The Letter Killers Club Read online

  What is meant by “interference in the organism”? Mechanized human beings were a common theme of the 1920s, beginning with the Čapek brothers’ robots in their play R.U.R. (1921). Krzhizhanovsky himself touched on the theme in a piece he wrote for the Moscow Chamber Theater’s in-house newspaper in 1924, “Man Against the Machine.” There he remarked that the atrocities of the recent war had turned “the human being, who by the maxims of European philosophy should be an aim in and of himself, into a target.[13]” Theaters should take care not to do the same (the implied culprit here is Vsevolod Meyerhold and his stylized biomechanics): “‘People’ under arms were called a ‘crew,’” Krzhizhanovsky writes, “and those silent and submissive ex-persons unquestioningly obeyed the hole pressed into the iron.” In these regimented military and theatrical scenarios, however, as soon as the brain is disarmed or re-attached to its own organism, the body snaps back. It remembers its prior real life, realigns itself, perhaps even develops an immunity to its own automatization. Das’s story in The Letter Killers Club takes these reflexes into account, but plays them out in a far more lethal way.

  The fourth Saturday is given over to Fev’s Tale of Three Mouths, another questing tale with a carnival concept. Ing, Nig, and Gni argue over whether the mouth was created for talking, kissing, or eating. They set out to interview the world on this question, but end up in the stocks for thieving. As punishment, on pain of death, each must do without the one mouth-based activity by which he had lived. We have now moved in comic fashion around the head and face: dismembering Hamlet’s monologues, detaching the brain, taping up the polymath mouth. The fifth and final tale, told by Mov, also hovers around the teeth and lips. It concerns a tiny gift from the mouth of the deceased Roman Mark Sept, the obol (copper coin) placed there to purchase his passage across the river Acheron. The slave girl Fabia, attending the body, uses it to buy herself some sweet dates.

  Like every distinctly original writer, Krzhizhanovsky has his repertory, his own grammar of images through which to express favored paradoxes and insights. This final Roman tale can be stitched to a brief story written three years later, “Bridge over the Styx.”[14] In setting and theme it is a model Krzhizhanovskian narrative. A man wakes up in his tiny room, reaches out his hand, and instead of a cold cup of tea on the bedside table he touches a clammy toad. “Excuse me, is it far from here to death?” it asks. The toad, one of those “frogs from the River Styx” that Juvenal sang about, somehow got lost in transit. It has defected from its muddy depths. Too much traffic of late, it says, mass deaths and cut-off lives silting down from Charon’s ferry. “Down they slowly sink—dissociating into days and instants—through the fissures between droplets, down to us on the bottom…. turbid and faded deposits from days, silhouettes of acts and refractions of thoughts.” It’s unlivable, says the toad. There’s too much matter to wade through. Let’s build a bridge over the river and have excavators dredge up the Stygian ooze with “all of the world’s sunken memories, all of the centuries passed into oblivion … We’ll drain oblivion to the bottom. Death will deal out all its riches to the poor—obols and lives—and we shall see how you contrive to remain alive amid all those raised-up deaths.”

  “Bridge over the Styx” could have been delivered at a Saturday Club meeting, as a variation on Mark Sept and Fabia. It too is a meditation on life becoming death (or on life’s obligation to the dead) shared by many Russian writers of fiction during those harrowing years. It is also an epitaph to the entire Letter Killers project. For that final challenge was another paradoxical task facing the members of this fantastical Club: how to keep their own ideas alive amid all the raised-up deaths that are the world of letters, literature.

  —CARYL EMERSON

  [1] Savl Vlob, literally “Saul Straight-at-your-forehead” (or, straight between the eyes). The story is included in Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Memories of the Future, translated by Joanne Turnbull (NYRB, 2009), 53–85.

  [2] S.D. Krzhizhanovsky, “Argo i Ergo” (1918), edited and with an introduction by Vadim Perelmuter, Toronto Slavic Quarterly 21 (Summer 2007): 1–8.

  [3] Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, “Shekspir i piatiklassnik,” in “Fragmenty o Shekspire,” Sobranie sochinenii (Collected Works), edited by Vadim Perelmuter (St. Petersburg: Symposium, 2001–2010), Vol. IV, 350–84, esp. 383–84.

