Countries That Don’t Exist: Selected Nonfiction 9780231554527

Citation preview

COUNTRIES THAT DON’T EXIST

RU S S I A N L I BR A RY

The Russian Library at Columbia University Press publishes an expansive selection of Russian literature in English translation, concentrating on works previously unavailable in English and those ripe for new translations. Works of premodern, modern, and contemporary literature are featured, including recent writing. The series seeks to demonstrate the breadth, surprising variety, and global importance of the Russian literary tradition and includes not only novels but also short stories, plays, poetry, memoirs, creative nonfiction, and works of mixed or fluid genre. Editorial Board: Vsevolod Bagno Dmitry Bak Rosamund Bartlett Caryl Emerson Peter B. Kaufman Mark Lipovetsky Oliver Ready Stephanie Sandler ɷɸɷ For a list of books in the series, see page 283

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Y D UN VSK ZM O GI AN SI IZH ZH

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ry me b E tor aco pek y J rS d b ande ite Ed Alex d an

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Columbia University Press New York

Published with the support of Read Russia, Inc., and the Institute of Literary Translation, Russia

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2022 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Krzhizhanovskiĭ, Sigizmund, 1887–1950, author. | Emery, Jacob, 1977– editor. | Spektor, Alexander, editor. Title: Countries that don’t exist: selected nonfiction / Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky ; edited by Jacob Emery and Alexander Spektor. Description: New York : Columbia University Press, [2022] | Series: Russian library Identifiers: LCCN 2021021519 (print) | LCCN 2021021520 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231202367 (hardback) | ISBN 9780231202374 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780231554527 (ebook) Subjects: LCGFT: Essays. | Literary criticism. | Excerpts. Classification: LCC PG3476.K782 C68 2022 (print) | LCC PG3476.K782 (ebook) | DDC 891.78/4208—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021021519 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021021520

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America Cover design: Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich

CONTENTS

Foreword

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Introduction: Restoring the Balance

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1. Love as a Method of Cognition 2. Idea and Word

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3. Argo and Ergo

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4. A Philosopheme of the Theater (Excerpt) 41 5. A Collection of Seconds 6. The Poetics of Titles

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7. Countries That Don’t Exist 115 8. Edgar Allan Poe: Ninety Years After His Death 143

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9. Shaw and the Bookshelf (Abridged)

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10. The Dramaturgy of the Chessboard

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11. Moscow in the First Years of the War: Physiological Sketches (Excerpts) 197 12. A History of Unwritten Literature: A Prospectus 209 13. A History of Hyperbole 217 14. Writer’s Notebooks Notes 235 Contributors

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EDITORS’ PREFACE

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ntil recently, the English-speaking reader’s exposure to Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s oeuvre has been limited to his fiction, in Joanne Turnbull’s exquisite translations. Literary prose might be the most obvious and accessible entry point into Krzhizhanovsky’s strange worlds, and the six volumes available to date—Memories of the Future, Letter Killers Club, Autobiography of a Corpse, Return of Munchausen, Unwitting Street, and Stravaging “Strange”—amply represent his philosophically inclined fiction and metafiction. Nonetheless, it is impossible to fully appreciate Krzhizhanovsky’s scope and significance without the substantial legacy of writings that cannot be classified as narrative fiction. The recent publication of a volume of writing on theater (including the play That Third Guy, theoretical essays on performance, and critical pieces on Shakespeare, Pushkin, and Shaw), meticulously translated and annotated by Alisa Ballard Lin, goes a long way toward restoring the balance. The present volume aims to express further the range of Krzhizhanovsky’s imagination through a selection of his philosophical essays, works of literary criticism, and autobiographical writings.

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The initial impulse for this work was a conference that the editors organized at Indiana University in 2016, funded in part by a National Endowment for the Humanities grant in World Literature and Translation. Some of our guiding questions emerged from Krzhizhanovsky’s perennial image of literary themes and philosophical ideas as restless ghosts, generated in one brain and seeking to come to rest in the brains of others. What kind of resting place for Krzhizhanovsky’s themes is the English language, we asked, in which his words have come to lodge a century after he wrote them, and after a long dormancy in which they could not be published even in Russian? What kind of gap or wound is created in English literature— and in world literature—by the additional specters of his work in nonnarrative genres such as the critical essay, feuilleton, aphorism, and philosophical dialogue? The scholars brought together to consider these questions included a number of topnotch translators, and before the conference send-off dinner was over, many of the participants had agreed to put together a volume of Krzhizhanovsky’s nonfiction in English. It was our hope—a hope, we think, borne out in the pages that follow— that a range of translators would be able to highlight the range of styles and genres in which Krzhizhanovsky worked. Each of the texts collected here represents a distinct challenge to the translator, each of whom has added a headnote and generous annotations glossing references and explaining puns. All endnotes are added by the translator; all footnotes are Krzhizhanovsky’s own. His early essays, “Love as a Method of Cognition,” “Idea and Word,” and “Argo and Ergo”—translated by Alexander Spektor, Timothy Langen, and Joanne Turnbull,

respectively—are dense but playful philosophical tracts that revolve around the knowability and communicability of inner and outer words and worlds. Here Kantian logic, paronomastic wordplay, and the intuitions of a transcendent world of art that Krzhizhanovsky inherited from the Russian Symbolists vie as organizational principles of the text. Next in this anthology comes an excerpt from his major essay on the philosophy of theater, A Philosopheme of the Theater, of which Alisa Lin has allowed us to reprint a portion of her translation. Karen Rosenflanz’s translation of “A Collection of Seconds” represents Krzhizhanovsky’s work in the genre of the feuilleton: this brief piece on street photography is a profound meditation on time, essentially akin to Krzhizhanovsky’s many tales revolving around distortions of the space-time continuum. Krzhizhanovsky’s 1925 “The Poetics of Titles” originally appeared as a pamphlet—the only of his publications to appear in his lifetime with its own cover and under his own name. An erudite and appreciative anatomy of the title page as a distinct genre, this tract showcases its author’s capabilities as a quirky polyglot scholar with decidedly eccentric tastes. Its linguistic brinksmanship is dazzlingly managed by Anne O. Fisher. “Countries That Don’t Exist,” written a decade later and translated by Anthony Anemone, is in much the same vein: a grand tour of imaginary lands and peoples from the history of fantastic literature. Krzhizhanovsky is both our psychopompos through this vast terrain and a philosopher who uses the trope of hyperbole to unsettle the fabric of real and fictional space. Other notable appreciations of the period include the insightful tribute, “Edgar Allan Poe: 90 Years After His Death” Editors’ Preface

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(another contribution from Joanne Turnbull), devoted to a writer who looms large among influences on Krzhizhanovsky, and “Bernard Shaw and the Bookshelf,” an attempt to write a politically unobjectionable essay about a left-leaning writer that would be acceptable to the Stalin-era publishing apparatus. The most lasting impact of the latter essay, edited and translated by Caryl Emerson, might lie in its relevance to Krzhizhanovsky’s own bibliophilia and his recurrent, troubled imagery of the bookshelf as a kind of afterlife for disembodied minds. The presence of the book in Shaw’s stage sets provides the pretext to examine the dead thinkers, from Mozart to Schopenhauer, who haunt the imagination of the playwright and Krzhizhanovsky himself. Because of his declining health, the upheavals of World War II, and his disappointed ambitions, Krzhizhanovsky’s writing by the 1940s became more uneven in quality and less likely to appear in polished forms suitable for publication. It is all the more astonishing that some of his most interesting and experimental works belong to this period. A case in point is the tour de force “The Dramaturgy of the Chessboard,” which Reed Johnson undertook to translate for this collection. The work revives the tradition of the philosophical dialogue from Greek and Enlightenment philosophy as a bitter contest—as much wordplay as strategy—between the two halves of a chessboard. One representing comedy and the other, tragedy, the two sides discuss plot construction and dramatic tension through a series of puns and chess metaphors that commit to the “rules” of chess and plot construction, even while admitting their conventionality and even their irreality.

