Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

[rich]

NYRB is publishing Memories of the Future this week. sounds wonderful

Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (1887-1950), the Ukrainian-born son of
Catholic Poles, 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 the bulk of his time to the study of literature and his
own writing. In 1920, after a brief stint in the Red Army,
Krzhizhanovsky began lecturing intensively in Kiev on the 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 satirical stories with fantastical plots ignored
official injunctions to portray the new Soviet state in a positive
light. Three separate efforts to print different collections were
quashed by the censors, a fourth by World War II. Not until 1989 could
these surreal fictions 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

Written in Soviet Moscow in the 1920s—but considered too subversive
even to show to a publisher—the seven tales included here attest to
Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky's boundless imagination, black humor, and
breathtaking irony: a man loses his way in the vast black waste of his
own small room; the Eiffel Tower runs amok; a kind soul dreams of
selling "everything you need for suicide"; an absentminded passenger
boards the wrong train, winding up in a place where night is day,
nightmares are the reality, and the backs of all facts have been
broken; a man out looking for work comes across a line for logic but
doesn't join it as there's no guarantee the logic will last; a
sociable corpse misses his own funeral; an inventor gets a glimpse of
the far-from-radiant communist future.