Friday, November 02, 2007
The fiction of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky
The literary history and critical accounting of twentieth century imaginative writing remains very much unfinished business. The work of once marginal, barely-known writers continues to present a challenge and a qualification to the current orthodoxies of critical reputation. Lee Rourke puts forward the example of Fernando Pessoa; let me press the case for Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky.
Krzhizhanovsky (1887-1950) worked in Moscow in almost total obscurity till his death in 1950. He wrote five short novels and more than a hundred stories. His compulsion to write depended on neither publication nor public admiration. Apart from a handful of stories in magazines none of his work appeared in print in his lifetime. His fiction was not rediscovered until the 1980s and the first Russian edition of his work appeared in 1989. It’s a strange story (and the thought flickered across my mind that it might be a spoof, a witty literary hoax; but then again if Beckett had never written Waiting for Godot and if Nabokov had not produced Lolita, both writers might well have lived out their lives in obscurity).
The first ever collection of Krzhizhanovsky’s short fiction in English translation, Seven Stories (trans. Joanne Turnbull), was published by Glas in April 2006. I first came across Krzhizhanovsky when I read a review of this collection by Benjamin Paloff. It made me want to read the book. I eventually came across a copy in the London Review of Books bookshop by the British Museum. And it has not disappointed.
Some of the stories are relatively straightforward satires. ‘Yellow Coal’ addresses the topic of diminishing oil and an over-heated earth (oddly prescient for a story apparently first published in 1939). A new energy supply is harnessed – human spite and bad-temper. Two million supposedly happy marriages produce enough ill-feeling to power ‘an enormous sawmill’. In ‘The Unbitten Elbow’ an eccentric individual determined to bite his own elbow becomes a national celebrity, giving rise to ‘elbow mania’ and ‘elbowist thought’. More elusive is ‘The Runaway Fingers’(1922), which rewrites Gogol’s classic story ‘The Nose’. In the middle of a performance, the fingers of a brilliant concert pianist’s right hand make a break for freedom. After various adventures they are reunited with his body – with disastrous consequences. The first of these stories reads like a parody of Stalinist society, the second could almost be a parody of contemporary Russia and the third – dated 1922 - like an oblique satire on Bolshevism. Others are surreal and absurdist but not satirical. ‘In the Pupil’ is a bizarre story about jealousy. A man sees his own tiny figure in his lover’s pupil and finds himself inside it, along with the eleven previous men in her life.
A recurring theme in these stories is anxiety. Personal identity is threatened by sudden transformation. Individuals and entire societies undergo abrupt, dizzying total change. But that anxiety extends to storytelling itself. At the end of ‘In the Pupil’ the narrator, reunited with his own reflection, decides he has ‘enough material’ to tell the story. But how best to tell it? The story ends with the narrator indecisively fretting about the correct formula and about his relationship with an indifferent reader. All that has gone before is balanced on this precarious, incomplete climax, which terminates with a question mark.
The relationship between reader and writer is posed in much darker terms in ‘Autobiography of a Corpse’, in which the tenant of a newly available room discovers the lengthy suicide note of the man whose death made his tenancy possible. The narrative is, in part, about the petrifaction of the October revolution; the corpse seems to be that of revolutionary idealism. But the story’s intention is to embed itself in the mind of the reader. Its impact is to leave the living narrator in a condition of inertia and paralysis. A transference has taken place which, perhaps, will result in another suicide.
‘The Bookmark’ is the story of a writer who twice encounters a strange figure he calls ‘the theme catcher’. The theme catcher has a compulsion to invent stories out of trivial, random events. As story melts into story it becomes apparent that Krzhizhanovsky is satirising the condition of literature under Stalin. In place of the conformism of socialist realism Krzhizhanovsky asserts the rights of an imaginary volume entitled Stories for the Crossed-Out and dreams of a banner reading ON THE NON-EXISTENCE OF LITERATURE. The theme catcher’s final provisional narrative involves a stranger who travels to the Arabat Spit and sets out on a sixty mile walk along it (‘utterly deserted…only sand and shingle, rotten seas are either side, a sun scorched sky above, and ahead an endless strip, narrow and dead, leading on and on’). As a consequence of these two meetings the narrator is inspired to tell the story the reader has just read: a story about narrative possibility. We are left with the image of a man, his notebook and his bookmark, struggling against the grain to write; ‘any corner,’ he asserts, ‘is better than the long, bare literary pavement of today.’
