Autobiography of a corpse

205 Pages·2013·1.34 MB·English

by  Turnbull

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
v1.1
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 perverse 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