“Moscow in the First Years of the War,” excerpted and translated by Benjamin Paloff, similarly reduces frozen, starving Moscow during the approach of the German armies to a stage in which the dehumanized populace mechanically performs its parts. The papered-over windows and structures festooned with camouflage to guard against air raids become curtains and stage sets, and the terse exchanges between the residual population resemble Beckettian dialogues. Rounding out the volume are fragments from the vast reservoir of ideas contained in Krzhizhanovsky’s notebooks. A pair of detailed proposals for books he never completed— “A History of Unwritten Literature,” translated by Jacob Emery, and “A History of Hyperbole,” translated by Elizabeth Geballe—outline spectacular (if perhaps unrealizable) projects that reveal themselves to be more suggestive and powerful in ovo than any full-length book might have been. In both cases, the failure of the books to be realized on anything near the scale they set for themselves meaningfully resonates with the subject matter. We end with a smattering of aphorisms from the notebooks, selected and translated by Muireann Maguire. Some of the entries are ideas or titles for stories Krzhizhanovsky did not write, and others are suggestive puns or brief literary mediations that carry forward into the twentieth century the tradition of the Romantic fragment—often with a distinctly irreverent flavor. There is much more in the six volumes of Krzhizhanovsky’s collected works in Russian that we regret leaving out. But the point of diminishing returns is perhaps the corollary to the “law of unrealization” that Krzhizhanovsky describes in his Editors’ Preface

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prospectus for a History of Unwritten Literature, which stipulates that unfinished projects spin off an exponentially increasing number of new ones. In the fraction of his writing represented here, we offer the English-speaking reader a minimal outline of Krzhizhanovsky’s virtuosic range without, we hope, diluting his obstinate originality. We hope at least that we have come some way toward writing off the debt—to use an animating metaphor from the unwritten History of Unwritten Literature, which proposes that future generations have a responsibility to execute the incomplete literary legacies of the past—that Krzhizhanovsky’s unpublished writings continue to exact from us. Toward that end, we want also to acknowledge a number of debts toward our contemporaries. First, we wish to thank the collective of translators for the enormous energy, profound erudition, and sensitive ear for language that each of its members brought to bear on the individual pieces, and for the ready assistance they offered to us and each other along this book’s way from initial inkling to published text. We thank the participants in that initial conference who are not represented in this book’s table of contents: Alexander Tullock, Abigail Weil, and, above all, our keynote speaker Vadim Perelmuter—to whom we are additionally obliged for the discovery of Krzhizhanovsky’s archive and the painstaking stewardship with which he brought it to light. We would also like to acknowledge the legendary generosity of Galina Zlobina, who was deputy director of the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art during the years when many of us were mining archive f. 2280. Indiana University’s College Arts and Humanities Institute gave generous funding to the conference at which this

project was conceived, as did Indiana’s Departments of Slavic and Comparative Literature and the University of Georgia’s Germanic and Slavic Studies Department. We are particularly grateful for support received from the National Endowment for the Humanities, under the auspices of the World Literature and Translation project run by Indiana University’s Russell Valentino, who later gave invaluable guidance in preparing this volume for publication. We thank the University of Wisconsin Press for its gracious permission to publish an excerpt from Alisa Ballard Lin’s translation of Krzhizhanovsky’s theatrical writings, That Third Guy, and the wonderful editorial and design team at Columbia University Press for their keen eye and swift professionalism. Finally, we would like to thank the following people from outside our collective—Slavists but also scholars of English and French and Spanish literature, philosophers, classicists, and typographers—who helped us in one way or another to find expressions in English for Krzhizhanovsky’s nonfiction works, with all their obscurities and technicalities: Mitchell Brown, Alison Calhoun, Matt Carlson, Francie Cate-Arries, Daniel Franklin, Jeremy Hartnett, Ilya Kliger, Irma Nuñez, Patrick Michelson, Peter Scotto, David Taylor, Nicolas Varazza, and surely many more to whom our debt of words must remain outstanding and who we hope will forgive the omission.

Editors’ Preface

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INTRODUCTION Restoring the Balance

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t some point in the first half of the twentieth century, Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (1887–1950)—a writer who, at the height of Stalinist repression, had not abandoned the arguably suicidal project of seeing his work into print—wrote a prospectus for a History of Unwritten Literature. Its opening lines identify the “biological cause” of unwritten literature: the closer an author approaches to death, the greater his accumulated literary to-do list. “As the quantity of themes and materials increases, life decreases in proportion.” Worse yet, the growth of unused inspirations is exponential, since, according to Krzhizhanovsky’s “law of unrealization,” each idea ramifies into new ones until it has been finalized in writing. Thus the lengthier its period of gestation, “the more themes to which it gives birth,” each demanding its own embodiment. The proposed History might seem an effort on the part of a penniless holdover from the pre-Revolutionary period to discover a topic so inherently apolitical that it might possibly make its way through Soviet censorship. But Krzhizhanovsky’s project also yields profound insight into the gap between intent

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and accomplishment, the archive and the canon. Although fundamentally impossible—“to what degree is research into the unrealized realizable?” Krzhizhanovsky asks—the project radically reorients literary culture upon the obligation to pay “some part of that thematic and narrative debt that previous generations did not liquidate” by taking on and carrying out their uncompleted projects. Far from a romantic or modernist quest for originality, writing appears as a kind of ancestor cult whose adherents, the aspiring authors of the present day, endeavor perpetually to perform their fealty to the past. Despite the isolation and obscurity in which its author labored, Krzhizhanovsky’s idea is of a piece with the wider literary culture of its time. American fantasist James Branch Cabell’s Beyond Life, a 1919 collection of dialogues on aesthetics, takes place in a library containing “the cream of the unwritten books—the masterpieces that were planned and never carried out.”1 In other ways Krzhizhanovsky’s prospectus seems to prefigure the literary future. The very form in which it has come down to us—an idea for a book that fills in for the book itself—anticipates Stanisław Lem’s collections of introductions to imaginary works, one of which describes a computer that completes unfinished literary monuments by Franz Kafka and Fyodor Dostoevsky.2 These examples illustrate the crux of Krzhizhanovsky’s brief, long-unpublished prospectus for his History of Unwritten Literature: no matter how long a fragment of an idea persists in darkness, it must find visible form and spark new ideas in an audience beyond the purview of the author. Superficially, the sentiment resembles the famous line from Mikhail Bulgakov’s

Master and Margarita, also written at the height of the Stalinist terror and published decades later: “Manuscripts don’t burn.”3 But where Bulgakov’s dictum is embedded in a religious allegory that links the persistence of the word and the hope for resurrection, the power that sustains Krzhizhanovsky’s unpublished themes is an uncanny haunting by a ghostly potentiality—a humanist and secular version of Romantic notions of inspiration as a demonic or divine possession. The readers of subsequent generations, their brains now inhabited by the disembodied thought of a deceased person, cannot but transmit that thought to paper as it seeds their minds with new words. Krzhizhanovsky’s History offers an apt metaphor for his sprawling and inchoate legacy: a body of text that, as with other “rediscovered” writers of the early Soviet period, found an audience only after the fall of the Soviet Union. At once unmistakably of its time and entirely new to contemporary readers, the work of these writers is a signal instance of the “off-modern,” to use Svetlana Boym’s phrase for the many “alternative genealogies and histories of modernity” whose possibility haunts and shadows modernity itself.4 Krzhizhanovsky’s diagnosis of an inverse correlation between biological life and creative endeavor even makes a subtle political commentary: in the Stalinist context of censorship and mass persecution, the very survival of Soviet writers was intertwined with their literary pursuits. During Krzhizhanovsky’s creative peak, the advancing totalitarianism of Soviet life turned aesthetics into politics and literary choices into matters of life or death. ɷɸɷ Introduction

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Judging from the fate of his better-known contemporaries, it might be argued that Krzhizhanovsky escaped the worst: he was neither shot like Isaak Babel, nor sent to die in the camps like Osip Mandelstam, nor publicly ostracized like Mikhail Zoshchenko. And yet against the background of the Stalinist night, his star shines with a particularly tragic quality. A prolific writer of spectacular talent and breadth of vision, Krzhizhanovsky was denied publication with such consistency that by the time of his rediscovery in the 1980s, he was almost completely forgotten. It is hard to say who comes off worse— the writer, whose prose was heard by only a small group of listeners; the readership, deprived of this prose for almost forty years after the writer’s death; or the literary tradition itself, bereft of one of its most singularly original voices. If not for the brutality of its execution, the last decade of Krzhizhanovsky’s life in particular, when he stopped writing almost entirely, could have easily appeared in one of his own fictions; for example, his masterpiece, The Letter Killers Club, in which a group of ex-authors bands together around a belief that putting words on paper brings death to the creative potential of the imagination. Reading Krzhizhanovsky, one feels that his presence in Russian letters is something of an anomaly, the result of an unusual implant into the Russian soil. The effect of foreignness is partly explained by biography: he grew up in a Catholic Polish family on the outskirts of Kiev. (Polish came in handy during the last years of his life, when he earned his living translating Polish literature into Russian.) He moved to Moscow in 1922, close on the heels of his fellow Kievan Mikhail Bulgakov.

