Night Visions
By Liesl Schillinger
MEMORIES OF THE FUTURE
By Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky
Translated by Joanne Turnbull with Nikolai Formozov
228 pp. New York Review Books. Paper, $15.95
In the 1920s, a disaffected Soviet encyclopedia editor named Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky — a man haunted by Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason” and by Communist realities — began writing a series of philosophical, allegorical, fantastical short stories. Seven of them appear in “Memories of the Future,” a selection of his fiction that takes its title from the book’s longest entry — the tale of a brusque monomaniac who builds a “timecutter” to eject himself from 1920s Moscow. None of these stories were published in Krzhizhanovsky’s lifetime. This was not because the work had been rejected or because it was, well, a little weird. Krzhizhanovsky, it seems, was too proud, too shy or (more likely) too frightened to show them around — given that he was spinning his dystopic fictions at about the same time that Stalin was collectivizing the Soviet countryside.
Still, Krzhizhanovsky read his stories to friends at literary gatherings where they were, apparently, well received. And after his death, in 1950, at the age of 63, his wife deposited his manuscripts at the State Archives in Moscow, except for one novella, “Red Snow,” an anti-Soviet parable she concealed among her personal effects. In 1976, the scholar Vadim Perelmuter discovered the Krzhizhanovsky archival stash and went on to spend decades compiling and publishing the writer’s work. Now the translators Joanne Turnbull and Nikolai Formozov introduce Krzhizhanovsky’s neologistic whimsy, feverish invention and existential angst to a wider audience.
“Very tall, thin, slightly stooped, with a pale nervous face and a pince-nez,” Krzhizhanovsky the man could be a character in an absurdist tale by Gogol or an allegory by Kafka. But Krzhizhanovsky the author is harder to pin down. As he wrote in the story “Someone Else’s Theme” (in which a writer is accosted by a beggar who trades aphorisms for soup), “I should describe you as a literary descendant of Leskov, with his apocryphisms, and of Poe, with his love of the fantastic . . . but all that’s beside the point.”
Newcomers to this author will appreciate the guidance Turnbull provides in her introduction, which serves “to exgistolate the gist” of the stories, as the author might say. In “Quadraturin,” a man who lives in a communal apartment building “loses his way in the vast black waste of his own small room,” which has been magically enlarged by the application of a “proliferspansion” ointment. “The Bookmark” features an Eiffel Tower that “runs amok.” In “The Branch Line,” a commuter ends up in a place where “nightmares are the reality,” while in “Red Snow,” a dejected man “comes across a line for logic but doesn’t join it.” A “sociable corpse misses his own funeral” in “The Thirteenth Category of Reason.” And in the title story, the man with the time machine “gets a glimpse of the far-from-radiant Communist future.”
Krzhizhanovsky’s stories are more like dream diaries than fiction. Quite intentionally, he blurs the line between sleep and waking, real and unreal, life and death. While his translators admirably convey the whirligigging quality of his narratives, Krzhizhanovsky’s peregrinations demand unstinting focus and frequent compass checks. His characters often seem half, or wholly, asleep. Sometimes, as in “The Thirteenth Category of Reason,” they are dead — which doesn’t stop them from boarding city trams and chatting with commuters. “Alive or dead, they didn’t care.” Their only concern is whether such conduct is “decrimiligaturitized” — that is, legal. “In “Quadraturin,” the man with the proliferspansion ointment never exits a state of benumbed grogginess. Lying on his bed, “unable to part eyelids stitched together with exhaustion,” he tries to sleep through the night, “mechanically, meekly, lifelessly.” When inspectors from the Remeasuring Commission drop by to make sure he hasn’t exceeded his allotted
In the most effective story, “The Branch Line,” the nightmare is more straightforward. Quantin, a passenger on a train, is warned by the conductor, “Don’t over-stay-awake.” There’s no risk of that. Quantin’s legs “feel oddly cottony and hollow, the briefcase under his elbow soft and springy, like a pillow plumped for sleep.” In prose so melodiously somnolent that it conjures Tennyson’s “tir’d eyelids upon tir’d eyes,” Krzhizhanovsky describes how “the old locomotive, trailing steam, moved through the night as though shuffling soft slippers.” Disembarking in a factory town where nightmares are manufactured, Quantin spots a flier vaunting the local industry: “Our nightmares, weighing as they do on the brain, gradually form a sort of moral ceiling that is always about to come crashing down on one’s head: some of our customers call this ‘world history.’ ” But that’s not the point, the notice continues. “The point is the durability, unwakability, high depressiveness and wide availability of our nightmares: mass-market products good for all eras and classes . . . closed eyes and open.”
Here such commentary reads as satire, but in “Red Snow” (the story his wife hid), Krzhizhanovsky unveils his anger. “Haven’t you noticed how in the last few years our life has been permeated by nonexistence?” one of the characters asks. “Aren’t we, members of the intelligentsia, . . . inscribed in hopelessness?” But, he adds, “In hopelessness, too, you see, there’s a razor-sharp delight.”
In an essay justifying Shakespeare’s reliance on dreams as a device in his plays, Krzhizhanovsky wrote, “A dream is the only instance when we apprehend our thoughts as external facts.” His fascination with dream and consciousness emerges throughout this collection, in allusions to Plato’s cave and Socrates, to Husserl and Kant. And yet his refusal to wake to the reality of his times can fog the clarity of his visions. “To those who are awake,” Heraclitus wrote, “the world order is one, common to all; but the sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own.” In these pages, you sense that Krzhizhanovsky, in rejecting his world order, turned aside. “According to Heraclitus,” Plato explained, “in sleep the channels of perception are shut, and the intelligence in us is severed from its kinship with the environment.” It’s only upon waking that perception “recovers the power of reasoning.” But does this truth hold when, upon waking, the dreamer confronts an unreasonable world and finds no kinship with it?
For all the phantasmagoria in the works of Kafka and Bulgakov, it’s the undergirding reality that gives them their power. Borges once wrote of Kafka that he “knew he could dream only nightmares and was aware that reality is a continuous sequence of melancholy nightmares.” Kafka may have marked a difference between sleeping and waking, but did Krzhizhanovsky? “I live in such a distant future that my future seems to me past, spent and turned to dust,” he wrote. The time machine his protagonist boards in “Memories of the Future” allows him to look back on the Soviet 1920s from the distance of the 1950s. He sees “destitute years stained with blood and rage when crops and forests perished while a forest of flags rose in revolt” and concludes that “in a certain present there is more of the future than in the future itself.”
In Krzhizhanovsky’s tales, relics of a future past, he transports readers back to the present he renounced, to a life that’s “not-life, a gap in existence” — a place from which he sought refuge in fiction and dreams.
Liesl Schillinger is a regular contributor to the Book Review.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/25/books/review/Schillinger-t.html?nl=books&emc=booksupdateema3
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