The Rossica Translation Prize for 2007 for literary translation from Russian has been awarded to Joanne Turnbull for Seven Stories by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky - a recently redisovered author from the 1920s and 30s, unpublished during his lifetime. We look back to Oliver Ready's review of the book from the TLS of October 13, 2006.
Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky; translated by Joanne Turnbull
SEVEN STORIES.
208pp. Moscow: Glas. Paperback, $15.95; distributed in the UK by Inpress. Pounds 8.99. 5 7172 0073 0
«The source of my constant sorrows - bad luck in all matters literary - never runs dry, not even in summer.» So wrote Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky to his wife, Anna Bovshek, a former actress and the future guardian of his archive, in July 1925. The immediate cause of his distress was the deferral, and then abandonment, of the publication of his story «Autobiography of a Corpse», but such setbacks punctuated his entire career.
«Bad luck» - which was primarily the misfortune of possessing a free and brilliant mind - left a visible imprint on Krzhizhanovsky's fiction, whether in its profound studies of isolation, its association of literature and death, or, more directly, its jaundiced portraits of life on Moscow's Grub Street in the 1920s. Gorky acknowledged Krzhizhanovsky's gifts, but said that 1932 was certainly not the time for «philosophy». In the 1940s, after the German invasion put paid to another projected volume of stories, Krzhizhanovsky turned to translation work and drink. He died in 1950 without a book to his name. Despite the efforts of Bovshek and others, the bulk of his fiction remained unpublished until the late 1980s, and even then received only a muted response.
The twenty-first century promises Krzhizhanovsky a far warmer welcome. With the ongoing publication in St Petersburg of his collected works, edited by Vadim Perelmuter (who himself retrieved them from the archives), an awareness has grown that Krzhizhanovsky belongs with the best of the Russian prose writers who came to maturity in the post- Revolutionary decade. Like them, he sought and developed a new aesthetic in an altered world; and like them, he was soon thrown back on himself. The seven stories collected in this first English translation acquaint us with an often mesmeric voice. Nightmarish visions and philosophical conundrums are explored in entertaining, fleet-footed prose. Gorky thought them old-fashioned, but Krzhizhanovsky's whimsical and self-reflexive tales are more likely to strike today's readers as harbingers of Borges or Calvino.
Krzhizhanovsky's cultural background was exceptionally rich. He wrote in Russian and set many stories in Moscow, but he grew up in Kiev and his first language was Polish. After a formative encounter at school with Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, he took a degree in law, while exploring Europe, mastering six languages and continuing his wide-ranging studies. In Kiev he lectured to great acclaim on philosophy, theatre, history and music, among other subjects. But it was his move to Moscow in 1922, at the age of thirty-five, which galvanized his fiction. A sense of discovery and displacement is a motif of several stories, and the newness of Krzhizhanovsky's surroundings appears to have reinforced his literary preference for the defamiliarizing perspective (a preference fully shared by one of his most important tutors, Swift). His stories also retained his earlier cultural enthusiasms, as this collection shows. «The Runaway Fingers» describes the peregrinations of a hand after it frees itself, in mid-performance, from the arm of a concert pianist. In «The Unbitten Elbow», a man's frustrated attempts to bite his own elbow are inflated by journalists and academics into a challenge to Kant's theory of transcendence.
The two stories form a curious diptych. If the pianist's fingers suggest the very essence of motion, the elbow-eater is stasis personified: «in his small square room, not unlike a chess square, his elbow pulled up to his jaw, (he) waited, wooden and inert, like a dead chess piece, to be put in play». This piece barely leaves its square, yet «The Unbitten Elbow» sweeps past with the same fluency and charm as «The Runaway Fingers» (until its savage conclusion, which deliberately mocks the reader's expectations). It is the play of language rather than plot that drives Krzhizhanovsky's writing. Neologisms, wordplay and rapid shifts in register achieve a dynamic, polyphonic effect, which is admirably captured here in Joanne Turnbull's excellent translation.
The theme of Seven Stories, if there is one, is change, both in language and in the apprehension of reality. In the first story, inspired by Moscow's chronic shortage of living space (a problem very familiar to Krzhizhanovsky), the protagonist is offered Quadraturin, «an agent for biggerizing rooms». In the last, a crisis in global energy resources is temporarily resolved by a mad professor's scheme to transform human spite into «yellow coal». In «Autobiography of a Corpse», the central story, the theme of change alights on its main target - the fragility of the self. While much of Krzhizhanovsky's fiction merrily dispenses with the notion of the coherent self in favour of a collage of eyes, elbows, fingers and other organs, the narrator of the «Autobiography» is determined to cling to his «...» at all costs, and even to his soul. He can only do so, however, by shutting out humanity (other selves) and immersing himself in intellectual labour: a dissertation on the letter «T» in Turkic languages. Even these measures fail him. Eventually, his philological inclinations lead him to a comparative study of the letter «...» in various European tongues. In all of them, he finds a short phoneme and a «changeable root». He can draw comfort only from the inhabitants of the Fiji Islands, where «savages do without that symbol we so value by replacing it with something like our 'to me'«. He fantasizes about living in the dative case («To me some bread, a female»), but ultimately accepts that his fate is to remain in the accusative, with all the other intellectual waifs of Soviet Russia's atomized society. He is with the bespectacled, with the «dead or almost dead», who cannot live themselves but «can be lived».
Krzhizhanovsky listed G. K. Chesterton among his precursors, and even adapted The Man Who Was Thursday for the stage. His fiction shares Chesterton's wit and agility, but not the English writer's conviction that the madness of solipsism (promoted by modern philosophies) can be overcome by faith. God is absent from Seven Stories, and love fares little better. The narrator of «In the Pupil» describes how a man enters the eye of his beloved when she accepts his advances.
The opening suggests amorous delight, and a possible source in the «sweet new style» of Cavalcanti and Dante (whose Vita Nuova is mentioned here in another story); but the tale rapidly mutates into an altogether bawdier and more cynical fantasy. Here, as elsewhere in Krzhizhanovsky's fiction, fear and solitude can be transformed only by the alchemy of language and the imagination. The story ends in high Formalist fashion with the narrator providing the recipe for literary magic: «cross out the truth», «variegate the pain throughout», «add a touch of the day-to-day», «a few philosophical bits» and «a veneer of physiology». Fearful of losing his reader, he cuts himself short, before concluding with a more revealing comment, the credo perhaps of Krzhizhanovsky himself: «I want to say to you what I've never said to anyone: why, in the end, make little children afraid of the dark when one can soothe them with it and lead them into dreams?».