Like Bulgakov, he was heavily invested in the bustling theatrical life of early Soviet Moscow and lived in his adopted city until his death. Soon after his arrival in the capital, Krzhizhanovsky began his long-standing association with Alexander Tairov and his Chamber Theater. One of the many fruits of that collaboration was the “Philosopheme of the Theater,” a major essay on the potentiality of theater as an art form and category of human consciousness. In whatever genre he worked—and he worked in most of them—Krzhizhanovsky’s prose often reads like a literary translation of a philosophical problem. In one of his few published fictional texts, the 1919 story “Jacobi and ‘As If,’ ” German philosopher Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi earnestly discusses ontology with a personified subjunctive. Pitting the philosopher against a word that is almost but not quite identical with his name, the story’s Russian title—“Якоби и якобы” (“Iakobi i iakoby”)—gives a good indication of the problems awaiting Krzhizhanovsky’s translators, not least his predilection for wordplay. Krzhizhanovsky’s most obvious legacy is in literary fiction. His first collection of stories and novellas, Stories for Wunderkinder, had been conceived back in Kiev and slated for publication in 1926, but the publisher went bankrupt before it could be printed. In 1941, another attempt to publish it was prevented by the paper shortage caused by the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. Several other collections of short fiction had been scotched by the censorship apparatus in the interim. In the forties, Krzhizhanovsky stopped writing fiction altogether, although he continued to channel his creativity into other genres, writing plays and philosophical excurses as well as a Introduction

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closely observed account of wartime Moscow. He drank heavily in his last years and suffered a series of strokes in 1949–50, which afflicted him with a form of aphasia called alexia, the inability to read. As a result, this master of wordplay spent the last months of his life struggling to relearn the Russian alphabet. On December 28, 1950, Krzhizhanovsky died. The story of his revival, at the far end of the twentieth century, also might have come from his own hand. Vadim Perelmuter, a poet and scholar who was working on the archive of poet Georgii Shengeli almost thirty years after Krzhizhanovsky’s death, discovered a private obituary in Shengeli’s notebooks: “Today, on December 28th, 1950, Sigizmund Dominikovich Krzhizhanovsky, a science fiction writer and ‘overlooked genius,’ whose gifts were equal to those of Edgar Allan Poe and Alexander Grin, has died. Not a single one of his lines was published during his lifetime.”5 The note’s sensational promise led Perelmuter to the practically complete archive of a major modernist writer whose fiction remained virtually unknown: a researcher’s fantasy and a reader’s treasure trove. The author appears out of Lethe as the eyes of his first future reader fall on the note announcing the death of the man; one hopes that Krzhizhanovsky would have found the story amusing. Shepherded out of oblivion by Perelmuter, Stories for Wunderkinder appeared at last in 1989. Its distinctive blend of metafictional paradox and philosophical fable immediately earned its author the sobriquet “the Russian Borges”—a fairly apt shorthand comparison, if one that places its author far outside his actual historical and national context. Other works soon followed, and Perelmuter’s able stewardship of Krzhizhanovsky’s

legacy culminated in the amply annotated six-volume Collected Works, which represents not just his fiction but also his critical essays, dramas, aphorisms, and philosophical writings. The comparison to Borges testifies, once again, to the impression Krzhizhanovsky gives of a writer transplanted into Russian letters from another place and time, fundamentally alien to the vast social panoramas for which Russian fiction is best known internationally. Krzhizhanovsky’s deep penetration into the materiality of the Russian language, most evident in his love of puns and proverbs, testifies to how well the foreign implant took. Nonetheless his most obvious literary influences come mostly from the West: Jonathan Swift, H.  G. Wells, E.  T.  A. Hoffmann, Edgar Allan Poe, and Gustav Meyrink. In his 1928 novella The Return of Munchausen, Krzhizhanovsky rewrites Rudolf Raspe’s 1785 classic (one of his perennial points of reference) by bringing Munchausen back to Russia—this time to its Soviet iteration. The master of the tall tale is undone by the encounter, since Russia has become more absurd and unbelievable than Munchausen’s imagination. Confronted with this “country about which one cannot lie,” the baron is forced to admit that reality has exceeded his capability for invention.6 For insight into this fictional episode we can turn to Krzhizhanovsky’s prospectus for another unwritten scholarly book, a History of Hyperbole. This whirlwind rehearsal of exaggeration in world literature ends with the observation that in the Soviet 1930s, “the writer need only record realistically the pace of history, which has exceeded realism’s customary orientation.” Krzhizhanovsky here links his fantastic tales to the mainstream of Russian literature through the Introduction

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insight that modernization in Russia happened, in Marshall Berman’s words, “in the most jagged, halting, blatantly abortive or weirdly distorted ways.”7 Berman finds these discordant scales of time to register in literature as the ghosts and doubles haunting the Petersburg tales of Pushkin, Gogol, and Dostoevsky. From this point of view we might see Krzhizhanovsky’s apparent foreignness within Russian literature as a temporal as well as geographic dislocation. In his essay “A Collection of Seconds,” Krzhizhanovsky defines early Soviet photographs as discombobulated “collections of seconds which have captured within them elements of old and new daily life”; in another feuilleton of the 1920s, Krzhizhanovsky describes the streets of revolutionary Moscow as a palimpsest of names, referring at times to the city’s medieval past, at other times to its communist future, so that the city itself seems to exist in a temporal gap between the ruins of history and the mirage of a world to come.8 Obsessed with the burden of the past even as it dabbles in science fiction, Krzhizhanovsky’s writing emerges from a similar gap between the nostalgic and the utopian, the no more and the not yet. In both his fiction and nonfiction, Krzhizhanovsky points beyond the realist tradition to the Renaissance, Baroque, and Enlightenment periods that Russia scarcely knew. His phantasmagorical prose is deeply rooted in gothic romance and often gravitates toward allegory; among Krzhizhanovsky’s Russian predecessors one must include Nikolai Gogol and Vladimir Odoevsky, who similarly wrote loosely framed collections of stories in the vein of early Romanticism. Krzhizhanovsky credits his fictional method, which he dubs

“experimental realism,” to his pre-realist precursors, William Shakespeare and Jonathan Swift. Its motive force comes from the conditional particle “as if ” which allows the writer to transcribe what follows from the irruption of an idea—no matter how improbable—into life. As Krzhizhanovsky writes in his grand tour of the imaginary territories of fantastic literature, “Countries That Don’t Exist,” “It’s interesting that only once in the first two parts of Gulliver’s Travels did Swift, a true artist, allow himself to violate proportion—to shrink or enlarge the bodies of the people among whom his hero lived. Henceforth, he was extraordinarily precise and adhered to a strictly realistic style.” Krzhizhanovsky’s prose, in which perspective and scale are altered without distorting human features or mental capacity, grafts only a single element of the fantastic onto an otherwise rigidly realistic base. He thereby complicates Tzvetan Todorov’s definition of the fantastic as the tension between the uncanny and the supernatural. Although Krzhizhanovsky’s philosophical parables and fantastic visions take place mostly in abstract locales drawn from literary convention more than observed reality, they hardly could have been conceived and nurtured anywhere apart from Soviet Russia—where, as the 1920 anthem “The March of the Aviators” has it, “the fairytale is meant to come true.” To recall once more Munchausen’s account of the Soviet Union, it was a country in which ideology permeated life to such an extreme degree that its absurd reality outstripped the literary imagination. ɷɸɷ Introduction

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In addition to more than a hundred short stories and novellas, Krzhizhanovsky’s corpus contains a wide variety of genres that fit into the larger spectrum of belles lettres. His range and versatility are appreciable even in the small number of texts that saw the light of day during his lifetime, either in print or on stage: unattributed vignettes for the Chamber Theater’s in-house weekly, a series of sketches about Moscow, a couple of critical essays—out of fourteen(!)—on Shakespeare, a few other essays (out of the more than fifty that he wrote) on the history and theory of literature and theater, an uncredited script for Yakov Protazanov’s 1930 film St. Jorgen’s Day, stage adaptations of Gilbert Keith Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday and Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (with music by Sergei Prokofiev), parts of a libretto for a patriotic opera written during World War II, and uncredited entries for the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. None of his plays and only six works of original fiction were published in his lifetime.9 Like Krzhizhanovsky’s fictional texts, his critical and philosophical writings inhabit the borderland between poetic and speculative prose. In our selection for this volume, we have aimed to showcase Krzhizhanovsky’s range as well as his originality. The reader will find the neo-Kantian philosophical essays of Krzhizhanovsky’s late teens; the feuilletons and quirky essays of the 1920s; literary criticism from the 1930s, when he was struggling to secure his membership in the Writer’s Union; the wartime notebooks of the 1940s; running meditations on the theater in genres ranging from manifesto to metaphysical dialogue; as well as the fragments, fables, aphorisms, and jotted ideas that span his entire career. Yet in the same breath with

the diversity of Krzhizhanovsky’s talent we can speak of the unity of his oeuvre. It is as if a major idea, a leitmotif, a method were migrating from one genre to another, presenting itself in different guises but always immediately recognizable. In all his writings Krzhizhanovsky stands out as the twentieth century’s outstanding thinker of potentiality. His texts lament their own obscurity and often express an unverifiable belief in their destiny. “I am known for being unknown,” he quips in one epigram; in another, “I am at odds with the present day, but eternity loves me.”10 In addressing his lack of an audience, Krzhizhanovsky expresses both resignation regarding his historical circumstances and a seething ambition to speak beyond them: “I am not a man, but a sword. I will lie in my grave as in a scabbard.” A chaotic cornucopia of ideas populates Krzhizhanovsky’s notebooks, few if any of them adequately realized and a number of them reiterating one another. His various manuscripts are written in observably different styles, genres, and settings, and yet they all evince the idée fixe of Krzhizhanovsky’s entire oeuvre, which revolves around a fundamental paradox of creative language. How does an idea take shape in the artist’s inner world, emerge into the external world as a material object, and lodge itself in the minds of others? Krzhizhanovsky’s earliest essays, such as “Idea and Word,” had already theorized the passages and permutations of the private and public word. The image of the writer’s mental life as a blade seeking to sheathe itself in the brain of the reader, instantiated in the aforementioned aphorism, circulates through multiple texts and across genres. Over the years of his professional obscurity, the liminal Introduction

