Memories of the Future (New York Review Books Classics) [Paperback]

Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (Author), Joanne Turnbull (Translator, Introduction)

Book Description

Series: New York Review Books Classics | Publication Date: October 6, 2009

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Fantastically imaginative, darkly ironic and marvelously crafted, these seven tales written in the 1920s were unpublished during Krzhizhanovsky's lifetime. Set mostly in Moscow, where the toilsome workdays sap spiritual strength, the stories are about the strange, wondrous and alarming things that can result from a chance encounter. In Quadraturin, the most straightforward story, the resident of a matchbox-size flat is proffered an experimental formula for biggerizing rooms, which, when applied, expands the space and doesn't stop until the room becomes a black wilderness. In Someone Else's Theme, a writer meets a down-on-his-luck seller of philosophical systems, while the protagonist of The Branch Line is directed to a train that spirits him into a disorienting dreamscape. The long title story is the biography of a brilliant, lonely scientist, Max Shterer, whose obsessive pursuit of making time dance in a circle proves prescient and chilling. Turnbull's translation reads wonderfully, capturing the isolation and strangeness of Krzhizhanovsky's startling stories. (July)
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Review

"For anyone enthralled by the satirical avant-garde that briefly shone on the fringes of Soviet culture in the 1920s, here’s a revelation.  Krzhizhanovsky somehow scraped a living in post-revolution Moscow as he wrote stories infused by a disturbing surrealism.  Joanne Turnbull’s fine translations of seven won the Rossica Prize, and this edition should gain them a flock of new fans."  Boyd Tonkin, The Independent


"These dystopic Stalin-era stories...read like dream diaries..." --The New York Times

"Fantastically imaginative, darkly ironic and marvelously crafted, these seven tales written in the 1920s were unpublished during Krzhizhanovsky’s lifetime. Set mostly in Moscow, where the toilsome workdays sap spiritual strength, the stories are about the strange, wondrous and alarming things that can result from a chance encounter...Turnbull’s translation reads wonderfully, capturing the isolation and strangeness of Krzhizhanovsky’s startling stories." --Publishers Weekly

 "A writer visionary, an unsung geniu..." --Georgy Shengeli

"Nightmarish visions and philosophical conundrums explored in highly entertaining, fleet-footed prose... Krzhizhanovsky's whimsical and self-reflexive tales are more likely to strike readers as harbingers of Borges or Calvino." -OLIVER READY, The Times Literary Supplement

"Like Platonov, Krzhizhanovsky is a poker-faced surrealist whose imagination is so radical it goes beyond political lampoon into the realms of metaphysical assault. But Krzhizhanovsky’s writing is more in the fantastical modernist mode of Jorge Luis Borges and Stanislaw Lem–he works out the eccentric premises of his plot with a relentless cogency..." --Bill Marx, WBUR.fm

"Krzhizhanovsky is often compared to Borges, Swift, Poe, Gogol, Kafka, and Beckett, yet his fiction relies on its own special mixture of heresy and logic...phantasmagoric..." --Natasha Randall, Bookforum

“Curiously, one of the most startling qualities of his work is the directness with which it addresses our 21st century concerns. It’s as if the Soviet editors were right: Krzhizhanovsky now seems more our contemporary than theirs...His stories, like those of Jorge Luis Borges, are closer to poetry and philosophy than to the realistic novel...It is now clear that Krzhizhanovsky is one of the greatest Russian writers of the last century.” –Robert Chandler, Financial Times

"Delightful to read, humorous, sad and meaningful...His work, subtly subversive, as his editor rightly calls it, only started to be published as a whole in 1989, when what might be described as all the usual suspects, Kafka and Borges, Swift, Gogol and of course Samuel Beckett, were promptly trotted out by way of comparison. Krzhizhanovsky has certainly much in common with them, but the flavour and personality of his writing is all his own, as if it were a subdued and friendly personal conversation. His method, as he put it, was not to borrow from reality, but to ask reality for permission to use his own imagination'." –John Bayley, The Spectator

