"Eternity Loves Me"
The life, death, and resurrection of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky and his stories
First, let’s get a handle on that name: Sigizmund Dominikovich Krzhizhanovsky. Kuh-zhi-zha-NOV-ski: kuh as in correct, the zh sounding like the s in measure, nov as in nova, and ski, rhyming with free. The “r” is actually silent, a holdover from the original Polish, where rz and ż are phonetically the same but etymologically different. Krzhizhanovsky probably thought of that phantom letter often. His tales are full of disappearing letters, cracks between dimensions, bookless bookshelves, and, as in the title of a recent collection, Countries that Don’t Exist. The root word of his name, krzyż, means “cross.” He called himself “a crossed-out person.”
The Krzyżanowski family kept writing their crossed-out r even when they wrote it in Russian Cyrillic as Кржижановский. They were part of the large Polish minority in Tsarist Kyiv/Kiev, a city with its own phantom letter problems and vexed relationship with Russian. Sigizmund was born there in 1887. In 1922, at the age of thirty-five, he moved to Moscow, hoping to establish himself as a writer. He didn’t. Living in his tiny apartment on Arbat Street, he wrote a hundred stories and novellas, a dozen plays and film scenarios, and filled entire notebooks with adages, aphorisms, and anecdotes—enough writing, altogether, to fill out the six heavy volumes of his collected works, some of it the very finest fantasy and science fiction in Russian literature. But in his lifetime, he only published nine stories in obscure journals and a single, slim pamphlet on the philosophy of theater.
It’s not that he was censored, at least not formally. Although his period of active writing fell entirely under the Stalinist era, few of Krzhizhanovsky’s tales commented directly on the Soviet catastrophe. His two most damning tales are the sci-fi parable of the “exes” turned into mindless slaves by government mind control and novella Return of Munchausen, in which the legendary baron of bullshit finds himself out-bullshitted by Soviet propaganda, declaring that Russia is “the only country about which one cannot lie.” Both were formally submitted to the state-run publisher, and both were rejected. An internal review of Munchausen ended with this judgment: “While trying to relate ironically to routine slander leveled against the USSR, he fell into the same tone himself. It’s best not to publish it.”
Krzhizhanovsky was always going to have a hard time with GlavLit. He conspicuously defied the tenets of Socialist Realism, writing with what one rejection slip called an “insultingly high level of learnedness” smacking of elitist, bourgeois erudition. He even wrote back to GlavLit in 1928, after they had rejected yet another one of his books, writing that “in view of the fact that Glavlit rejected for publication my books Letter Killers Club and Collector of Cracks for reasons that are contradictory and mutually exclusive, I consider this decision incorrect and request that you, Pavel Ivanovich [Lebedev-Polyansky, chief censor], read them personally.” He didn’t.
Although his writing was convicted of anti-Soviet messages, Krzhizhanovsky himself was never arrested, never persecuted, never formally ostracized, even as his fellow authors were murdered for far less: Osip Mandelstam froze to death in Siberia for a mocking couplet about Stalin; Daniil Kharms starved to death in an insane asylum because his poems for children were too anarchic; Isaac Babel got a bullet through the back of his head because his books were too famous, and he traveled too much. Even Krzhizhanovsky’s fellow fantasists, Mikhail Bulgakov and Evgeny Zamyatin, were formally condemned and exiled for their novels, Zamyatin externally and Bulgakov internally. Why did Krzhizhanovsky, defiant and decadent, survive unscathed?
The simplest, most painful possibility is that Krzhizhanovsky simply wasn’t important enough to punish. As I write this, I have been reading Kurt Schlögel’s monumental history of Stalin’s purges, Moscow 1937. Even though the terror touched every level of Soviet society, arrests and executions were disproportionately aimed at the country’s elites. Of the 139 members elected to the Central Committee in 1934—the Soviet senate, as it were—only seven were still in office by the end of 1939. The rest were all dead or imprisoned. Most arrests were driven by accusations of sabotage: in government, military, economics, infrastructure, and culture alike, there were no accidents, only Trotskyite saboteurs. A derailed train, a disappointing harvest, and a poor show at the Bolshoi Theater were all, inevitably, followed by arrests.
In literature and culture, sabotage was done by corrupting the morals of readers. This necessarily entailed readers, which Mandelstam, Babel, and Akhmatova all had. Krzhizhanovsky didn’t. What use would Trotsky’s agitators or fascist spies have with an unknown chudak sitting alone in his shoebox of an apartment and writing fairytales about chess?