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status of Krzhizhanovsky’s writings lends this image a metafictional function as well as a rich pathos. The metaphor dramatizes Krzhizhanovsky’s hermetic creative life and the uncanny autonomous force of the unrealized idea; its persistence testifies to the frustration of a restless imagination that cannot find release in a readership. Even if his work had been condemned by its audience, publication in vitam might have created for Krzhizhanovsky an opening onto the world and the possibility of vitalizing dialogue. The psychological effects of this creative isolation on Krzhizhanovsky’s writing must have been profound, and not always for the good. His idiosyncratic style is occasionally awkward; unchecked wordplay sometimes overwhelms the intricate texture of the prose. His works are uneven in quality, even bearing in mind the different audiences for which he attempted to write. Krzhizhanovsky’s exclusion from official literary production helps to account for these deficiencies, so long as we remember that it also provided the fertile ground where the author’s creations could grow wild, earning him an exceptional place in Russian modernism. Perhaps more than any other Russian writer of the first half of the twentieth century, Krzhizhanovsky was conscious of the process of writing itself, which he envisioned as a conduit between the realms of idea and matter. His texts are true experiments (not a few of them failures), exploring scenarios in which the word becomes aware of its ability to bequeath physical existence upon ideas. For this reason, too, Krzhizhanovsky’s fiction cannot be separated neatly from his activity in nonfiction genres. His efforts in

his many literary modes can be seen as incarnations of a single swarm of restless ideas, restating themselves as poetry, fable, essay, aphorism, memoir, but always in images that resonate from one text to another and encode the same preoccupations. The kinship between his fiction and his essays is not just thematic but formal. If his fiction enfolds numerous mises en abyme of the essayistic or prospective variety, his work in critical genres teems with verbal play. Take, for example, the essay “The Poetics of Titles.” In it we find not just an appreciation for the title as a literary genre but a carefully patterned text that, in the original Russian, abounds in assonance, alliteration, and verbal meter. The initial thrust of the essay is motivated largely by a pun on the morpheme glav, or “head,” which appears in both the word for title (zaglavie) and an idiom for “the most vital thing” (glavnoe). As Krzhizhanovsky leads us into his topic, our sense of what is central and what is ornamental—the most vital thing in the text and the paratextual appendage that adorns the cover—become fundamentally destabilized. The title in Krzhizhanovsky’s conception both addresses the world without (enticing readers to buy the book) and speaks to the idea within (distilling its theme into a compact utterance), promising potentiality to the one and realization to the other. The subject matter Krzhizhanovsky chooses in “The Poetics of Titles” is, moreover, part and parcel of his obsession with synecdoche. In this essay an appendage of the literary text comes to life as a pretext for Krzhizhanovsky’s mental gymnastics and displays of erudition. The conceit is of a kind

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with the short story “The Runaway Fingers,” in which a pianist’s fingers scurry off the keyboard: the fantastic enters the text as the metonymy springs to life. Language’s hybridity, as a material medium for abstract thought, underlies the particularly linguistic nature of Krzhizhanovsky’s phantasmagoric prose. Not just titles but individual words and letters receive physicality; concepts become personified, idiomatic expressions literalized; parts achieve autonomy from the whole. This analytic poetics remains, however, in communication with the system-building philosophical tendency. In “The Poetics of Titles,” the accumulation of examples evolves into a coherent theory of titles and a powerful commentary on the place of reading and writing—and, ultimately, art—within the quickening tempo of modern life, reminiscent of essays by Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin. The philosophical stakes of a poetics based in the physicality of language comes through most efficiently in “Philosopheme of the Theater,” which defines its key concepts through a playful technique resembling parlor games such as ghosts or word golf. Krzhizhanovsky subtracts a suffix from бытие (bytie), the metaphysical concept of Being with a capital B, to arrive at быт (byt), meaning everyday life, humdrum existence, all that is taken for granted and passes without notice. Another subtraction takes him to the pure potentiality represented by the two-letter sequence бы (by), the conditional particle, which can mean “if ” or “as if ” and works as a marker of the hypothetical. For Krzhizhanovsky, this sequence illustrates the ceaseless dynamic through which material existence mediates potentiality on the one hand and transcendental

concepts on the other. A philosophical ladder spanning unrealized and ideal existence, the bytie-byt-by series invites us to blur the boundaries between happy linguistic accident and phenomenological insight. ɷɸɷ

Krzhizhanovsky’s linguistic cum philosophical play allows us to establish him as an intermediary between the two most influential poles of Russian literary modernism: symbolism and futurism. During the first decade of the twentieth century, symbolism was the dominant presence on the Russian literary and artistic scene. Drawing on mystical Christianity and idealist philosophy, symbolism presented a coherent philosophical and aesthetic system grounded in the existence of a transcendental world of forms (noumena) and an immanent world of matter (phenomena). The movement’s influence is most directly felt in Krzhizhanovsky’s early philosophical essays “Love as a Method of Cognition,” “Idea and Word,” and “Argo and Ergo,” which share the premise of a distinction between those two worlds. In “Love as a Method of Cognition,” Krzhizhanovsky posits that transcendental truths can be apprehended only through love, the single force capable of forging our mystical unity with universal being. “Idea and Word” explores the difference between the internal word—the word of the “mind” or “soul” (dusha)—and its external manifestation as an “outside” (ulichnoe) word. It can be seen as a reflection on Fyodor Tiutchev’s 1830 poem “Silentium,” which in a famous line Introduction

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insists that “the spoken thought is a lie.” “Argo and Ergo” is similarly preoccupied with the loss of potency that accompanies the shift from mystery to revelation. “All the things in my world I divide into these and Those,” Krzhizhanovsky pronounces, making the hierarchy between the deficient world of phenomena and unattainable world of noumena clear through capitalization. Unlike the symbolists, whose worldview assumes the static inviolability of this hierarchy, Krzhizhanovsky, even in these early efforts, finds purpose in the dramatic tension between its binary elements. His fiction and nonfiction alike can be read as a prolonged meditation on what we might term the dynamics of interpermeability between the two realms, which ultimately calls into question the ontological primacy of one over the other. Already in “Argo and Ergo” the “this-into-Thaters,” who concern themselves with movement from the world of matter into the world of ideas, are balanced by “That-into-thisers,” who reverse the direction. By the 1920s we begin to see in Krzhizhanovsky’s writing the collapse of the strict binary division between the two worlds. In “The Poetics of Titles,” to take one example, the deductive method through which Krzhizhanovsky constructs an all-encompassing theory is offset by the similarly powerful inductive drive: the sheer variety of examples threatens to shatter the whole into disparate and eccentric fragments. We can perceive the same principle at work in Krzhizhanovsky’s obsessive wordplay, which serves as an efficient device for conveying complex theoretical conceptions (the bytie-byt-by sequence and the title “Argo and Ergo” are

just a few of the examples mentioned earlier) but which diverts our attention from the idea to the materiality of language. Krzhizhanovsky’s interest in the formal attributes of the word as a material medium, its flexibility and self-sufficiency, draws comparison with artists of the Russian avant-garde who saw their work as a radical break with the aesthetics of the symbolists. The poetic experiments of futurism treated language as material with which to construct new meanings, typically by breaking words down into patterned morphemic and phonetic particles. Transformation of poetic meaning through the addition and subtraction of letters was a staple of poets like Vasilii Kamenskii, whose 1914 poem “Я” (ia, “I”) operates according to a similar method: Излучистая Лучистая Чистая Истая Стая Тая Ая Я

izluchistaia, “meandering,” “sinuous” luchistaia, “rayed” chistaia, “clean,” “pure” istaia, “genuine” staia, “mob,” “horde,” “flock,” or “pack” taia, “melting,” but also “hiding” aia, adjectival suffix ia, “I”

In this case, too, the sequence implies a meaningful narrative: the mob or flock melts away under the pure rays of the sun in order to reveal the hidden genuine speaking self of the individual poet, who triumphantly emerges from the cocoon of language and announces his presence in the last line.

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The futurists referred to their manipulations of language as zaum, a neologism derived from the morphemes meaning “beyond” and “mind, reason,” often rendered into English through the equivalents “beyonsense” or “transrational.” Zaum was to be a pure language of poetry, liberated from conventional meaning; exulting in phonetic, morphological, and syntactic ambiguity; verging in various manifestations on religious glossolalia, the sound play of infants, or the dream of universal language. Krzhizhanovsky nods to zaum directly in a scene in The Letter Killers Club in which a medieval monk composing chants deforms the words, “nonsensing [bessmyslia] the syllables for the sake of other abtruse [zaumnye] meanings.”11 The creative deformation of language—breaking its words down into constituent parts and repatterning them for poetic effect—is not just represented in the monk’s actions but also performed by Krzhizhanovsky’s neologism “nonsensing.” As the reader of Krzhizhanovsky rapidly becomes aware, his oeuvre boasts hundreds of neologisms. Writing about the impossibility of fitting original thoughts into the common currency of conventional language in “Idea and Word,” Krzhizhanovsky resorts to “kaleidescoplets [kaleidoskopiki]” and “desensification [obessmyslivanie],” to name just a few of the fruits borne by the morphological resources of the Russian language. To sense the constituent morphemes of words is, of course, a crucial expression of Krzhizhanovsky’s poetics, which emphasizes the potential of synecdoche. In his critical essays he brings the same tactic to bear on literary history. “The Poetics of Titles” points out that the three major novels of nineteenth-century realist Ivan Goncharov represent

a coherent series of elaborations on the Russian prefix ob, each more abbreviated than the last.

