The Return of Munchausen 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 The Letter Killers Club (winner of the AATSEEL Award for Best Literary Translation into English) and Autobiography of a Corpse (winner of the PEN Translation Prize).

  OTHER BOOKS BY SIGIZMUND KRZHIZHANOVSKY PUBLISHED BY NYRB CLASSICS

  Autobiography of a Corpse

  Translated by Joanne Turnbull with Nikolai Formozov

  Introduction by Adam Thirlwell

  The Letter Killers Club

  Translated by Joanne Turnbull with Nikolai Formozov

  Introduction by Caryl Emerson

  Memories of the Future

  Translated by Joanne Turnbull with Nikolai Formozov

  Introduction by Joanne Turnbull

  THE RETURN OF MUNCHAUSEN

  SIGIZMUND KRZHIZHANOVSKY

  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

  Copyright © 2002 by Éditions Verdier

  Translation and introduction copyright © 2016 by Joanne Turnbull

  All rights reserved.

  Published with the support of the Institute for Literary Translation, Russia

  Cover image: Yury Annenkov, Adam and Eve (detail), 1918; Tretyakov

  Gallery, Moscow

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Krzhizhanovskiĭ, Sigizmund, 1887–1950, author. | Turnbull, Joanne, translator, writer of preface.

  Title: The return of Munchausen / by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky ; translated and with an introduction by Joanne Turnbull.

  Other titles: Vozvrashchenie Miunkhgauzena. English | New York Review Books classics.

  Description: New York : New York Review Books, 2017. | Series: New York Review Books classics | Includes bibliographical references.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016026846 (print) | LCCN 2016028315 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681370286 (alk. paper) | ISBN 9781681370293 (epub)

  Classification: LCC PG3476.K782 V6913 2017 (print) | LCC PG3476.K782 (ebook) | DDC 891.73/42–dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016026846

  ISBN 978-1-68137-029-3

  v1.0

  For a complete list of titles, 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

  THE RETURN OF MUNCHAUSEN

  1. Every Baron Has His Flights of Fancy

  2. Smoke That Roars

  3. Kant’s Coeval

  4. In Partes Infidelium

  5. The Devil in a Droshky

  6. The Theory of Improbability

  7. The Hermit of Bodenwerder

  8. The Truth That Dodged the Man

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  INTRODUCTION

  BARON Munchausen’s hold on the European imagination dates back to the late eighteenth century when that resourceful raconteur first pulled himself (and his horse) out of a swamp by his own upturned pigtail. The year was 1786 and Gottfried August Bürger had turned his impecunious hand to a German translation of Baron Munchausen’s Narrative of his Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia. With embellishments of his own, however anonymous. The lyric poet did not want his name attached to this racy récit printed scant months before at Oxford and already in its third edition. French and Russian translations followed soon after.

  The mythical Munchausen’s monologue begins with him riding through deep snow in Russia. Overcome by night and sleep, he ties his horse to a tree stump poking up out of the snow. He wakes to find himself lying in a village graveyard, his horse dangling from the church steeple, the snow having melted. He is astonished, but then: “I took one of my pistols, shot off the halter, brought down the horse and proceeded on my journey.”[1] Before we know it, the baron is fighting the Turks and telling us what Nabokov called “Munchausen’s horse-decorpitation story.” With the enemy put to flight, the baron races into a walled town and stops at a fountain to let his Lithuanian drink: “He drunk uncommonly—with an eagerness not to be satisfied, but natural enough, for when I looked round for my men, what should I see, gentlemen? The hind part of the poor creature, croup and legs were missing, as if he had been cut in two, and the water run out as it came in.”[2] The mystified baron goes back to the town gate and puts two and two together: the portcullis had been dropped on his horse (“unperceived by me”) as he came rushing in. He finds the frisky back half larking about in a field full of mares.

  These tall and infectious tales attributed to a garrulous flesh-and-blood baron, a former cavalry officer given to hunting and entertaining at his Bodenwerder estate, were in truth the anonymous work of a versatile but insolvent assay master at a tin mine in Cornwall, Rudolf Erich Raspe. A distinguished geologist and ambitious polyglot, Raspe had been elected a fellow of the Royal Society; a literary scholar and antiquarian, he had been appointed the curator of collections belonging to the Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel. Caught embezzling from those collections to pay off creditors, Raspe had fled his native Germany for London, his ruined reputation hard on his heels. Before long the Royal Society had taken the unprecedented step of expelling the Hanoverian, who was eventually reduced to living in a remote Cornish village and rifling his old notebooks for the odd bit of material that might garner a few guineas. Enter: the baron.

  The real Baron Hieronymus von Münchhausen (1720–1797) had spent twenty-odd years in the Russian service and taken part in various campaigns against the Turks, including the siege of Oczakov, before retiring at the age of forty to his country seat. An ordinary career for a German nobleman of the time was made extraordinary in the baron’s cavalier retellings at his hospitable dinner table. The guests upon one occasion, in the spring of 1773, may have included a red-haired curator named Raspe.

