Autobiography of a Corpse Read online

  4

  There it is, then—the real as redefined by Krzhizhanovsky. And I suppose one question that still needs to be put is how these new definitions invented in the solitude of Krzhizhanovsky’s room related to the Soviet definitions that were being broadcast out in the streets. On the one hand, in its metaphysical preoccupations, his writing seems to represent a sustained refusal to engage with the usual Soviet definitions. And yet maybe the historical reader should also consider the kind of rhetoric that the Communist state specialized in—its new physics to match its new society—and then consider how far this kind of rhetoric was in some way being tested in the supercollider of Krzhizhanovsky’s fiction.

  Walter Benjamin, for instance, was in Moscow in the winter of 1926–27. Everyday life, he observed, was a giant experiment in changing one’s idea of time; the inhabitants of Moscow, he wrote, were drunk with time. “They fritter everything away. (One is tempted to say that minutes are a cheap liquor of which they can never get enough, that they are tipsy with time.)” And Benjamin, the precise Berliner, continued his notations of the effects—the consequent “time catastrophes” and “time collisions”: “They make each hour superabundant, each day exhausting, each life a moment.”[12]

  Everyday life was a constant philosophical problem. It was, in Krzhizhanovsky’s own description, a “hive”: a web of constricted movement and floating thinking, where time ebbed and flowed. In this context, the preoccupations of Krzhizhanovsky’s fiction begin to seem more intimately engaged with the Soviet state than they might at first appear. The streets were an experiment in changing what was accepted to be real. So one form of resistance would be to submit those streets’ rhetoric to the private pressure of a style, to trace all its fantastical implications. If the Communist self were new, and if time and space had been renovated, then Krzhizhanovsky would investigate what this would really mean. It would not be utopia at all. This new reality was obsessive, fractured, indigent: a minus-space, where words and objects could swap places with terrible fluidity.

  5

  “Every morning at nine forty-five, having buttoned myself into my coat, I set forth in quest of Moscow.” This is how the narrator describes his average day, in the story “Postmark: Moscow”—a story that’s a kind of emblem or distillation of Krzhizhanovsky’s inventions in the realm of the fantastic. In this new world, “caught up inside a chaotic whirl of words,” the usual edges between things have disappeared. There is no outside possible.

  But I can never leave my theme: I live inside it. The windows of the buildings I walk past stare with a particular expression; every morning, my eyes barely open, I see the red brick of the house opposite: must be Moscow. And so the thought: Moscow. My problem materialized, crowded round me with a thousand stone boxes, branched out beneath my feet in a thousand crooked and broken streets—and I, odd fellow that I am, exploring my where, walked right into it, like a mouse into a mousetrap.

  And so there is no gap between thinking and objects, between the city and the self: “To protect the life hidden between your temples from the life swirling about you, to muse down a street without seeing that street, is impossible. Try as I did to concentrate my images, to shield my thoughts from the jostlings, it was unthinkable. The street always intruded . . .” And the effect is that Moscow is in fact a place not of meaning, of harmonies and similarities, but of infinite indefinable extension: “Moscow is a mishmash of utterly unrelated (logically and optically) building ensembles, of large and small houses crammed from cellar to eaves with utterly unrelated offices, apartments, people living apart, at odds, past one another, yet separated by only thin walls . . .” It is a language without any referent. Which is one way of explaining why it is also a place where word games will represent sincere attempts at doing philosophy—as his narrator tries to move up and down the escalator separating by, as if; byt, everyday life; and bytiye, existence:

  Oh, now I understood the little white book in my palms: It, and really all of them, can only try to trace moving shadows. But shadows shorn of things—everyday life (byt) shorn of existence (bytiye)—are powerless and illusory. Then again, if things must be shorn of their shadows, bytiye of byt, one mustn’t stop halfway; one must take byt and lop off that obtuse “t”: by (“as if”) is pure subjunctivity, a fusion of the free phantasms beloved by Alexander Grin. This is the first way out of the world of shadows to the world of fanciful romanticism; bytiye (“existence”)—of which one syllable, one ingredient, is byt (“everyday life”)—is the second way out of the “dwelling place of shadows” . . .