Ob-

yknovennaya istoriya (A Common Story, 1846) lomov (Oblomov, 1859 [oblomat’ means to “fail/break off.”—Trans.]) ryv (The Precipice, 1869)

Like a mathematician presented with a set of numbers, Krzhizhanovsky predicts from this series a fourth book, which is to intensify the idea of a break or rupture. Krzhizhanovsky’s contention that the repeated prefix makes legible an underlying logic to the writer’s career recalls a claim made by Velimir Khlebnikov, the most gifted and innovative poet of zaum: that the beginning of a word “governs the whole word—sets orders for the rest of it.”12 In his notebooks and manifestoes Khlebnikov exhaustively catalogues the underlying meanings of letters and prefixes, apparently with the aim of devising “a new world language for the whole human family.”13 In “Philosopheme of the Theater,” the bytie-byt-by sequence is in fact built on a description of Leibniz’s “ ‘globus intellectualis,’ a closed sphere of symbolic signs that without the mediation of words expresses the whole system of essences in the universe.” “The Poetics of Titles” ends with an almost identical paragraph, suggesting that titles, as shorthand signs for complex content, presage “the moment when the orbits of the earthly globe and the globus intellectualis will inescapably collide.” The idea of a universal or Adamic language, in which being and word would fuse into one, seems to be the limit case of Krzhizhanovsky’s idealism. Introduction

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The translingual aspirations of Krzhizhanovsky’s wordplay shine through in his notebooks, which, among the titles for unwritten stories and aphoristic jottings, include multilingual puns in idioms including Polish, Italian, and English. Take this example: Die = die: Игра в кости—умирать [“a game of dice (literally, ‘playing at bones’) is—to die”]14

Here a simple sound coincidence in English motivates another equation between death and “playing at bones,” now meaning to perform the role of a skeletal corpse as well as to throw dice. The commonplace Russian phrase is made strange and macabre through its triangulation with a simple English pun; the pun is lent profundity through its displacement into Russian. The joke is consistent with the association of games and death throughout Krzhizhanovsky’s work—as in “The Dramaturgy of the Chessboard,” which identifies both board games and works of art as “small conditional worlds” that distract the mind from life and absorb it in the dead end of a manmade puzzle (or, perhaps, trap). Krzhizhanovsky’s definition of the artwork as a “conditional [uslovnyi] world” unfolding according to the laws of literary convention, like his emphasis on the mystifying and defamiliarizing functions of verbal art, might be in dialogue with formalist theorist Viktor Shklovsky, whose influential theory of ostranenie—itself a quasi-futurist neologism meaning “enstranging” or “making strange”—was devised not least in

order to justify and theorize Khlebnikov’s poetry. In his most famous essay, the 1917 “Art as Device,” Shklovsky writes that “by ‘enstranging’ objects and complicating form, art makes perception long and ‘laborious.’ ”15 Like Shklovsky, Krzhizhanovsky argues (in the 1918 “Argo and Ergo”) that riddles are the primal form of “artistic creativity, an attempt to make the comprehensible incomprehensible.” And yet Krzhizhanovsky expresses contempt for formalist efforts to assimilate literary studies into scientific inquiry by focusing on the measurable, material aspects of verbal art: “Nowadays That-into-thisers, who manage the business of art theory and criticism, teach us how to crack riddles, i.e., to unriddle them.” Despite his affinity with the verbal innovation of futurist poetics and the formalist valorization of difficulty and the “rules of art,” Krzhizhanovsky suggests that in cutting themselves off from the transcendental concept whose mystery cannot be reduced to its material manifestation, his peers in the avant-garde are missing the point. In fact Krzhizhanovsky is interested in linguistic innovation less for its own sake than for its ability to test the complex role that language plays in human life and in the life of the idea, both of which he endows with subjecthood and agency. To enter into communion with others, ideas must find their entrance into life, into language—and Krzhizhanovsky, in what perhaps most betrays his belonging to Russian culture, almost ubiquitously describes this journey as traumatic. One of the most common metaphors in his prose involves a crack between the two worlds, an absence whose emblem is the creative fissure in a fountain pen’s nib splitting the white of the page with black ink. Yet only ideas can breathe life into dead matter: in Introduction

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“Idea and Word,” Krzhizhanovsky writes of words as skulls, empty forms requiring thought to be reanimated. As the word takes on a life of its own, it splinters the mind, depriving the creative subject of wholeness and autonomy. By demanding an audience, even an interlocutor, writing sets up an ethics. Writing is a boundary that separates the pure forms of thought from material existence. It calls for accountability and responsibility even as it guarantees radical loneliness. For Krzhizhanovsky, a man who devoted his life to writing unread pages, literature is at once a bridge into the lives of others and the precipice that reinforces the divisions between us. ɷɸɷ

As noted earlier, Krzhizhanovsky’s literary themes readily resonate with the most dramatic moments and poignant tendencies of his own life. In forging his biography, Krzhizhanovsky seems to follow the impulse of zhiznetvorchestvo, or “life creation”—a doctrine that aimed to collapse the boundary between life and art and guided the projects of the Russian symbolists, with many of whom Krzhizhanovsky was close. Yet the ideal of zhiznetvorchestvo hardly accounted for the state’s ideological intrusion into creative pursuits. Krzhizhanovsky’s more fundamental affinity with symbolism resides in his efforts to stage the life cycle of the idea, from the full potentiality of its transcendental form to its actualization in the material world, where, as if soiled by matter, it loses in purity but acquires political and ethical significance. In writing—in any artistic undertaking, really—ideas give up their transcendental

quality and take on material forms. It is only in this degraded condition that thought is able to venture forth into the alien embodied reality of existent things and leave its mark. At the same time, writing restores the balance, generating new ideas in new minds, thereby transcending the material word and returning to the potentiality of the ideal. As the protagonist of Krzhizhanovsky’s story “Someone Else’s Theme” points out, the etymology of the Greek word talent (τάλαντον) is “scale” or “balance,” and artistic labor becomes the fulfillment of a duty toward life—or, as he puts it, the repayment of “the bill presented by the sun.”16 Here Krzhizhanovsky writes himself into an ancient mystical tradition that imagines God as an inexhaustible creditor whose loan we must unceasingly pay back. Krzhizhanovsky’s time on earth, which he devoted to writings that he would not see reach a public, can be seen as an ascetic quest to settle accounts with life. The following pages are partial payment toward an infinite debt. Jacob Emery and Alexander Spektor

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LOVE AS A METHOD OF COGNITION

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“Love as a Method of Cognition” was Krzhizhanovsky’s first— and only—published philosophical essay. It appeared in The Theosophical Journal (Vestnik Teosofii) in 1912 and can be read as Krzhizhanovsky’s response to Vladimir Solovyev’s famous cycle of lectures, The Meaning of Love, published twenty years earlier. In these lectures Solovyev focuses on sexual love, arguing that unlike its mystical and familial counterparts, it is the only force through which human beings can overcome their egoism and achieve both unity with others and fulfillment as individuals. In his own meditation on love Krzhizhanovsky concerns himself with epistemological questions. Here, he is much more chaste than the Russian philosopher, defining sexual love—“deformed by the passions”—as but a poor copy of the real thing. At the same time, Krzhizhanovsky is much more radical—or, shall we say, Platonic (filtered through the mystical and Christian traditions of Western philosophy)— than Solovyev. Love, for him, is the precondition for a mystical union between the subject and object, allowing us to transcend our individuality and merge with universal being.

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Filling the world with meaning, love offers us the possibility to engage in true cognition of our—and the world’s— transcendental essences. Significantly, while Solovyev considers love to be superior to consciousness, he still insists on the necessity of their symbiotic coexistence, as without consciousness love “could not act as an internal saving power, elevating and not abrogating individuality.”1 In contrast, for Krzhizhanovsky there is an undeniable hierarchy between the type of cognition produced by what he calls our “mental work” and that which becomes possible through love. It is appropriate that at the end of his essay, Krzhizhanovsky invokes not the Aphrodite of sensual love but the goddess of celestial wisdom—Aphrodite Urania—and defines philosophy as the practice of thinking through the lens of love.

LOVE A S A M ETHOD OF COGNITION Using a diversity of words, a person divides their soul into a multitude of capabilities, endows them with autonomy, and, carried away by their word-splitting, often forgets that all these capabilities are nothing but separate streams, temporary currents in the single course of the soul. We distinguish mind and feeling, draw a line between cognition and love, all but setting one against the other: the principle of the first, we say, is passive, inceptive, whereas love is activity itself; its meaning lies in creation and creativity.