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Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: NYRB Classics (October 6, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590173198
• ISBN-13: 978-1590173190
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #508,315 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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23 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A startling rediscovery, November 9, 2009

By 

R. H. Chandler (London England) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Memories of the Future (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)

Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (1887--1950) used to say that he was `known for being unknown'. For the main part, Soviet editors rejected his work; often they dismissed it as `untimely' or `not contemporary', by which they meant: `This is not what we need during our new socialist epoch.' Curiously, one of the most startling qualities of his stories is the directness with which they address our twenty-first century concerns. It is as if the Soviet editors were right; Krzhizhanovsky now seems more our contemporary than theirs.
One story, `Yellow Coal' (published not in this volume but in the earlier SEVEN STORIES), anticipates global warming. It is set in a time when we have run out of coal and oil and the sun is drying up our reserves of water. A scientist suggests harnessing the energy of human spite: 'On the long keyboard of feelings, you see, the black keys of spite have their own distinct, sharply differentiated tone.' Marriage, of course, is a good potential source of this energy: 'coldness and, wherever possible, repugnance multiplied by proximity would produce high-voltage spite...' But there are other sources: 'Mills could make do with workers' hatred alone; the workers themselves were no longer needed. Factories and mills began laying huge numbers of people off, keeping only skeleton crews to man the spite collectors.' In the end, however, it appears that even the seemingly infinite energy of spite can grant humanity only a brief respite.
The pun on `spite' and `respite' is mine, but it is, I believe, in Krzhizhanovsky's spirit. He follows the play of thought and words wherever they take him. In his own words, `A thinker is not someone who thinks loyally, but someone who is loyal to his thoughts'. He also wrote, `I am not alone. Logic is with me'. This brings us to one of the finest stories, `Red Snow' (1929), the Russian text of which was discovered only a few years ago. In it a man is wandering around Moscow in search of work. Eventually he joins a line of people waiting on the street. They are hoping to obtain some logic, but they are afraid it will run out before they reach the front of the line...
Another story, `Quadraturin', takes as its starting point the shortage of living space in 1920s Moscow. The narrator, like Krzhizhanovsky himself, lives in what is little more than a cupboard. A mysterious stranger brings him a tube containing `an agent for biggerizing rooms: Quadraturin'. The narrator smears this substance around the walls - and from that moment they never stop moving apart. Many writers have described the boundlessness of the steppe; many have described the suffocating quality of a Soviet communal apartment. No one else has evoked both agoraphobia and claustrophobia in a single image. I had thought I understood this story well, but a friend has just written to me, `The enlarged room is a subtle metaphor for an inner revolution. The protagonist is an inverse image of Kafka's man who turns into a cockroach. His difficulty in dealing with the world derive from the magnification of his inner world, not its shrinkage.' This startled me; I had never read the story this way. Krzhizhanovsky's work, however, is subtle enough to bear many interpretations, and I am sure he will continue to startle me.
Krzhizhanovsky's work is remarkable both for its brilliance and for its breadth. The complete works - now being published in both Russian and French - amount to around 3000 pages. As well as both long and short stories, he wrote travel sketches, plays, opera librettos and essays about literature and the theatre. In the 1920s, when Meyerhold, Vakhtangov and other great directors were at the height of their fame, he criticized them for arrogating dictatorial powers; he argued that slave labour is never productive and that it is therefore a mistake to turn actors into slaves. He also wrote that the Revolution had turned the entire country into a theatre - one where improvisation was forbidden and only canonical texts could be performed.
The translator, Joanne Turnbull, conveys Krzhizhanovsky's intellectual vitality. She provides neat equivalents for the puns and neologisms, and her language is idomatically and rhythmically alive. One story begins with terse onomotopeia: 'The rail joints clacketed, rapping out the staccato of the route.' 'Red Snow' begins still more arrestingly: ' Resignation to one's fate takes practice. Like any art. Or so Citizen Shushashin maintains. He begins every day - after putting on his shoes and washing his face, before throwing on his jacket - with an exercise. Again, the expression is his. This exercise works like this: he walks over to the wall, puts his back up against it and stands there in an attitude of utter resignation. For a minute or two. And that's all. The exercise is over. He can begin to live.'

