, Sigizmund, 1887–1950, author.

  [Short stories. Selections. English. 2013]

  Autobiography of a corpse / by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky ; introduction by

  Adam Thirlwell ; translated by Joanne Turnbull.

  pages cm. — (New York Review Books classics)

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-1-59017-670-2 (alk. paper)

  I. Thirlwell, Adam, 1978– writer of added commentary. II. Turnbull, Joanne, translator. III. Title. IV. Series: New York Review Books classics.

  PG3476.K782a2 2013

  891.73'42—dc23

  2013019761

  eISBN 978-1-59017-696-2

  v1.0

  For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to: Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  CONTENTS

  Biographical Notes

  Title page

  Copyright and More Information

  Introduction

  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

  Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  1

  ACCORDING to the usual theory of the real, these are the important facts about the life of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky.

  He was born in Kiev to a Polish-speaking family on February 11, 1887. At university, he studied law. In 1912, aged twenty-five, he traveled through Europe, visiting Paris, Heidelberg, and Milan—for 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 Conservatory and the Theater Institute. In 1922, aged thirty-five, he left for Moscow, where he lived for the rest of his life. In Moscow, Krzhizhanovsky wrote articles and gave lectures, in particular at Alexander Tairov’s Drama Studio. He also worked as a consultant to Tairov’s Chamber Theater. Meanwhile, he wrote novellas and stories, which were never published—either 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—but then the Second World War intervened, preventing even that collection from appearing. In May 1950 he suffered a stroke and lost the ability to read. He died at the end of the year. (His works—almost all of them unpublished—were stored by his lifelong companion, Anna Bovshek, in her apartment: in her clothes chest, under some brocade.)

  But of course, the real is a mobile category—this is one truth that the totalitarian twentieth century has proved—and one way of altering the real is to erase various facts from history. Krzhizhanovsky’s life, it might have seemed, would be one more element in history’s sequence of deletions. Almost no one, after all, knew that he was writing fiction, since the state never allowed its publication. They knew him in other guises—as a lecturer on theater, or an essayist, or an occasional playwright. In 1939 Krzhizhanovsky, despite his restricted publication history, was nevertheless elected to the Writers’ Union—which meant that posthumously he was eligible for the process of “immortalization.” In 1953 Stalin died, and three years later Khrushchev’s secret speech to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party instituted a revisionist anti-Stalinist thaw. In 1957—the same year as Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago—a commission was set up to examine Krzhizhanovsky’s 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’s archive. He had to wait until 1988 and the full thaw of perestroika before he could publish one of Krzhizhanovsky’s stories. Between 2001 and 2010, Perelmuter finally edited a handsome five-volume edition of Krzhizhanovsky’s works.

  The twentieth century, of course, had other totalitarian tricks as well. It could act horizontally, as well as vertically. On November 16, 1934, the Soviet newspaper Izvestiya recorded the anxieties of the composer Sergei Prokofiev, newly returned to Russia from a prolonged European exile: “The danger of becoming provincial is unfortunately a very real one for modern Soviet composers.”[1] But it was not just the Soviet composer who was endangered; the Soviet writer was, too. In the same year as Prokofiev’s return, the writer Karl Radek addressed the Soviet Writers’ Congress. His theme was “Contemporary World Literature and the Tasks of Proletarian Art.”[2] The situation, he argued, was problematic. “Our writers are not sufficiently well acquainted with foreign literature. Very many of our writers, when they hear of some novelty abroad, ask with morbid interest: ‘Does not this contain the great key to art?’ ”[3] And yet, he then continued, in a per
verse logical pirouette, the solution was not therefore to read world literature but in fact to forget that world literature existed. His central example was James Joyce’s Ulysses—which had appeared a decade earlier, in 1922.

  Just because he is almost untranslated and unknown in our country, Joyce arouses a morbid interest among a section of our writers. Is there not some hidden meaning lurking in the eight hundred pages of his Ulysses—which cannot be read without special dictionaries, for Joyce attempts to create a language of his own in order to express the thoughts and feelings which he lacks?

  This interest in Joyce is an unconscious expression of the leanings of Right-wing authors, who have adapted themselves to revolution, but who in reality do not understand its greatness. They want to get away from Magnitogorsk, from Kuznetskstroy, to get away from the great deeds of our country to “great art,” which depicts the small deeds of small people.[4]

  Joyce’s method was perhaps “a suitable one for describing petty, insignificant, trivial people, their actions, thoughts and feelings,” but “it is perfectly clear that this method would prove utterly worthless if the author were to approach with his movie camera the great events of the class struggle, the titanic clashes of the modern world.”[5] And so, argued Radek, it turned out that there was no need for the Soviet writer to consider Joyce’s novel at all. The morbid desire to read it should be happily abandoned. From his own inaccurate description of Ulysses—“a book of eight hundred pages without stops or commas”[6]—it seems that he followed his own advice. But then, why not? The ideal Soviet writer was to be grandly isolated from reactionary influences: The only comrades a writer required were the revolutionary Soviet masses.

  And Krzhizhanovsky . . . Krzhizhanovsky, alone in the cube of his room, wrote stories where people invent time machines, or drift onto a branch line to a republic of dreams. In other words, the fantastic is the genre in which Krzhizhanovsky worked. (In a story written in 1927, he mentions in passing his general scheme—a “projected cycle of ‘fantastic’ stories.”[7]) 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—these stories where noses could detach themselves from faces, or authors could run after their own characters. And if this term fantastic seems to imply a B-movie, lurid kind of aura, a down-market 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.