We consider a person’s rational abilities to hold a monopoly on cognition. We consider any inclusion into the act of cognition of the cognizing spirit’s other abilities either as unlawful or determined through an overly general, indeterminate designation—“intuition.” To impose these or other methods of comprehension onto the spirit is not easy, however. In essence, only truth itself can teach us the perfectly correct method, as only that method that has allowed us to grasp the truth can be recognized as fully tested and justified. That is, a man discovers the fully correct method only when, strictly speaking, it is no longer needed, since the truth has been already found and the need for any methods at all disappears. Hence, it is impossible to decide beforehand whether the truth will come to us through speculative thinking or experiential knowledge, that is mystical experiences. Ultimately, even the slightest act of one’s spiritual life can be said to carry a cognitive character, since even the most insignificant vibration of the soul deposits into consciousness particles of experience, often even imperceptible ones, and, accumulating one after the other, they later become visible and comprehensible as a certain truth about the world. Whether a person desires truth or is afraid of it, truth crystallizes in him slowly and irresistibly, for the words “life” and “cognition” are in a certain sense synonymous and, consequently, cognition in its own sense of this word, cognition declaring itself as such is life’s strongest expression, life pouring itself into an especially active and vigorous form. Love as a Method of Cognition

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Every vivid cognition, cognition explicite, contains within itself an element of love: it is suffused with a certain selfdenial, since the cognizer must drown out the voice of his own “I” with the voice of objective essence. Then, in our efforts to comprehend anything, we strive to fuse and wholly identify the cognizer with the cognized, a process that constitutes more than a simple affinity with the essence of love. Speaking about the gnoseological meaning of mysticism, of mysticism as cognition, Nikolai Berdyaev gives the following definition: “mysticism is a condition that rests on the identity of the subject and object, the fusion of human existence with universal existence, a communication with the world that does not predetermine the world in any way” (from The Religious Consciousness and Society, chapter XIII).2 Substituting the word “mysticism” with the word “love,” we can see that this formula loses none of its meaning or persuasiveness. It is necessary, however, to justify such a substitution and to investigate how much of the cognitive is contained in love itself, and whether love can be seen as a special unconscious method that helps a person to make sense of the surrounding world and to separate truth from fiction. It is customary to see love as a result of existing knowledge. Ostensibly, we study different facets of the object, then we evaluate it, and, in the event of a positive evaluation, love appears, a feeling of benevolence toward the object, an inner affirmation of its being. We love “for a reason,” by virtue of these or other positive characteristics of the object. It is hard to argue against the blunt empirical truth of such a description. The whole question,

however, lies in whether or not this path of love is indirect, inconsistent with its nature, and whether it delays love’s manifestation and obscures love’s eternal meaning? Undoubtedly, love is naturally connected with knowledge, but in a different temporal sequencing: namely, love is not the result of knowledge, but, rather, knowledge comes as a result of love. This process is best imagined like this: one or another partial rational understanding as it were pushes us toward love as the object of our investigation, and love completes this cognition, transforming it from partial and random into complete and absolute cognition. We procure a chance flare of knowledge about a person, with difficulty, by means of intense observation and psychological experience: the procured knowledge kindles our interest; actively interested in each manifestation of his inner truth, making barely distinguishable steps in the perplexing investigation of the labyrinth of someone else’s soul, we continue to observe this person. Who knows how our intense efforts would end if Nature did not come to our aid with the mysterious instrument of Love, quickly and painlessly completing the labor of our cognition? In this particular case, experiential knowledge plays the role of a simple catalyst that induces the great reaction of love; experiential knowledge is a kind of second-rate knowledge, and love’s cognition devours it completely: it is a spark that disappears in the flame it has awoken, and from the very moment of love’s appearance, the process of cognition leaves the surface and descends into the depths. Love makes comprehensible everything that is hidden and irrational, revealing the secret meaning of the loved object. Love as a Method of Cognition

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In love we come toward that which is loved, selflessly giving ourselves to it and striving to fuse with it. It is this fusion that brings a possible truth for a person, for to know an object is to become as close as possible to it, to transform it into yourself and to identify with it completely. Indeed, no matter how we approach cognition, the process itself cannot be imagined differently than as “a fusion of a human being with universal being,” which supposes an initial identity between object and subject, the identity that allows for the very possibility of their fusion. Love gives precisely the fullest fusion between the soul and a loved object and is the effect of their primary identity, their kinship. Love destroys the division of “I” and “not-I,” topples the artificial walls of logical definitions aiming to atomize and disperse being. Left to its own devices, love integrates life that has been atomized by reason and offers a mystical sensation of unity, the fusion of being’s discrete manifestations. To strive to contemplate the world as a unity, and each separate object in it and you yourself as a part, indivisibly united with the Whole— that is to have a cognitive attitude toward being. In that way, love is rightfully a carrier of cognition.3 I strenuously underscore that this proposition cannot be proved logically. Our inner experience is its only verification: we position ourselves toward the world at different angles, now examining it with the strength of our thought, now withdrawing into ourselves to search for truth in our “I.” But why not instead try to fall in love with the world: we would immediately notice its comprehensibility grow hour by hour;

we would notice life and meaning where we did not see it earlier, and everything around would become more intimate and more deeply treasured. Love makes the world substantial and accessible. It glorifies the world, for it removes the degrading disguise of falsehood, and in the same stroke simplifies it, since the great simplicity, the “Unity in plurality”4—in other words, truth itself—is love’s greatest reward. One need only dare to love. Studying, for example, the life of St. Francis of Assisi, you cannot for a moment forget that you are facing a man of great mysterious knowledge—a man who has understood something enormous that is hidden from others. What taught him this great knowledge, which we perceive radioactively?5 Love, immeasurable love toward the world: toward people, flowers, birds. We do not know the incommunicable* truth of his soul, but we see its great signs: everything that is complex and entangled in human relationships is resolved and untangled by the simplifying meaning of St. Francis’ love, and at the same time all the insignificant, unnoticeable things we walk past without paying attention, like, for example, household objects, grow for Francis beneath the rays of love-cognition, turning into great symbols; they become meaningful, acquire a soul, become his “brothers and sisters.” Love is a secret, mysterious act that destroys the web of “deceitful phenomena” that stand between the soul and the world.

* The Sophists taught: “even if truth can be cognized, it cannot be communicated.” The question of the communicability of truth awaits its thorough investigation, and I lean toward the claim that logical means of communication are entirely inadequate.

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One must dare to recover one’s vision through love to see that egoism, voluntary solitary confinement within oneself, is identical to ignorance and lack of knowledge. No amount of mental work will reveal the meaning of the object of investigation if it is combined with the coldness of egoism, with inner alienation from that object. Truth is being in all of its wholeness; therefore, in order to fuse with it, which amounts to cognition, one must attach oneself to universal being indivisibly with one’s whole soul, one’s whole “I,” and not only its mental aspect. Only love gives up its soul generously without concealing any of its fractions; only love—as true cognition—is the resolving synthesis of all the separate, fractional activities of the spirit. But if one can consider love as a cognizing ability, then, just like the intellect, it must have its own “logic,” the science of the most expedient and reasonable expenditure of its precious force. A love that reveals the meaning of the world must be (a) without motive (rationalistic, sexual, etc.) and must be (b) all-inclusive. We have already observed, in looking at the inception of a chance individual feeling of love, that it is preceded by acquaintance with the object, observation, and sometimes even study of it. But proceeding this way, we expend much superfluous energy on the meticulous mental effort that leads to an evaluation, which might, after all, not engender love (owing to the errors of the mind, as we will see below). Religious “logic” teaches us to substitute deductive evaluation for the inductive kind: we are not to evaluate each object

and person separately; we are once and for all to accept all the things of the world as good and worthy of love in their essence—and to love them as it were “up front,” remembering that reasons for love will appear in its very development. The second condition of perfect love is its all-inclusivity. We are not to choose at random—love must spread, like rays, in all directions; this is the guarantee of complete knowledge that comes with love. Love for a given person, for a given phenomenon, is love that is artificially impeded in its growth, cut short. It naturally strives to expand, to embrace the whole world, to fill up all of being. Love for a single person is an excuse to love the whole world, and those who love bravely will not let this opportunity slip. Enchained in the most hideous forms, the natural metaphysical all-inclusivity of love nevertheless always lets itself be known: to lovers “the world seems to be a better place,” it “regenerates,” etc.; as their attitude toward a single person changes, there is a fundamental change in their attitude toward life in general, which, logically speaking, appears, after all, an absurdity. “Love,” says Spinoza in Ethics—“is joy united with the knowledge of the cause as such.” I choose this definition as one of the least original ones, lacking personal bias. Indeed, everyone who has tried to define and describe the feeling of love, besides pointing out its cognitive meaning (for Spinoza love is “united with the knowledge of the cause”; also see the description of Diotima in Plato’s Symposium6)—everyone, from Plato to Thomas à Kempis, has Love as a Method of Cognition

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depicted love as a great joy, as a delightful light and a reward for the perfect soul. If love gives us a true sensation of the world, and if this sensation is first and foremost joy, does it not follow to allow that the basis of the world is joyful and that everything perceived sub specie aeternitatis, as refracted in a purified consciousness, is perceived as the crystallized good, the idea of the good, incarnated in the multitude, clouded only by our imperfection?7 As we investigate the origin of the feeling of joy, we see that the formulation of the question itself undergoes change. Joy is a subjective feeling, but essentially it signifies the perception of reality. When the sum of the primordial, real being inside us increases, we experience a feeling of joy, since joy is nothing but the sensation of being in its fullness and power, while pain and grief mark the absence, nonexistence, and immobility that retard the flow of life. In a person, every decrease of purely physical† as well as of spiritual being results in sadness and distress; but cognition, which is the boundless increase of reality in the cognizing subject, brings with it a great, mysterious joy‡ that testifies to the fidelity and accuracy of the path the cognizing subject has chosen.

