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The stakes are wildly high in Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky's fantastic and blackly comic philosophical fables, which abound in nested narratives and wild paradoxes. This new collection of eleven mind-bending and spellbinding tales includes some of Krzhizhanovsky's most dazzling conceits: a provincial journalist who moves to Moscow finds his existence consumed by the autobiography of his room's previous occupant; the fingers of a celebrated pianist's right hand run away to spend a night alone on the city streets; a man's lifelong quest to bite his own elbow inspires both a hugely popular circus act and a new refutation of Kant. Ordinary reality cracks open before our eyes in the pages of Autobiography of a Corpse, and the extraordinary spills out.… (more)
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"The Autobiography of a Corpse" is concerned with seams, cracks, and gaps. Krzhizhanovsky’s characters perceive the gulfs between 'I' and 'not-I', between 'here' and 'there'; they see the cracks in reality, cracks which (pace Leonard Cohen) let the darkness in.
Many of the stories in this collection combine philosophy with fantastic scenarios to create an often difficult but invigorating read. These scenarios include a handful of runaway fingers, a man whose life's mission is to bite his own elbow, a world literally fuelled by spite, the fate of Judas's thirty pieces of silver, and a 'pitiable pupil manikin' which resides in a lover's eye. A deep pessimism underlies the black humour, lush description, and prose scattered with neologisms.
Most of Krzhizhanovsky’s writings were not published during his lifetime, largely due to the Soviet system he lived under. Life under this regime informs these stories: Krzhizhanovsky (1887-1950) may write of the surreal and fantastical, but at times reality was not much different. The final piece 'Postmark: Moscow' consists of a series of letters written to a friend in the provinces. In them the writer describes his wanderings in Moscow's tangled streets and reflects on the city's past and new communist present. These letters are filled with that philologically-inspired philosophy which suffuses the book's other stories.
This NYRB edition contains an introduction by Adam Thirlwell and notes which elucidate the many historical, philosophical, and literary allusions.
[I was given a free download of this book by the publishers for review.]