  In this way, the genre of the fantastic acquires its melancholy new development.

  And of course that such an experiment was almost erased by the pressure of Stalinist history is only a proof of the principle that Krzhizhanovsky himself investigated: Everything that exists is always vulnerable to the total law of deletion. Everything that exists is pregnant with its nonexistence; the real exists on the cusp on unreality. And once again, I don’t think it’s entirely wrong to note how Krzhizhanovsky has his international avant-garde companions. In 1961, Robert Rauschenberg, with Duchamp, took part in the Symposium on the Art of Assemblage at MoMA. Something he was exercised by was the constant flow of time, of “what should be done to prevent the loss of this moment, to keep this moment from being realized.”[13] And the beauty is all in the smuggled definition Rauschenberg constructs with his two clauses: that loss is the same as realization. The only way to prevent the loss of something, as Krzhizhanovsky also knew, is to maintain it in a state of non-existence.

  And yet, in the end, here these stories are. For just because the real can disintegrate, or disappear, doesn’t mean a reader can’t sometimes also be hopeful.

  —ADAM THIRLWELL

  1. David Nice, Prokofiev: From Russia to the West (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 321.

  2. Problems of Soviet Literature: Reports and Speeches at the First Soviet Writers’ Congress, by S. Zhdanov, Maxim Gorky, N. Bukharin, K. Radek, A. Stetsky, edited by H.G. Scott (Moscow and Leningrad: The Co-Operative Society of Foreign Workers in the USSR, 1935).

  3. Ibid., 150–51.

  4. Ibid., 154–55.

  5. Ibid., 154.

  6. Ibid., 178.

  7. Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Memories of the Future, translated by Joanne Turnbull with Nikolai Formozov (New York: New York Review Books, 2009), 126.

  8. Italo Calvino, Fantastic Tales (London: Penguin, 2001), vii.

  9. Ibid., viii.

  10. Ibid., xvi–xvii.

  11. Marcel Duchamp, The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, edited by Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 194.

  12. Walter Benjamin, “Moscow,” in Selected Writings, Volume 2: 1927–1934, translated by Rodney Livingstone et al., edited by Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999), 31, 32

  13. Joseph Ruzicka, ed., “The Art of Assemblage: A Symposium (1961),” in Essays on Assemblage, Studies in Modern Art 2 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1992), 137.

  AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A CORPSE

  AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A CORPSE

  JOURNALIST Shtamm, whose “Letters from the Provinces” were signed “Etal,” among other pseudonyms, had decided to set out—on the heels of his letters—for Moscow.

  Shtamm believed in his elbows and in the ability of Etal to swap drops of ink for rubles, but the question of living space worried him. He knew that on the metropolitan chessboard, squares had not been set aside for all of the chessmen. People who had been to Moscow scared you; the buildings are all packed to the rafters. You have to camp in vestibules, on backstairs, on boulevard benches, in asphalt cauldrons, and in dustbins.

  That is why Shtamm, as soon as he stepped off the train onto the Moscow station platform, began repeating into dead and living, human and telephonic ears one and the same words: a room . . .

  But the black telephonic ear, having heard him out, hung indifferently on its steel
hook. The human ears hid under fur and astrakhan collars—the frost that day crackled underfoot—while the words, as though blanketed by layer upon layer of carbon paper, grew fainter with each repetition and broke up into softly knocking letters.

  Citizen Shtamm was very nervous and impressionable; that evening when, spun out like a top on a string, he lay down on three hard chairs bent on forcing him to the floor with their backs, he clearly saw in his mind’s eye the specter of the dustbin, its wooden lid thrown hospitably open.