† German chemist Wilhelm Ostwald attempted to define “the formula for happiness,” inasmuch as it is physiological. He demonstrated that joy is a sensation of the increase of physiological energy, whereas the state of distress is the opposite, indicating a gradual decrease of bodily strength. ‡ Kuno Fischer, in the article “Cheerful Pessimism,” underscores the spiritual joy that accompanied the pessimistic discoveries of Schopenhauer. It is obvious that every cognition, even if it leads to a complete logical pessimism, is, as cognition, bright and joyful through and through.

Cognition is the highest health of the spirit, and in this sense every being is joy, while love—as the highest joy—gives the most concentrated sensation of being (i.e., cognition). But on its way into the world, love encounters familiar obstacles to its manifestation. The ongoing torrent of life is composed of elements of the real and the phantasmal, seemingly unreal. Both currents fuse into one, forming a variegated river of sensations, and it is in vain that thought strives to separate them. But love appears only from a contact with true being. This is its analytic strength: we love—in a person or in some kind of object, no matter—what is real about them, not responding with this emotion to what is unreal, which we pay no heed and do not notice. The one who loves does not see the repulsive sides of the beloved—not because he does not want to see them, but simply because in reality they cannot be seen, since they are unreal, negative: they exist for thought, which operates on concepts to which it is indifferent, but are absent when life’s vital elements are sensed—absent like imaginary values. In this fashion love gives the beloved the right to exist, confirms the reality of his being. “I am loved, therefore I am”—here is a formula understood by those who have taken in the rays of true love. This is why the soul so persistently demands love: in love it wants to discover itself, to become convinced by mystical means of its own real existence. Cognition through love does not just reflect the essence of things—it is the echo of the very fact of their creation, because by sanctioning the perceived world, love expresses the will to Love as a Method of Cognition

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being of the things it loves and accepts. This reflection as it were repeats and completes the very act of their creation. Love toward each given thing creates it all over again, because each thing is called into being by the Great Love.§ Here we approach the religious mystery of Love the Creator: love does not appear after the world; no, in the beginning it exists as Love for the uncreated, and only by the force of its Will does it create what It loves. And the world created by the single great Love is transparent and is reflected once more in cognizing love, granted, imperfect and weak but striving to receive and repeat the Great Love. The behest of Christianity that demands of us to love the world without testing its worth, without rationally investigating its merits, imperfectly reflects the great creating force and meaning of Love. The human spirit begins to comprehend here that it is not the world’s worth that endows love for it with meaning, but that love itself increases and, perhaps, creates the world’s worth. The loved object cannot be insignificant, since love— as the creative beginning—bestows on it strength and beauty. Earthly love is imperfect: it is deformed by the passions that often hide behind the sacred name of “Love,” emasculated by the fear of courageously following the great summons of the feeling.  .  .  . But here is a simple, constantly observed fact of life: a person loves another and sees in that person positive qualities that are clearly absent; yet the lover does not delude § Descartes insists that God creates the world an infinite number of times, given that each moment expresses his Will toward continuation of its being.

himself—through the strength of his love, he gradually cultivates these positive qualities in his beloved.|| A person has a twofold “I”#—the empirical “I,” visible to everyone, and the transcendental “I,” the primordial one, visible only to the lover. By contemplating the transcendental “I” of the beloved, we see in her all the infinite possibilities that are not manifested in the empirical “I,” and through the mysterious force of love we induce them to appear. Love always “disarms”; it forces obedience to it and its creativity (for example, we constantly speak of people who know how to “lift others to their level”). Here, in a distorted and weak form, Love’s creating force nonetheless makes itself known. Only what creates can cognize holistically, for cognition is the anamnesis of the previously created. Cognition and creativity— are different sides of the same force.** Love is invisibly present in every cognition, even the purely rationalistic or narrowly empirical: often it is born regardless of the researcher’s wishes; its growth is commensurate with the intensity and difficulty of his work. Studying the history of culture, we encounter the Great Companion of the soul under such humble pseudonyms as “love for science,” “devotion to intellectual labor,” etc.— and then there arise discoveries and metaphysical systems:

|| This psychological fact is the foundation of every truly Christian upbringing. The right to be called “an educator” is obtained only through love. # The division of the human “I” into the empirical and the transcendental belongs to Kant. ** Kant taught that a person cognizes in his experience only what he brings into the experience (see part 1 of The Critique of Pure Reason).

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we bow down before a scientist’s powers of logic or invention, never asking ourselves to whom, in effect, we owe the scientific finding—to the logical operations or to the love for the object of study that has taught the researcher to decipher the mysterious language of the book of being. The more subtle, the more intense the work of the mind, the more significant is the degree of love in it. The cognizing thought is a pure sacrifice to Heavenly Aphrodite8—and the highest, most refined form of the search for truth. In all fairness the name “philosophy,” which means “love for wisdom,” should be worn not by empiricism and not by rationalistic cognition but by love—as the principle of the highest and fullest fusion with true being. 1912 Translated and introduced by Alex Spektor

IDEA AND WORD

02

“Idea and Word” concerns the difficulty of communicating one’s ideas to others through the medium of language. For Krzhizhanovsky it’s not so much that language and thought are incompatible but, rather, that the word itself has a double existence, both personal and public. Thought arises in the individual mind, where it accretes a mass of words that resonate in rich, idiosyncratic, and fundamentally unreproducible ways that will never survive the transition to public discourse. One might be reminded of related arguments by Vygotsky, Wittgenstein, or perhaps Bakhtin concerning the public and/ or private nature of language. One might also think of several of Krzhizhanovsky’s own fictional works, which would be written years after this essay. Krzhizhanovsky’s terms for the two aspects of the word are dushevnoe slovo and ulichnoe slovo, both of which resist easy translation. Dusha, like psyche, overlaps meanings of both “soul” and “mind,” and though it is normally closer to “soul,” “the soulful word” or “the spiritual word” would add

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connotations that are absent from the essay. Krzhizhanovsky’s argument concerns not religious or spiritual questions in any primary sense but, rather, the rich word that can be known to one individual versus the pared-down word that is known to many. I have chosen “mind” as the closest English equivalent to what Krzhizhanovsky means; however, the reader should imagine not “mind as opposed to heart, feeling, etc.” but mind in combination with those things and as distinct from other minds. As for ulichnoe slovo, the modifier derives from ulitsa, “street,” and the sense of traffic is part of Krzhizhanovsky’s point. But na ulitse is also a neutral way to say “outside” in Russian, and “the street word” or “the traffic word” would again distort his meaning.In short, “Idea and Word” is an illustration of its own thesis, a fantastically delicate combination of logic, fantasy, and association that is reduced or damaged with every act of transmission.

IDE A AND WORD With the words of this article I want to worry the old, indistinct sore spot you always feel in the part of the mind1 where thought and word are joined together. I experience my thought as my own, cultivated in me and by me, whereas I perceive the words of my native language as something given, alien, and not precisely fitted to my individual makeup, something forcing my thought to inhabit some kind

of “word hostel,”2 and this simple fact already creates discord between word and thought. In early childhood we all try to bring into the world our own individual language, reflecting in its unsteady babble the unsteady rhythm of thought growing toward word. But the child’s still-weak individual language, shaded out by the universally obligatory, ready-made language of the family and the outside world, cannot branch out, and, barely revealing its word-sprouts, it dies off. In naive folk speech, innocent of the press, book, and the “letter” (that herbarium of the word), one can still observe the surviving remnants of a free, as it were “homegrown,” relation to the forms of sound.* But the rolling stock of words that serve the workaday townsman (example: the present article) amounts to 4,000– 4,500 signs monotonously interspersing with one another in kaleidoscopes and kaleidoscopelets of conversation, lecture, or newspaper. An experienced typesetter can estimate ahead of time how many “r”s will go on a printer’s sheet, and how many “i”s. And yet the slightest attempt to convert any meaningful idea (of one’s own—this is the main thing) into words leads

* For example, “all kinds of beasts, these and those” (from a folktale). [In Krzhizhanovsky’s example, the expression is zveri vsiaki, i takí i táki, the point being that folk speech shifts word stress from one syllable to another in the service of the rhythm and perhaps the meaning.—Trans.] The paradoxical and whimsical quality of free word-formation is strikingly apparent when one reads Dal’’s Explanatory Dictionary [Vladimir Dal’, 1801–72, the great Russian lexicographer.—Trans.]