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A valuable and unique insider's view into a closed society, January 25, 2010

By 

Gwendolyn Dawson "Literary License" (Houston, Texas United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Memories of the Future (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)

This collection of seven loosely interconnected short stories, by turns whimsical and menacing, examines Soviet Moscow in the 1920s. In these stories Krzhizhanovsky primarily focuses on the lives of displaced intellectuals--those who, after World War I and the Russian Revolution of 1917, are left with little to do but wander the city's streets wondering what happened to their settled lives of respectability. One of Krzhizhanovsky's protagonists describes Soviet Russia, and particularly Moscow, as a "country of nonexistences," and it is these nonexistences, left without a place or function in society, that populate Krzhizhanovsky's stories. While often representing an isolated point of view, Krzhizhanovsky's stories contain enough dark comedy and signs of hope to mitigate their overall bleakness.

In a self-described style of "experimental realism," Krzhizhanovsky mixes gritty details (dark rooms in concrete block buildings, frozen boulevard benches) with fantastical elements, including several extended dream sequences. In one story, the Eiffel Tower uproots itself and heads towards the revolution in the East, laying waste to everything in its path. In another, a sociable corpse manages to miss his funeral while trying to experience one more day of life. In the last story of the collection (Memories of the Future), Max Scherter is a man obsessed with the concept of time. He works to build a time machine only to be repeatedly interrupted by war and revolution. Despite the obstacles Max faces, his story is a hopeful one of the perseverance of a noble idea over mankind's tragedies.

Krzhizhanovsky died in 1950 before any of his stories were published. Now, for the first time, these seven stories are available to an English audience thanks to Joanne Turnbull's translation and the New York Review of Books. Memories of the Future, although sometimes confusing in its wild departures from reality, gives us a valuable and unique insider's view into a closed society.

5 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Curious but not Essential 20th Century Russian Literature, February 5, 2010

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Tebes "Buchlieber" (Niagara Region, ON) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Memories of the Future (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)

Sometimes philosophy enhances an author's stories and prose. Krzhizhanovsky was a dedicated reader of Kant and in this instance I feel the Prussian thinker also had an indirect influence on the Russian's ability to tell stories.

"Quadraturin" was my favourite of the seven with a traveling salesman offering a lowly tenant in a cramped apartment space a cream to extend the confines of his room. My second and third favourite would be "The Bookmark" and "The Thirteenth Category of Reason". Otherwise, I found the majority of the tales (even the ones I liked sometimes) tiredly unfocused and lacking in a tight narrative structure, let alone description and pace. "Memories of the Future", the title tale begins on a fairly good note but then it becomes confusing and marred by Krzhizhanovsky's inability to stay on track and paint credible characters. I quickly lost sympathy for Shterer's character and his quest became disjointed by the addition of other characters that come out more as two dimensional side notes.

There are moments here in this book that are unique and disquieting - as when the wayward traveler of "The Branch Lines" ends up in his nightmarish world of empty bright streets and crowded nights. I enjoyed the anecdotes in "The Bookmark", especially the one about the Eiffel Tower running off and the cat trapped on the ledge. In these small and select instances, Krzhizhanovsky writes compelling narrative - you feel for the Eiffel Tower and this poor cat and it's brilliant! But these minor episodes don't make an entire book for me.

Overall, these stories are fun and curious, novelties really and at their basic, have great ideas. But beyond that, the ideas cannot provide a strong narrative backbone. On top of that, I rarely get a sense of place, as if the author lived in the landscape of Kant's ideals. Strong writing, whether translated or not, should be compelling. Krzhizhanovsky's works rarely stray too far from the abstract leaving the reader at times overworked and for the most part indifferent to his tales.

I am thankful NYRB prints and publishes the 'alternatives' to the major authors but this book is far too minor for me to recommend. I give it three stars because the ideas behind the stories themselves are stimulating.