Autobiography of a Corpse

Starred review from August 12, 2013
Sly, vibrant, and often very funny, Krzhizhanovsky’s stories, originally written in the 1920s and ’30s (though virtually unpublished during the author’s lifetime), are a joy. In “In the Pupil,” the narrator’s reflection in his lover’s eye leads to all kinds of drama. “Postmark: Moscow” consists of 13 letters to a friend and gives a finely rendered sense of place and time: “Moscow is a mishmash of utterly unrelated (logically and optically) building ensembles...” In “The Collector of Cracks,” a fairy tale leads to musings of great importance. The title story records a personal history related to a room. In “Yellow Coal,” human spite is harnessed as an energy source. “The Runaway Fingers” provides both a lesson in the etiquette of proper inquiry and an investigation of artistry. The best of the many exceedingly fine stories here is “The Unbitten Elbow,” in which a man’s life’s goal of trying to bite his own elbow leads to scarcely imagined changes in society. Full of precise detail, this book will instruct, delight, and then leave the reader pondering long after the reading is finished.

August 15, 2013
Eleven new translations of stories by one of Russia's great writers, virtually unknown in his time. Krzhizhanovsky (1887-1950) was exiled to obscurity under Soviet oppression. To this day, no one knows where he is buried. Just a sampling of the writer's early-20th-century writings (Memories of the Future, 2009, etc.) offers a wealth of strange pleasures. In the title story, a remote journalist becomes obsessed with the autobiography of his room's previous occupant. "In the Pupil" is another odd tale of an affair and a man's journey into his lover's eye. "Human love is a frightened thing with half-shut eyes: it dives into the dusk, skitters about in dark corners, speaks in whispers, hides behind curtains, and puts out the light," Krzhizhanovsky writes. Some stories are both literal and fantastic; in "The Runaway Fingers," a world-class pianist's fingers run off to spend a night sleeping rough in the streets. In "Yellow Coal," the world's energy crisis is resolved by harnessing the world's spite: The titular energy source is bile. Still others are distinctly Russian fairy tales. In "Bridge Over the Styx," an albino Stygian toad asks an engineer to construct a bridge to Hades. This collection isn't quite a revelation but definitely qualifies as buried treasure. Funny and pointed satire from one of literature's lost souls.

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