  [4] “Shtempel’: Moskva” (1925), in Sobranie sochinenii, Vol. I, 511–549.

  [5] For a brief (and to date the only) overview of the writer in English, see the excellent monograph by Karen Link Rosenflanz, Hunter of Themes: The Interplay of Word and Thing in the Works of Sigizmund KrŽiŽanovskij (New York: Peter Lang, 2005), biography on 1–21.

  [6] See the text of Gorky’s letter and outraged commentary on it in the editor’s preface to the Collected Works, “Posle katastrofy,” in Sobranie sochinenii, Vol. I, 25–31.

  [7] Remark by V.M. Vol’kenshtein on February 13, 1939, at a meeting of the Dramaturgs’ Section of the Soviet Writers Union of the USSR; see “Stenogramma Rasshirennogo zasedaniia Byuro sektsii dramaturgov ot 13–ogo fevralia 1939,” g., RGALI f. 631 (Soyuz pisatelei), op. 2, ed. khr. 355, 48.

  [8] “Zaiavlenie S. D. Krzhizhanovskogo na imia zaveduiushchego Glavnym upravleniem po delam literatury i izdatel’stv P.I. Lebedeva-Polyanskogo o peresmotre knig ‘Klub ubiits bukv’ i ‘Sobiratel’ shchelei,’ 28 September 1928,” RGALI f. 341 (Nikitina E. F.), op. 1, ed. khr. 261.

  [9] Anna Bovshek, “Vospominaniia o Krzhizhanovskom: Glazami druga,” in Velikoe kul’turnoe protivostoianie: Kniga ob Anne Gavrilovne Bovshek, edited by A. Leontiev (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2009), 10–66, esp. 60. Bovshek’s memoirs, written fifteen years after her husband’s death, are discreet, sentimental, and intensely loyal.

  [10] In 2010, Oliver Sacks described the effect of such stroke-induced alexia (a “special form of visual agnosia”) on a creative writer in his essay “A Man of Letters: A Neurologist’s Notebook,” The New Yorker (June 28, 2010): 22–26. The afflicted subject could still write, and fluently, only he could not decipher what he had written. “We think of reading as a seamless and indivisible act,” Sacks notes, “and as we read we attend to the meaning—and, perhaps, the beauty—of written language, unconscious of the many processes that make this possible.”

  [11] Vozvrashchenie Myunkhgauzena (1927–28), in Sobranie sochinenii, Vol. II, 135–262.

  [12] These ideas are discussed in three of Krzhizhanovsky’s nine essays on Shakespeare. “Twinning” and “splitting” as two Shakespearean aspects of the doubles problem that figures into the Hamlet episode in The Letter Killers Club is discussed in one of the first Ph.D. dissertations devoted to Krzhizhanovsky: Ioanna Borisovna Delektorskaya, “Esteticheskie vozzreniia Sigizmunda Krzhizhanovskogo (ot shekspirovedeniia k filosofii iskusstva)” (Moscow: Rossiisskii gosudarstvennyi gumanitarnyi universitet, 2000), 40–43.

  [13] “Chelovek protiv mashiny,” written for the in-house publication of the Moscow Chamber Theater, “7 dnei Moskovskogo Kamernogo teatra” (1924), in Sobranie sochinenii, Vol. IV, 660–62, quotes on 660.

  [14] “Most cherez Stiks” (1931), in Sobranie sochinenii, Vol. I, 496–507, quotes on 500 and 507.

  THE LETTER KILLERS CLUB

  TRANSLATORS’ NOTE

  A FEW DISCREPANCIES in the published Russian text of The Letter Killers Club have been corrected with the help of Krzhizhanovsky’s typescript (see notes). For improvements to the finished translation we are indebted to Caryl Emerson.

  1

  “BUBBLES over a drowned man.”

  “What?”

  A triangular fingernail slid with a quick glissando over the swollen spines gazing down at us from the bookshelf.

  “I said, bubbles over a drowned man. Plunge into a pool headfirst and your breath will rise to the surface in bubbles: swell and burst.”

  The speaker again surveyed the rows of silent books crowded along the walls.

  “You’ll say that even a bubble can catch the sun, the blue of the sky, the
green curve of a coastline. Maybe so. But does that matter to the man whose mouth is grazing the bottom?”