  But there’s truth to the old adage: Morning is wiser than evening. And wilier too. Having risen with the dawn from his chairs, which went back to their corners to sulk, Shtamm apologized for the trouble, thanked them for the bed, and trudged off along the half-deserted streets of snow- and rime-clad Moscow. But before he had gone a hundred paces, at practically the first crossroad, he met a little man mincing along in a thin and threadbare overcoat. The little man’s eyes were hidden under a cap, his lips closely muffled in a scarf. Nonetheless, the man saw Shtamm, stopped, and said, “Ah. And you too?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where so early?”

  “I’m looking for a room.”

  Shtamm did not catch the reply; the words stuck fast in the scarf’s double whorls. But he saw the man thrust a hand inside his overcoat, feel about for something, and finally pull out a narrow notepad. He quickly wrote something down, blowing on his frozen fingers. An hour later, a three-by-four-inch slip of paper torn from the notepad had miraculously turned into lodgings measuring one hundred square feet.

  The longed-for space had been found on the top floor of an enormous gray pile in one of the side streets that trace crooked zigzags between Povarskaya and Nikitskaya. The room struck Shtamm as somewhat narrow and dark, but once the electric light had been switched on, dark blue roses appeared, capering down the wallpaper in long verticals. Shtamm liked the sprightly blue roses. He went to the window; hundreds upon hundreds of roofs pulled low over more windows. Looking pleased, he turned round to the landlady—a quiet, elderly woman with a black shawl about her shoulders.

  “Very good. I’ll take it. May I have the key?”

  There was no key. The landlady, looking down and drawing her shawl more closely about her, said the key was lost, but that . . . Shtamm wasn’t listening.

  “Doesn’t matter. For now a padlock will do. I’ll go and fetch my things.”

  In another hour the new lodger was tinkering with the door, screwing in the padlock’s steel hasp. Elated as he was, one small detail did bother him: While securing the temporary bolt, he noticed that the old lock appeared to have been broken. Visible above its steel body were the marks of blows and deep scratches. A little higher up, on the wooden stock, ax marks were plain to see. Feeling not a little apprehensive, Shtamm lighted a match (the corridor connecting his room to the front hall was dark) and inspected the door. But nothing else—save the white number 24, clearly inscribed on the door’s flat brown surface and, evidently, necessary for the house accounts—did he notice.

  “Doesn’t matter.” Shtamm waved the thought away and set about unpacking his suitcase.

  Over the next two days everything went as it was supposed to go. All day Shtamm went from door to door, from meeting to meeting, bowing, shaking hands, talking, listening, asking, demanding. At night, the briefcase under his elbow now strangely heavy and straining his arm, his steps shorter, slower, and less steady, Shtamm returned to his room, looked blearily round at the ranks of dark blue roses, and sank into a black, dreamless sleep. The third evening he managed to finish somewhat earlier. The minute hand on the street clockface jerked forward to show ten forty-five as Shtamm approached the entrance to his building. He climbed the stairs and, trying not to make any noise, turned the cam of the Yale lock on the outer door. Then he went down the unlighted corridor to room No. 24 and stopped, fumbling in his pocket for the key. The other rooms were dark and quiet, except for the hum—to the left, through three thin walls—of a Primus. He found the key, turned it inside the steel body, and gave the door a shove; in that same instant a white blur rustled by his fingers, slipped down, and flopped on the floor. Shtamm snapped on the light. On the floor by the threshold, having evidently fallen out of the crack in the door, lay a notebook in a broad label-band. Shtamm picked it up and read the address:

  RESIDENT

  ROOM NO. 24

  There was no name. Shtamm folded back a corner of the notebook: Angular jumping letters bunched in a nervous line looked up. Puzzled, Shtamm again read the strange address, but in that instant, as he was turning the manuscript over, it slipped out of its rather loose paper noose and smoothed out its paper body. Shtamm had only to turn to the first page, which bore only these words: Auto-biography of a Corpse.