In the 1940s, Krzhizhanovsky turned to translation, hack writing, and alcohol, largely giving up on literature. In the last months, literature gave up on him: a stroke left him unable to understand writing. His partner, Anna Bovshek, later wrote that the day the doctors diagnosed him with alexia was the only time in their three decades together that she had seen her gentle, witty chudak weep. He died soon after, in 1950.
Bovshek donated his papers to the archives of the Writers’ Union, which he had managed to join in 1939. A GlavLit committee came together a few years later to consider Bovshek’s request to consider publishing some of these papers. Once again Krzhizhanovsky was rejected, this time posthumously. In his journal, he once wrote: “I am at odds with the present day, but eternity loves me.”
Eternity found him in 1976. Vadim Perelmutter, professor of Russian literature, was poking around the archives of the Soviet Writers’ Union, studying the papers of another forgotten writer, Georgiy Shengeli. In a diary entry bordered in funeral black, Shengeli had written: “Today, on December 28th, 1950, Sigizmund Dominikovich Krzhizhanovsky, a science fiction writer and ‘overlooked genius,’ whose gifts were equal to those of Edgar Allan Poe and Alexander Grin, has died. Not a single one of his lines was published during his lifetime.” Perelmutter, an expert on Soviet literature, had never even heard of Krzhizhanovsky. Intrigued, he located Krzhizhanovsky’s papers, began to read them, and was stunned. Shengeli was right.
But eternity had to wait a little longer—13 years, actually—for the political climate to cool. Only in 1989 was Perelmutter able to finally release a collection of Krzhizhanovsky stories. This time, there were no censors, no rejections, and no excuses: a century after his birth and forty years after his death, Krzhizhanovsky was a published author.
The books were a success. Russian readers in the last years of the Soviet Union had an unrelenting appetite for works from those artists, dissidents, and activists broken, erased, and obscured by Stalinism. They needed proof that their parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles, neighbors and teachers that they had grown up around were not all collaborators, killers, or cowards. They needed proof that Russian literature was still great, could still stand toe-to-toe with anybody else, and Krzhizhanovsky fit the mold perfectly: here, in the midst of the Terror, was a home-grown, Russian answer to Kafka and Borges, a missing link between the 19th century fantastique and postmodernism. He was everything Stalin’s New Soviet Man was not: witty, clever, cosmopolitan, with imagination to spare. Perelmutter moved ahead with editing a definitive, six-volume collection of the complete Krzhizhanovsky.
Europe quickly took interest. French translations appeared in the early 1990s, followed by German, Polish, and other European languages. English-language publishers, typically, let world literature pass them by, and outside of a university edition or two, it wasn’t until 2009–twenty years after his return–that New York Review Books finally issued Joanne Turnbull’s translation of Memories of the Future. NYRB hit a rich seam: in a quick succession, they put out Autobiography of a Corpse, The Letter Killers Club, The Return of Munchausen, and last year’s Unwitting Street, covering just about all the Krzhizhanovsky fiction worth reading. His belated reception in the anglophone world has been so positive, Columbia University Press stepped forward this year to publish Krzhizhanovsky’s remaining plays, non-fiction, and journals, starting with Countries That Don’t Exist.
When that series is done, we will finally have something close to the complete works of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky in English, his favorite foreign language and a source of endless literary delight. Among the most heartbreaking of his failed projects was a tourist’s guide to Shakespeare’s London, complete with maps, descriptions, and anecdotes. He never went to London. Now, his books are sold there, and around the world there are thousands of readers eagerly buying his stories, essays, notebook jottings, and family correspondence. That this resurrection came about by means of a single paragraph in a forgotten notebook at the back of a nondescript cabinet might have come from one of his own stories, except this one has a rather happy ending.
Further Reading
If you haven’t read Krzhizhanovsky yet, start with the stories, available in English through the Turnbull translations from NYRB. They are all excellent.
Countries That Don’t Exist, a selection of the non-fiction, is now out, and very good. I am relying more than a little on the editors’ introduction for background and biographical information.
I also checked much of that information against Caryl Emerson’s introduction to NYRB’s edition of Unwitting Street, excerpted here.
The great Adam Thirlwell is also a regular, reliable voice in Krzhizhanovsky Land. He has a great essay on the author here, in the Paris Review.
For more on Krzhizhanovsky’s intellectual context, I relied on Leiderman’s enthusiastic “The Intellectual Worlds of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky.” (2012)
For information on Soviet censorship practices, I relied mostly on Blium & Farina’s “Forbidden Topics: Early Soviet Censorship Directives.” (1998)
Meanwhile, on Musement…
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Happy reading!