  Suddenly, as if he had run against a word, he got up and, gripping his elbows behind his back, began pacing to and fro between the bookshelf and the window, only rarely meeting my eyes.

  “Yes, remember this, my friend: if there is one more book on the library shelf, that is because there is one less person in life. If I must choose between the shelf and the world, then I prefer the world. Bubbles to the day—oneself to the depths? No, thank you very much.”

  “But you,” I tentatively tried to disagree, “you’ve given people so many books. We’re all used to reading your—”

  “I’ve given. But no longer give. It’s been two years now: not a single letter.”

  “I’ve heard and read that you’re at work on a major new—”

  He had a habit of interrupting. “Major? I don’t know. New, yes. But the ones talking and writing about it, this I do know, they will not have a single typographical symbol more from me. Understand?”

  My expression, evidently, did not convey understanding. After a minute’s hesitation, he returned to his empty armchair, drew it up to mine, sat down so that our knees nearly touched, and looked me searchingly in the face. The seconds dragged on in excruciating silence.

  He was casting about in me for something, the way one casts about a room for a thing forgotten. I stood up.

  “Your Saturday evenings, I’ve noticed, are always busy. The day is nearly gone. I’ll be off.”

  Rigid fingers gripping my elbow restrained me. “It’s true: I, that is, we lock our Saturdays away from people. But today I shall show it to you: Saturday. You must stay. What you’re about to see, however, requires some background. While we’re alone, I’ll give you a brief sketch. I doubt you know that in my youth I was a student of poverty. My first manuscripts robbed me of my last coppers, which went for the postal wrappers that invariably came back to my desk drawers torn, dirty, and bruised with postmarks. Besides the desk that served as a cemetery for my fictions, my room contained: a bed, a chair, and bookshelves—four long boards the length of the wall, buckling beneath their load of letters. The stove was usually without wood, and I without food. But I reverenced my books, as some do icons. Sell them? The thought never entered my head until…until it was forced to by a telegram: MOTHER DIED SATURDAY. PRESENCE REQUIRED. COME. The telegram attacked my books one morning; by evening the shelves were bare, and I could slip my library, now in the form of three or four banknotes, into a pocket. The death of the person who gave you life, that is very serious. Always and for everyone: like a black wedge in your life.

  “When I had done the funeral days, I journeyed back over seven hundred miles to the door of my shabby abode. The day of my departure I had been disconnected from my surroundings—only now did the effect of the bare bookshelves make itself felt and enter my mind. I remember I took off my coat, sat down at my desk, and turned to face the emptiness suspended on four boards. The boards, though relieved of their burden of books, were still bowed, as if the emptiness were weighing them down. I tried to shift my gaze elsewhere, but in my room, as I said, there was only a bed and shelves. I undressed, lay down, and tried to sleep off my depression. No: the sensation, after only a brief rest, woke me. Lying with my face to the shelves, I watched a quavery moonglint dance along the denuded boards. Some scarcely perceptible life seemed to be dawning—with timorous glimmerings—in that booklessness.

  “Of course, all this was playing on nerves strung too tight—and when morning loosened the tuning pegs, I calmly surveyed the shelves’ sun-swashed hollows, sat down at my desk, and resumed my usual work. I needed to look something up: my left hand reached—automatically—for the spine of a book; in its place was air, again and again. In my annoyance I peered at that booklessness, filled with swarms of sun-shot motes, and tried—with an exertion of memory—to see the page and line I wanted. But the imagined letters inside the imagined binding kept fidgeting: instead of the wanted line I found a ragtag stagger of words, the line kept breaking and bursting into dozens of variants. I chose one and gingerly inserted it in my text.

  “Come evening, resting from my labors, I liked to stretch out on the bed with a weighty volume of Cervantes in hand, to skip with my eyes from episode to episode. The book wasn’t there: I remembered that it had stood in the left-hand corner of the bottom shelf, pressing its black leather with yellow corner pieces to the red saffian of Calderón’s* autos. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine the book before me—between palm and eye (thus do forsaken lovers continue to meet their loves—with the help of eyes shut tight and a concentrated will). It worked. In my mind I turned page after page; but then my memory dropped some letters—they got mixed up and slipped out of sight. I tried calling to them: some words returned, others did not; so I began filling in the gaps, inserting words of my own. When, weary of this game, I opened my eyes, I was surrounded by night, a snug blackness caulking all the corners of the room and shelves.