  Whoever you, the person in room 24, may be, the manuscript began, you are the only person I shall ever manage to make happy: You see, had I not vacated my hundred square feet by hanging myself from a hook in the corner by the door, you would hardly have managed to find yourself a resting place so easily. I write about this in the past tense: an exactly calculated future may be seen as a fait accompli, that is, almost as the past.

  We are not acquainted and it is too late for us ever to be so, but that in no way prevents my knowing you: You are from the provinces. Rooms like these, you see, are better rented to out-of-towners with no knowledge of local affairs and press reports. Naturally, you have come “to conquer Moscow”; you have the energy and will “to gain a foothold,” “to make your way in the world.” In short, you have that particular ability which I never had: the ability to be alive.

  Well, I am certainly ready to cede you my square feet. Or rather, I, a corpse, agree to move over just a little. Go ahead and live: The room is dry, the neighbors are quiet and peaceful, and there’s a view. True, the wallpaper was tattered and stained, but for you I had it replaced, and here I think I managed to guess your taste: dark blue roses flattened along silly verticals. People like you like that sort of thing. Isn’t that true?

  In exchange for the solicitude and consideration I have shown you, the person in room No. 24, I ask only for a simple readerly consideration of this manuscript. I do not need you, my successor and confessor, to be wise and subtle; no, I need from you only one extremely rare quality: that you be entirely alive.

  For more than a month now I have been tormented by insomnias. Over the next three nights they will help me to tell you what I’ve never told anyone. After that, a neatly soaped noose may be applied as a radical cure for sleeplessness.

  An old Indian folktale tells of a man forced to shoulder a corpse night after night—till the corpse, its dead but moving lips pressed to his ear, has finished telling the story of its long-finished life. Don’t try to throw me to the ground. Like the man in the folktale, you will have to shoulder the burden of my three insomnias and listen patiently, till the corpse has finished its autobiography.

  Having read down to this line, Shtamm again examined the broad paper label-band: There were no postage stamps, no postmarks.

  “I can’t understand it,” he muttered, walking to the door and standing there plunged in thought. The hum of the Primus had long since faded. Through the walls, not a sound. Shtamm glanced over at the notebook: It lay open on the table, waiting. He delayed a minute, then went obediently back, sat down, and found the lost line with his eyes.

  I have worn lenses over my pupils for a long time. Every year I have to increase their strength: my vision is now 8.5. That means that 55 percent of the sunlight does not exist for me. I have only to poke my biconcave ovals back into their case, and space, as if it too had been thrown into that dark and cramped compartment, suddenly contracts and grows dim. I see only gray blurs, murk, and long threads of transparent dots. Sometimes, when I wipe my slightly dusty lenses with a piece of chamois, I have an odd feeling: What if, along with the specks of dust that have settled on their glassy concavities, I were to wipe away all of space? Here and gone: like a sheen.

  I
am always keenly aware of this glassy adjunct that has crept up to my eyes on bent wiry legs. One day I discovered that it could break more than just the rays falling inside its ovals. The absurdity of what I am about to relate occurred some years ago: several chance meetings with a girl I half knew had created a strange bond between us. I remember she was young, her face a delicate oval. We were reading the same books, and so used similar words. After our first meeting I noticed that her myopically dilated pupils inside fine light blue rims, hidden (like mine) behind the lenses of a pince-nez, were affectionately but relentlessly following me. One day we were left alone together; I touched her hands; they responded with a light pressure. Our lips moved closer together—and at that very moment the absurdity occurred: In my clumsiness I jostled her lenses with mine; caught in a wiry embrace, they slipped off and landed on the carpet with a high, thin tinkle. I bent down to pick them up. In my hands I held two strange glass creatures, their crooked metal legs so entangled as to form one hideous four-eyed creature. Quivering glints, jumping from lens to lens, vibrated voluptuously inside the ovals. I pulled them apart: With a thin tinkle, the coupling lenses came unhooked.