  While Raspe’s English-language narrative ridiculing the hyperbolic baron might have gone unnoticed by him, Bürger’s more luxuriant German version could not. Overnight the real Münchhausen had become a legend in his own land, his estate deluged with gawkers whom the lone gamekeeper was powerless to keep back. The baron abandoned his storytelling. The dinner parties ceased—and their once genial host crept through his last decade a dispirited recluse.

  But his sprightly namesake lived on. The mythical Munchausen’s boundless faith in his own imaginative powers
, his invented worlds and impossible situations proved irresistible. Translators felt free to edit and embroider. Some of the best vignettes had been added by Bürger. In one episode Munchausen catches several dozen ducks with one very long dog leash to which he has attached a small piece of lard. The first duck swallows the slippery pork fat and passes it undigested; the second duck does the same, then the third, and so on, until they have all been strung like so many pearls. In another episode Munchausen, while at war with the Turks, leaps astride an outgoing cannonball, the better to infiltrate an unassailable fortress. Halfway there, he thinks better of this plan: “Once inside I’ll be taken for a spy and hung from the first gibbet.” Just then he sees an incoming cannonball whizzing by in the opposite direction. The baron quickly switches cannonballs—and returns to his regiment unscathed.

  THE RETURN OF MUNCHAUSEN

  Like Bürger, Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky has taken certain liberties with the mythical baron. As the hero of this half phantasmagoria, half roman à clef set in 1920s Berlin, London, and Moscow, Munchausen remains a dreamer and fierce champion of his own unfettered imagination. At the same time, the two-hundred-year-old baron, a self-taught philosopher who long ago joined “the struggle for nonexistence,” has emerged from his retreat on the Weser so as to take part in some real-world postwar diplomacy. In addition to the manor house at Bodenwerder, he now has a pied-à-terre in Berlin.

  Krzhizhanovsky’s novella opens in March 1921 to news of the Kronstadt rebellion. Thousands of sailors at a naval bastion near Petrograd[3] have risen against the Bolsheviks in what could spell, so some Western observers thought at the time, the end of Lenin’s fledgling regime. On the other hand, The New York Times reported, “there is a great deal of fog and smoke, and it is hard to find out who is fighting whom.”[4]

  Krzhizhanovsky’s Munchausen has strong opinions about both: smoke and fog—associated as they are with his phantasms. “We Germans have not learned how to deal even with smoke,” he tells the poor poet Unding. “We swallow it, like the foam from a mug, before it has done swirling and settled inside our pipe bowl. The imaginations of men with stubby cigars in their teeth are equally stunted.” Before long the baron will leave Berlin for London—to visit the fogs: “Yes, the albescent veils rising from the Thames can unshape shapes, shroud landscapes and worldviews, shade facts, and . . .”

  Unding takes umbrage. Why rush away to foreign fogs when you have at hand homegrown “fictionalism”? The poet is alluding to the philosophy of “as if” advanced by Hans Vaihinger. A popular Kant scholar, he held that the human mind, in order to think and to preserve itself, constructs conscious fictions, such as God, immortality, and freedom; while it knows these faiths to be false, it may benefit by acting “as if” they were not. “The ‘As if’ world, which is formed in this manner,” wrote Vaihinger, “the world of the ‘unreal’ is just as important as the world of the so-called real or actual.”[5] If not more so, Munchausen might add.

  The “exceedingly egocentric” baron cares only about his own imagination, Krzhizhanovsky remarked in an essay on countries that don’t exist. “Traveling across Germany by diligence, he looks after the tunes that have frozen up in the postilion’s horn, but is indifferent to the symphony of landscapes gliding past his eyes.” Krzhizhanovsky’s affection for his fantastical hero is palpable. As soon as Munchausen is settled in London, he begins giving dinner parties, pressing the local fogs into service, and filling his guests’ heads full of them “more deftly than an expert milkmaid decanting her ware into canisters.”

  When not receiving, the baron rambles through Kensington Gardens, past the statue of Peter Pan “who never existed,” then up Piccadilly and along the Strand to “the most nonexistent of all”: to God. Inside St. Paul’s he often gazes at a particular pair of allegorical figures and engages a lay brother in this ritual exchange:

  “What is that?”

  “A true representation of Truth and Falsehood, sir.”

  “And which one of them is Truth?” The baron squints.

  “If I may say so, sir, that one.”

  “The last time, as I recall, you said that one was Falsehood.”