Krzhizhanovsky (1887-1950) worked in Moscow in almost total obscurity till his death in 1950. He wrote five short novels and more than a hundred stories. His compulsion to write depended on neither publication nor public admiration. Apart from a handful of stories in magazines none of his work appeared in print in his lifetime. His fiction was not rediscovered until the 1980s and the first Russian edition of his work appeared in 1989. It’s a strange story (and the thought flickered across my mind that it might be a spoof, a witty literary hoax; but then again if Beckett had never written Waiting for Godot and if Nabokov had not produced Lolita, both writers might well have lived out their lives in obscurity).
The first ever collection of Krzhizhanovsky’s short fiction in English translation, Seven Stories (trans. Joanne Turnbull), was published by Glas in April 2006. I first came across Krzhizhanovsky when I read a review of this collection by Benjamin Paloff. It made me want to read the book. I eventually came across a copy in the London Review of Books bookshop by the British Museum. And it has not disappointed.
Some of the stories are relatively straightforward satires. ‘Yellow Coal’ addresses the topic of diminishing oil and an over-heated earth (oddly prescient for a story apparently first published in 1939). A new energy supply is harnessed – human spite and bad-temper. Two million supposedly happy marriages produce enough ill-feeling to power ‘an enormous sawmill’. In ‘The Unbitten Elbow’ an eccentric individual determined to bite his own elbow becomes a national celebrity, giving rise to ‘elbow mania’ and ‘elbowist thought’. More elusive is ‘The Runaway Fingers’(1922), which rewrites Gogol’s classic story ‘The Nose’. In the middle of a performance, the fingers of a brilliant concert pianist’s right hand make a break for freedom. After various adventures they are reunited with his body – with disastrous consequences. The first of these stories reads like a parody of Stalinist society, the second could almost be a parody of contemporary Russia and the third – dated 1922 - like an oblique satire on Bolshevism. Others are surreal and absurdist but not satirical. ‘In the Pupil’ is a bizarre story about jealousy. A man sees his own tiny figure in his lover’s pupil and finds himself inside it, along with the eleven previous men in her life.
A recurring theme in these stories is anxiety. Personal identity is threatened by sudden transformation. Individuals and entire societies undergo abrupt, dizzying total change. But that anxiety extends to storytelling itself. At the end of ‘In the Pupil’ the narrator, reunited with his own reflection, decides he has ‘enough material’ to tell the story. But how best to tell it? The story ends with the narrator indecisively fretting about the correct formula and about his relationship with an indifferent reader. All that has gone before is balanced on this precarious, incomplete climax, which terminates with a question mark.
The relationship between reader and writer is posed in much darker terms in ‘Autobiography of a Corpse’, in which the tenant of a newly available room discovers the lengthy suicide note of the man whose death made his tenancy possible. The narrative is, in part, about the petrifaction of the October revolution; the corpse seems to be that of revolutionary idealism. But the story’s intention is to embed itself in the mind of the reader. Its impact is to leave the living narrator in a condition of inertia and paralysis. A transference has taken place which, perhaps, will result in another suicide.
‘The Bookmark’ is the story of a writer who twice encounters a strange figure he calls ‘the theme catcher’. The theme catcher has a compulsion to invent stories out of trivial, random events. As story melts into story it becomes apparent that Krzhizhanovsky is satirising the condition of literature under Stalin. In place of the conformism of socialist realism Krzhizhanovsky asserts the rights of an imaginary volume entitled Stories for the Crossed-Out and dreams of a banner reading ON THE NON-EXISTENCE OF LITERATURE. The theme catcher’s final provisional narrative involves a stranger who travels to the Arabat Spit and sets out on a sixty mile walk along it (‘utterly deserted…only sand and shingle, rotten seas are either side, a sun scorched sky above, and ahead an endless strip, narrow and dead, leading on and on’). As a consequence of these two meetings the narrator is inspired to tell the story the reader has just read: a story about narrative possibility. We are left with the image of a man, his notebook and his bookmark, struggling against the grain to write; ‘any corner,’ he asserts, ‘is better than the long, bare literary pavement of today.’
# posted by Ellis : 3:33 PM
