Unwitting Street

by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Joanne Turnbull (Translator)

Overview

Eighteen strange, whimsical, and philosophical tales by the Russian master of the weird, all now in English for the very first time.

When Comrade Punt does not wake up one Moscow morning--he has died--his pants dash off to work without him. The ambitious pants soon have their own office and secretary. So begins the first of eighteen superb examples of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky's philosophical and phantasmagorical stories. Where the stories included in two earlier NYRB collections (Memories of the Future and Autobiography of a Corpse) are denser and darker, the creations in Unwitting Street are on the lighter side: an ancient goblet brimful of self-replenishing wine drives its owner into the drink; a hypnotist's attempt to turn a fly into an elephant backfires; a philosopher's free-floating thought struggles against being "enlettered" in type and entombed in a book; the soul of a politician turned chess master winds up in one of his pawns; an unsentimental parrot journeys from prewar Austria to Soviet Russia.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781681374895
Publisher:	New York Review Books
Publication date:	08/18/2020
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	192
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Sigizmund Krzizhanovsky (1887-1950) studied law and classical philology at Kiev University. In his philosophical and satirical stories with fantastical plots, he ignored official injunctions to portray the new Soviet state in a positive light, and three separate efforts to print different collections were quashed by the censors, a fourth by World War II. Two of his short story collections, Autobiography of a Corpse and Memories of the Future, and his novels The Letter Killers Club and The Return of Munchhausen are also available as NYRB Classics.

Joanne Turnbull’s translations from Russian in collaboration with Nikolai Formozov include Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s The Letter Killers Club (winner of the AATSEEL Prize for Best Literary Translation into English) and Autobiography of a Corpse (winner of the PEN Translation Prize).

Editorial Reviews

These philosophical, melancholic, darkly funny tales merit a place beside those of Kafka, Borges, and Calvino.” —Kirkus, starred review

“This collection . . . mixes playful and morose tones in stories of the kooky and the condemned . . . clever and satirical in his descriptions, Krzhizhanovsky is at his best when finding levity in grave revelations.” —Publishers Weekly

“Krzhizhanovsky found his definitive English voice in the Moscow-based translator Joanne Turnbull. . . . Turnbull has co-created Krzhizhanovsky’s best phantasmagorical modernist fictions in paperbacks published by New York Review Books.” —Caryl Emerson

From the Publisher

★ 2020-06-03
In these 18 short stories, written between 1920 and 1940, Russian writer Krzhizhanovsky turns a sardonic eye on history, God, philosophy, the early days of the Soviet Union, and the writer's fate.

After the title character dies in "Comrade Punt," his pants continue to perform his office job so well they are given a promotion. In "The Gray Fedora," a nihilistic thought jumps from a man's head into his new hat. When the fedora is mistakenly worn by the wife's lover, it causes his suicide, then floats downriver and continues to infect anyone who puts it on with a feeling of utter pointlessness. In these stories, thoughts and ideas have lives of their own. Literally. ("Only half-inhabited, like a hamlet after the plague, the old man's brain was thinly populated with thought-invalids and thought-pensioners.") In "The Life and Opinions of a Thought," the struggle of putting an idea into words is told from the point of view of a line by Immanuel Kant. In "Paper Loses Patience," the letters of the alphabet stage a rebellion, abandoning their posts in books, in newspapers, on signs. In "God is Dead," Nietzsche's statement is taken literally; the Almighty dies, long after people have stopped believing in Him, in the year 2204, with surprising consequences. Erudite, playful, wry, these stories are concerned with human failure and the failure of language itself: "We all understand each other by syllables...we don't know how to read someone else's feelings, the essence hidden in the word." They are also darkly funny. A parrot that sings “La Marseillaise,” subjected to the vicissitudes of war, is described as having "the look of an atheist selling indulgences." In the title story, a narrator who eschews the title of writer sends letters to strangers. "What, you may ask, makes me drink? A sober attitude toward reality." He addresses an unknown fellow insomniac whose window stays lighted throughout the night: "This new socialist property must be carefully and exhaustively studied. I'm doing this as best I can." Krzhizhanovsky died in 1950, his work all but unpublished in his lifetime. We are lucky to have the fruit of his exhaustive study available now; as his letter writer says, "We all live on history's Unwitting Street."

These philosophical, melancholic, darkly funny tales merit a place beside those of Kafka, Borges, and Calvino.

Kirkus Reviews