  Is it any wonder then that Munchausen should reverence not Saint Paul, not a conventional saint, but Saint Nobody? Or Nemo, as he was called in the eleventh century when he apparently sprang from the impudent head of an intractable French monk named Radulfus Glaber. Radulfus had the idea of treating the Latin word nemo (nobody, no man) in biblical and classical texts as a proper noun. His superhuman Nemo is not bound by the usual constraints. “All those endless stingy and gloomy negatives—‘no one can,’ ‘no one knows,’ ‘no one must,’ ‘no one dares,’ ” writes Mikhail Bakhtin, “become giddy affirmatives: ‘Nemo can,’ ‘Nemo knows,’ ‘Nemo must,’ ‘Nemo dares.’ ”[6]

  The baron’s London idyll comes abruptly to an end when he agrees to return to Russia. Undercover. Kronstadt and other uprisings have prompted Lenin to announce his New Economic Policy, a temporary return to private trade. At the same time, he is tackling what Maxim Gorky ruefully termed “the annihilation of the intelligentsia in our illiterate and uncultured country.”[7] The so-called dreamer in the Kremlin is especially exercised about the professors and writers: “counterrevolutionaries all.”[8]

  The religious philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev, for instance. From the very start Berdyaev perceived “the Bolsheviks’ moral deformity”; he rejected their image “both aesthetically and ethically.”[9] In February 1920 he was arrested and interrogated by Dzerzhinsky himself. The interrogation turned into a forty-five-minute lecture by Berdyaev on his religious, philosophical, and moral opposition to communism. His candor clearly disarmed the head of the Cheka. The philosopher was freed and delivered to his frigid apartment on Maly Vlasevsky where the small stove was sometimes fueled with sticks of ancestral furniture. All the same, it didn’t so much heat the apartment as fill it with smoke.

  It was there, in the spring of 1922, that Berdyaev received a tall, unknown writer from Kiev in search of work and a room: Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky. Berdyaev could help with neither: his life in Moscow was by then too tenuous. In September the philosopher found himself forced to board a ship to the West along with two dozen other leading lights. Krzhizhanovsky found a room on the Arbat and began fighting for the printed existence of his unorthodox phantasms at odds with the times—to little or no avail. In 1927, as Soviet Russia prepared to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik coup, he was closeted with his much loved Munchausen. For the baron, Krzhizhanovsky fought hardest of all.

  —JOANNE TURNBULL

  1. Rudolf Raspe and others, The Singular Adventures of Baron Munchausen, a definitive text edited by John Carswell and illustrated by Fritz Kredel (New York: The Heritage Press, 1952), 4.

  2. Ibid., 16–17.

  3. St. Petersburg (1914–1924).

  4. “The Fog of Petrograd,” The New York Times, March 12, 1921.

  5. Hans Vaihinger, The Philosophy of “As If ”: A System of Theoretical, Practical and Religious Fictions of Mankind, translated by C. K. Ogden (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1925), xlvii.

  6. M. M. Bakhtin, Tvorchestvo Fransua Rable (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaya literatura, 1990, 2nd edition), 458.

  7. Letter to Alexei Rykov, July 1, 1922, in Pisma i documenty: 1917–1922 (Moscow: Tsentrpoligraf, 2014).

  8. Letter to Felix Dzerzhinsky, May 19, 1922, in Vysylka vmesto rasstrela: 1921–1923 (Moscow: Russky put, 2005).

  9. N. A. Berdyaev, Samopoznanie (Moscow: Kniga, 1991), 229.

  THE RETURN OF MUNCHAUSEN

  1. EVERY BARON HAS HIS FLIGHTS OF FANCY

  A PASSERBY cut across Alexanderplatz* and stretched out a hand toward the faceted panes of an entrance door. But just then from the star of in-streaming streets came the crying mouths of newspaper boys:

  “Rebellion in Kronstadt!”*

  “End of the Bolsheviks!”

  The passerby, shoulders hunched against the spring chill, thrust a hand into a
pocket: his fingers fumbled from seam to seam—damn!—not a pfennig. He dashed open the door.

  Now he sprang up the length of a long runner; leaping after him, taking the stairs two at a time, came muddy footprints.

  On reaching the first landing: “Who shall I say is calling?”

  “Tell the baron: the poet Unding.”*

  The manservant eyed the caller—from his shabby boots to the crumpled crown of his ginger fedora—and asked again, “Who?”

  “Ernst Unding.”

  “One minute.”

  His footsteps retreated—then returned; his voice betrayed genuine surprise.

  “The baron will see you in his study. Pray come up.”

  “Ah, Unding.”

  “Munchausen.”

  Their palms met.

  “Now then. Come and sit by the fire.”

  No matter how one looked at it, guest and host bore little resemblance to one another: side by side—soles to the fender—were a pair of impeccable patent-leather pumps and the muddy boots we have already met; side by side—leaning back in Gothic armchairs—were a long, clean-shaven face with hooded eyes and fine aristocratic nose versus a jowly face with red button nose and prickly-lashed pupils under tufts of draggled hair.

  The two sat for a minute watching the dance of blue and scarlet sparks in the grate.

  “The cigars are on that side table,” the baron said at length.

  His guest extended a hand: after it crept a striped and crumpled cuff. The lid of the cigar box clicked open—then came the chirring of the clipper against dried leaves, then wreathes of fragrant gray smoke.

  The baron squinted slightly at the pulsating flame.

  “We Germans have not learned how to deal even with smoke. We swallow it, like the foam from a mug, before it has done swirling and settled inside our pipe bowl. The imaginations of men with stubby cigars in their teeth are equally stunted. Permit me. . . .”