by Douglas Messerli
Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky Memories
of the Future, translated from the Russian by Joanne Turnbull with Nikolai
Formozov (New York: New York Review Books, 2009)
Finding a room on the old
Arbat, Krzhizhanovsky joined the thousands of other Russians in a cramped,
communal life, filled with sounds and smells of crowded human bodies. In 1924
he was teaching drama theory in the experimental studios of the Kamerny
Theater, and the following year one of his tales was published in the literary
journal Rossiya. From 1925 to 1930
the young author found work as an editor for the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, writing further stories through these
years. When his work on the Encyclopedia
came to an end in 1931, a friend of Krzhizhanovsky's published a small
monograph titled Poetika zaglavii (A
Poetics of Titles), which ultimately allowed him acceptance into the Soviet
Writers Union, and allowed his wife to enter his works into the formal State
Archive of Literature and Arts upon his death in 1950.
In short, Krhizhanovsky's
life at first seems to parallel many minor Soviet authors of Stalin's regime.
Yet this author and his writings, radically satirical outcries against the
Soviet system, survived precisely because almost none of his work was published
during his life. The few stories he did submit were determined to be
"untimely," and several of his tales, such as "Red Snow"
might have resulted in imprisonment or even death. It was only a quarter of a
century that later critics discovered his Kafka-like creations, works that
created worlds unlike any others. As late as 2001-2010 Krhizhanovsky's complete
writings were finally published. In short, this author wrote in almost utter
silence, self-censoring his own output in order to survive.
The nightmarish satires that
make up seven tales of this volume are all worth reading again and again.
"Quadraturin" is a Gogol-like parable, where Sutulin, a prisoner of
the cramped communal quarters—a room so small that he can open the door with
his toe while lying upon his bed—is visited by a stranger who offers him a
magic essence, a "proliferspansion" ointment, for free, if only he
will sign a testimonial. Sutulin somewhat reluctantly agrees, and when the
visitor leaves applies the substance with water to the walls and floors of his
warren. He runs out of the essence, however, before being able to apply to the
ceiling. In a short while the room does indeed begin to expand, but the walls
and floor do not move equidistantly, but create strange, "monstrously
misshapen" forms which transform his comfy coffin into a terrifying
labyrinth of space. From the bed, he cannot even find the light.
Before long, the match-box
room has squared itself again and again to establish itself as a huge narrow
barrack-shaped space that continues to grow minute by minute so that, finally,
Sutulin cannot even find his way to the door.. A desperate cry of terror for
not being able to find his way out brings the apartment house-dwellers to his
little cell wherein he now is totally lost in space.
"The Bookmark"
begins with a man rediscovering in the confines of a book a bookmark that he
once used and loved. Intending to rejoin his bookmark friend once more on a
journey through a text, he seeks for a title, but unable to find an appropriate
book, goes for a walk. On the street he encounters a slightly garrulous writer
telling amazing stories to a friend; soon after, he himself joins the writer
and, metaphorically becomes the bookmark himself, as he points to possible
stories, plots, imaginary events. In one of the writer's stories the Eiffel
Tower goes mad, and attempts to walk away from the City of Light; in another a
cat trapped outside an office window on a sill for days, encountering storms
and starvation, jumps to its death; in still another a corpse misses its own
funeral and haunts a nearby grave digger who tries to find a way to dispose of
the body. Each tale is more fantastic than the others, all are remarkably
imaginative, but one after the other they are rejected—just as Krhizhanovsky's
own works—by editors for being inappropriate. The author describes his own
condition in another series of stories: Stories
for the Crossed-Out.
In "Someone Else's
Theme," the narrator encounters a man, Saul Straight, who sells
philosophical systems for the price of a bowl of soup. In "The Branch
Line" an exhausted train rider falls asleep as the conductor calls for
"All dreams, please." The nightmarish journey this rider takes, where
various forms and types of dream imagery push him forward, backwards, and
sometimes block his path, are as outlandish as those of Borges or even Kafka's
labyrinths.
The best story in this
fascinating collection is the novella "Memories of the Future," a
tale of an obsessed genius Shterer, who, almost from birth, is fascinated with
time and tinkers throughout his life on a H. G. Wells-like time machine that
will hopefully take him into the future.
So obsessed with his
invention, Shterer barely notices the rest of the world, focusing on attempts,
despite poverty, to create his machine; but almost the moment he finishes he is
called up into the army, where, soon after, he is arrested and imprisoned in a
concentration camp. There he receives word that his father has died, leaving
him his fortune, if only he can return to Russia. After much pleading and
maneuvering (Shterer has loaned his genius for creating mechanical devices to
the Germans, improving their gates), the man is freed, but the Revolution has
dispensed with the money and the bank.
Finally, the determined
Shterer finds a group of individuals who will support his venture in turn for
rides into the future in order to escape the Soviet system. Shterer eventually
achieves his goal, but before he can share it with the others, he is blasted
off alone, returning years later, an exhausted and changed man. A journalist
befriends him, and others told what he has experienced demand that he share
what he has witnessed there, in that unknowable world. But the man who has paid
such little attention all his life to things around him is vague about what he
has done and seen, and the little he remembers is obviously terrifying to those
in power, as is made evident by a secret visit to Shterer from Stalin, who
leaves Shterer's under-the-staircase quarters, in a rage.
What Shterer has not
comprehended, Krhizhanovsky brilliantly demonstrates through his own life and
writings: in order to have a future you must have a past, even if that life is
lived in the shadows.
Los Angeles, February
7, 2010
Reprinted from Rain Taxi (March-April
2010).