  2

  Italo Calvino once compiled Fantastic Tales, an anthology of stories from European literature—from Jan Potocki to Henry James—and in his introduction offered a definition of the genre. For Calvino, it was defined not by its macabre props but by its dark preoccupation, and that preoccupation was the nature of the real:

  The problem of the reality of what we see—both extraordinary things, which may be just hallucinations projected by our mind, and ordinary things, which perhaps conceal beneath the most banal appearances a second nature that is more disturbing, mysterious, terrifying—is the essence of this literature of the fantastic, whose most powerful effects lie in this hovering between irreconcilable levels of reality.[8]

  The consequent ambiguity of the real is why, Calvino continued, the fantastic itself is an ambiguous genre—always hovering between two modes. There is the story that seems fantastic but is then resolved with a rational explanation. And then there is the story where no such explanation is ever offered, the pure marvelous—that “presumes acceptance of the improbable and inexplicable.”[9] But it was therefore at the end of the nineteenth century, concluded Calvino, that the endpoint of this genre was reached, when these two modes collapsed into each other. This point was the ghost tales of Henry James. “This author, who could be classified as an American, English or European writer, represents the nineteenth-century supernatural tale’s ultimate incarnation—or rather disincarnation, in that it becomes in James more impalpable and invisible than ever, a mere psychological emanation or vibration . . .” For the law of James’s fiction was “the psychic reality of experience.” And so the rational story and the marvelous story were revealed as different ways of describing the same philosophical truth—that all reality is apprehended subjectively. “It could be said, then, that at the end of the century the supernatural tale becomes once more a philosophical tale, as at the beginning of the century.”[10]

  And there is, no question, a grandeur to this high-speed survey. But I also wonder if Calvino was a little abrupt in his conclusion. For of course the fantastic tale did not end with James at all. The genre continued—into even more anxious philosophical territory. The “psychic reality of experience” feels cozily mundane when compared to the labyrinths invented by the twentieth century. No, the fantastic had not exhausted its philosophy, not at all. And one of the most patient investigations of this loopy terrain was performed by Krzhizhanovsky, alone in his Moscow room.

  3

  For the anxiously prospective reader, it’s 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—like the early story “The Runaway Fingers,” where a pianist’s fingers detach themselves and make their escape. But in Krzhizhanovsky’s 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 really be personified, like noses or fingers, in these extraordinary stories much smaller elements can now take on uncanny life—like “solitudes” or literary terms. Or, as in his great novella The Letter Killers Club, it is a role in a play that somehow acquires its own existence, separate from a character and from its actor.

  Krzhizhanovsky’s fiction is based on the fact that language makes things possible that are not possible in reality. If there is a word for “role” and a word for “character,” 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 (“a three-by-four-inch slip of paper torn from the notepad had miraculously turned into lodgings measuring one hundred square feet”)—the hinge between animate and inanimate objects, which allows figures of speech to acquire a strange kind of life. So that if a geography book comes up with the statistic “In the country’s northern latitudes the population per square mile is 0.6 person,” then it will not be illogical in Krzhizhanovsky’s fiction to picture this 0.6 person: “a stooped, thread-paper body bent low to the bare, ice-covered ground.” In one story his narrator laments “Every time I try to make something out of the alphabet, it collapses.” But the reader should not be convinced by the melancholy tone. Really, these linguistic ruins are where Krzhizhanovsky liked to roam—exploring cracks in reality that are not merely spatial but temporal, psychological, philosophical . . .

  Because while this attention to the act of writing could I suppose be defined as metafiction, Krzhizhanovsky’s real subject is not the gap between fiction and reality so much as the gaps inside the real itself. The metafiction is really metaphysical. It should therefore be no surprise if a corpse, in “Autobiography of a Corpse,” reasons in this manner, arguing that space “is absurdly vast and has expanded—with its orbits, stars, and yawning parabolas—to infinity. But if one tucks it inside numbers and meanings, it will easily fit on two or three bookshelves.” It is
just one more example of Krzhizhanovsky’s exploration of language’s tricks.

  In this way, he maps one of the strangest and yet most logical topographies in literature: “I am neither ‘here’ nor ‘there’ but in a between—in a seam.” And it’s in the story called “Seams” where Krzhizhanovsky gives the most complete account of his new domain.

  People whom Moscow has tried in its courts and banished from the city are said to have been sentenced to “minus 1.” No one has passed sentence on me: 0–1. I am still here, in the hodgepodge 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 . . .

  In this inverted world, everything that seemed marginal is in fact revealed as central—the crack, the seam, the dream, the reflection, the shadow:

  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—only facts that have fallen on their heads. Therefore, shadows cast things.

  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—details, titles, epigraphs, stage directions—is what Krzhizhanovsky most likes to examine.)

  And so, to perform a trick of retrospective history for a moment, it’s perhaps not outlandish to notice how Krzhizhanovsky can sometimes recall the writings of Marcel Duchamp—and in particular Duchamp’s idea of the inframince. Duchamp’s list of what he wanted to express by this idea of the infrathin—the way the smell of tobacco smoke combines with the smell of the mouth that exhales it; the sound corduroy trousers make as one walks; the distance between the front and back of a thin sheet of paper—seems strangely reminiscent of Krzhizhanovsky’s oblique obsessions, always trying to track the gaps in one’s field of vision, or one’s momentary self-reflections in other people’s pupils.[11] His stories are explorations of infrathin edges that are usually ignored. “A thought thought either no further than ‘I’ or no closer than the ‘cosmos.’ On reaching the ‘threshold of consciousness,’ the line between ‘I’ and ‘we,’ it would stop and either turn back or take a monstrous leap into ‘the starry beyond’—the transcendent—‘other worlds.’”