  “At the time I had a great deal of leisure—and more and more often played the game with the emptiness of my debooked shelves. Day by day they became overgrown with phantasms made of letters. I had neither the money nor the desire now to go to bookstalls and secondhand booksellers for letters. I was extracting whole fistfuls of them—letters, words, phrases—from myself: I took my conceptions, printed them in my mind, illustrated them, clothed them in carefully considered bindings, and stood them neatly on the shelves, conceptions next to conceptions, phantasms next to phantasms—filling the willing emptiness, whose black wooden boards absorbed everything I gave it. One day, when a man who had come to return a book made to replace it on the shelf, I stopped him: ‘No room.’

  “My visitor was a poor devil like me: he knew that the right to eccentricity was the only right of half-starved poets … He regarded me calmly, put the book on my desk, and asked if I would listen to his poem.

  “When I had closed the door on him and his poem, I quickly put the book out of sight: the garish gold letters on the swollen spine were already disrupting my barely established game of conceptions.

  “In the meantime I continued to work on my manuscripts. A new bundle sent to the old addresses, to my genuine surprise, did not come back: the stories were accepted and printed. As it turned out, what books made of paper and ink could not teach me, I had learned from three cubic meters of air. Now I knew what to do: I took them down, one by one, my imaginary books and phantasms filling the black emptiness of the old bookshelves, and, dipping their invisible letters in ordinary ink, turned them into manuscripts, and the manuscripts into money. And gradually—over the years—my name grew fat, I had more and more money, but my library of phantasms was drying up: I was spending the shelves’ emptiness too fast and recklessly: that emptiness, less and less charged, was turning into ordinary air.

  “Now, as you can see, my shabby room has grown up into a respectably furnished apartment. Next to the old shelves, their disused emptiness freighted afresh with books, I have large glass-fronted bookcases—these here. Inertia was on my side: my name continued to fetch me fees. But I knew: sooner or later the emptiness I’d sold would have its revenge. Writers, in essence, are professional word tamers; if the words walking down the lines were living creatures, they would surely fear and hate the pen’s nib as tamed animals do the raised whip. Or a better analogy: do you know about the production of astrakhan fur? Suppliers have their own terminology: they track the patterns of the unborn lamb’s wool, wait for the necessary combination of curls, then kill the lamb—before birth: they call that “clinching the pattern.” That is exactly what we—trappers and killers—do with our conceptions.

  “I, of course, was not a naïve person even then; I knew that I was turning into a professional killer of conceptions. But what could I do? Surrounded by outstretched palms, I kept flinging them fistfuls of letters. They only wanted more. Drunk from the ink, I was prepared—whatever the cost—to force more and mor
e themes. But my exhausted imagination had no more to give. It was then that I decided to stimulate it artificially by the old proven means. I had one of the rooms in my apartment emptied … But come with me, it will be simpler if I show you.”

  He rose. I followed. We passed through a succession of rooms. A threshold, another threshold, a corridor—he led me to a locked door hidden by a portiere the color of the wall. The key clicked loudly, then the light switch. I found myself in a square room: at the far end, opposite the door, was a fireplace; ranged round the fireplace were seven heavy carved armchairs; and along the dark felt-covered walls, rows of blank black bookshelves. Cast-iron fire tongs rested against the fender. That was all there was. We walked across the patternless, step-muffling carpet to the semicircle of chairs. My host motioned to me: “Sit down. You’re wondering why seven? At first there was only one armchair. I came here to commune with the emptiness of the bookshelves. I asked these black wooden caverns for a theme. Patiently, every evening, I would shut myself away with the silence and emptiness and wait. Gleaming with black lacquer, dead and strange, the shelves were loath to reply. So I, a professional word tamer, went back to my inkwell. Several deadlines were approaching: I had nothing out of which to write.

  “Oh, how I hated all those people slitting open the latest literary journal with their paper knives, surrounding my flogged and exhausted name with tens of thousands of eyes. I’ve just remembered a tiny incident: a street, a little boy on the frozen pavement hawking letters (R and L) for galoshes, and my immediate thought: both his letters and mine will end up underfoot.