Sigizmund Krzhizhanovskiĭ

In eleven fantastic and darkly comic philosophical fables, introduces a cast of extraordinary characters, including a pianist whose fingers on his right hand run away to spend a night alone in the city streets.

Autobiography of a Corpse

Joanne Turnbull

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.

Memories of the Future

In 1920s Moscow, a group of anonymous "letter killers" meet to conceive stories and pledge to never write them down, but their conceptions lead to suspicions among the group's members, in a novel by an early 20th-century author. Original.

The Letter Killers Club

First inspired in the eighteenth century by the tall tales of the real Baron Hieronymus von M nchausen, the legend of Baron M nchausen-as transmitted and transformed by Rudolf Erich Raspe and Gottfried August B rger-soon eclipsed the fame of his living counterpart and has captivated the European imagination ever since. An irrepressible cavalier and raconteur, the Baron gallivants through battle (in one episode he climbs aboard an outgoing cannonball only to change his mind halfway and hop onto another one heading in the opposite direction), scoffs at death, and inflates his own stature at every turn. In Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky's update, the Baron returns in the troubled twentieth century, where he will rediscover the place of imagination amid the tenuous peace, universal mourning, and political machinations of the aftermath of World War I. "To me," he claims, "the debates of philosophers, grabbing the truth out of each other's hands, resemble a fight among beggars over a single coin." Transcending truth, the Baron instead revels in smoke and mist. He is a devotee of the impossible and a worshipper of "Saint Nobody." But lost as he is in the twists of his imagination, can the Baron heal Europe through diplomacy-or at least hold a mirror up to its absurdities?

The Return of Munchausen

A Comedy from the Stalinist 1930s with Essays on Theater

That Third Guy

Contemporary Russian Prose

War & Peace

A rediscovered classic Krzhizhanovsky was banned during his lifetime and only published in 1990s.

Sigizmund Krzhizhanovskiĭ

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