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inevitably to the thesis: for pure thought, all human languages are foreigners. “Thoughts die the moment they are incarnated in words” (Schopenhauer).3

II It is time for an objection to arise: psychological experimentation has yet to discover any “pure thought” in anyone’s “I.” Only “internal speech” (“conversation in the belly,” according to the Polynesians’ vivid definition) is given to consciousness. It is only the sharp edge of abstraction that severs idea from word. Hobbes distinguished signa (words for others) from notae (words for oneself).4 It did not escape his attention that although in “internal speech” we do use words from the ordinary— external—dictionary, still we use them unordinarily; thinking “for ourselves,” we insert into words a special, intimate meaning that refines them; signa taken from the outside world become part of one’s mind, become esoteric (in the lingua interior), become notae (notes) comprehensible only to that mind. But how to turn the nota back into a signum (into the lingua exterior), how to pour the contents of the mind’s word into the language of the outside world, and moreover without spilling a single drop—Hobbes says nothing about that. Even if we shun the use of an artificial conception of “pure thought,” we still cannot avoid the question: how can the individuum translate, as grammatically as possible and with enough fidelity to the text, from “internal speech” to the external language of a given social group?

III For the poet, human language is too abstract; for the metaphysician, too sensual. Clearly the metaphysician’s brain and the poet’s heart were both left out and forgotten during the construction of language. The philosopher has a right to say: give me different words. These ones are not suitable for thinking. Language serves only what is practical: the animal and social instincts. It is wholly about things of this world, and necessary for life among things (not ideas) to individuals who have each yoked their egoism in one way or another to society. Among one hundred and seventy proto-language verb forms, the linguist will find only one root that is not directly connected to the functions and needs of the human body: “to fly—to soar.” Thus a handful of coarse words is tossed to the minds of the poet and metaphysician alike, minds quivering with myriad fine distinctions, minds deprived of meaning-in-sound; how are these words to be joined to beauty and truth? The poet must feel envious on hearing that a member of the primitive “Dieri” tribe has two entirely different-sounding words—“coongarra” and “piyacooduna”: the first denotes “the noise made by a flock of birds taking flight from the earth,” the second, “the noise made by a flock of birds landing on the earth” (E. Curr5).†

† For us to convey this requires two miniature poems; the Dieri has only to pronounce two words.

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For his part, the metaphysician will note with sorrow that, for example, in the language of the ancient Russian churchmen, there lived and died (needed at one time in the monk’s cell, it is now unneeded in the public square) the word “resnota,” by which is denoted the truth of the flesh (the phenomena) that is apprehended only through slightly parted eyelashes6 and which dissipates when they are closed, to make room for “istina” (from “istniti,” to refine or make more precise)—that is, for the spiritual refinement of things. In human society moving from a “militant” to an “industrial”‡ form (Spencer),7 with the latter’s love for things and words that are simple, sturdy, and cheap,§ there is no demand for such words. There is no room for them in popular speech—in the newspaper; they are tucked away among dictionaries and specialized monographs for lovers of curiosities and lexicographers. One American primitive, seeing for the first time a person with his head buried in a newspaper, asked, “is that a medicinal kerchief for the eyes?” The primitive was wrong: it was a paper kerchief for binding the eyes.

IV Words filled to the brim with thought—that (in my opinion) is what good style is. ‡ Through “military industry” (nunc). [This last word is Latin for “now”—Trans.] § According to the unanimous testimony of linguists, new languages are formulated by simplifying old ones (cf. Potebnia, Ovsianiko-Kulikovskii, and others).

The extraction of 3 is possible only to a greater or lesser approximation. The degree to which a word approximates a thought, when the thought is extracted from under the lid of the skull, varies with the degree of sharpness of the writer’s pen. Occasionally the experienced writer, patiently using the point of his pen to root around his own self, is able to amputate, as it were, an agonized thought, to tear it away from the “I.” Straining to catch it “dead or alive,” the master catches Thought—true, deadened into a word, but still it. The very shortest line drawn from image to image—that is what verbal art is.|| It can draw lines shorter than a straight line; after all, the total number of points in A- – - – - – -B is smaller than in A----------------B. Linear continuity, which is necessary for a mathematician conducting operations on the motion of a point, may be replaced, for those operating with brush or word, by the discontinuity of allusions (the peculiar “dotted line of words”). It can and should be asked of any form: of what are you the form? Stanzas should not rock back and forth with meaningless rhythm# like scale pans for the measurement of emptiness. “Therefore” is no enemy to (genuine) poets:8 the words must be the minimum of sound about the maximum of meaning. A sound is genuinely poetic if genuine thought is immanent to it. Children love to play with scales, nudging the pans up

|| Why, criticism used to ask, did Chekhov never write a novel? Because he wrote several of them, but in the form of stories. See, for example, “Ionych” and others. # Some would say: there is meaning already in the rhythm itself.

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and down with their fingers. But scales are made and adjusted not for the amusement of children but for the measurement of weight. For the artist and the thinker, the world is Infinity narrated in the “low,” lapidary style—of finite, faceted things. For example, a word can be uttered in this room and for this room, but it is possible, without raising one’s voice, to pronounce that same word so that it sounds forth in the world. A benediction delivered from the walls of the Vatican in the weak, aged voice of the Roman pontiff is experienced by him, by the clergy, and by the people as the “urbi et orbi” sounding forth.9 Any image that has joined its facets tightly together opens wide, like a shuttered mica windowpane,10 onto Infinitude. All that is needed is effort. Any complete object of my experience can be taken and its facets turned such that boundlessness peeks through it, if only dimly, if only just barely. I maintain that Infinitude (ἄπειρον) is the natural and sole object of any genuine art and genuine thought. The spires of Gothic cathedrals and the pens of poets alike stretch toward It. The mind is a Mind only when it strives toward the Infinite (see Fichte’s construction)11 since, to the extent that it sets a limit to its own striving, to that extent it is not striving and is, consequently, a non-mind. A “limit” is the delaying of activity, and although one may easily conceive of the limit of creative activity (for example, in regard to the friction of a thought against the words of a language), the creativity of the limit is inconceivable.

The question of form and content in art,** if the matter were in any way different from how it is described here, would lead to the unsolvable problem of two points in empty space, where the distance between them changes: only by assuming that one of the points is motionless does it become possible to calculate the motion of the other (in this case—the one symbolizing “form”). Whether through the fourteen colored-glass panes of the Petrarchan sonnet or in the narrow frame of a Corot landscape, we always see the same thing: the dim-gray dawning of infinitude through the finite. Byron yearned for “the one word,”†† in which “everything”12 would sound; that is, for the solution to the aesthetic puzzle of “maxima and minima” (cf., for example, the honeycomb problem in Marakuev’s Algebra: obtaining maximum cellular capacity with minimum outlay of wax). Is there not a dream hidden in the playing of a great pianist—to tear the rippling clothing of black and white keys away from absolute unity, and to touch Harmony itself with one’s fingers? All these attempts are, of course, pathetic to the point of ridiculousness: it’s not only that “stars do not weep, but even bears do not always dance” to our music (I seem to be mangling Flaubert).13 ** I take the term “form” in an almost opposite sense to Aristotelian “form.” [The matter/ form binary (“hylomorphism”) is fundamental to Aristotle’s thought; Krzhizhanovsky might be thinking here of De Anima, in which Aristotle maps the relation body/soul onto the relation matter/form.—Trans.] †† God found such a word: Logos—Λογος (in Greek). And Byron?

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A thought thrown toward the infinite falls short, back here by the mind, but it is thrown all the same toward Infinitude: the distance may not be traversed, but the direction taken is true.

V The philosopher orients the first movements of his thought according to the ever-strengthening sensation of “all.” We may observe distantly related phenomena even among the lowest animals, in the form of so-called heliotropism: thus a fly with its wings plucked off, placed on a rotating disk, invariably climbs upward (E. Mach, Knowledge and Error, p. 6114).‡‡ The same experience formulated in a somewhat more intricate way: along the surface of the spinning earthly sphere, someone’s quest crawls upward, striving in vain toward an infinitude that keeps slipping away. The duration of the experience: thirty or forty years. “The only exposition that can be acknowledged as good,” writes Johann Fichte, “is one in which it is not the author who arranges the exposition, but rather the very topic that expresses itself and depicts itself by means of the author’s organ of speech” ( J. Fichte, Fundamental Features of the Present Age, p. 65).15 Thus a being ( J. F.), taken for a second, somewhat more complicated experiment, senses itself—during the whole time it is subjected to this experimentation—to be the instrument of some Idea: it is ‡‡ See a parallel passage in Hegel’s introduction to the Berlin lectures (1818), where he asserts that it is human nature to “think upward.”

not it that is thinking; the Idea is thinking through it. Consequently, the Idea also sets its orientation. After all this, it is clear that the metaphysician relates to the word in precisely the same way as the Idea relates to him: the Idea isolates the metaphysician from life, freeing him from the tangled mass of interwoven human self-love (society), and forces him some distance from life, in inactivity and silence, to serve only It. The metaphysician, in turn, isolated by the Idea, takes a word from the outside world and, freeing it—by means of “isolating abstraction” (in Wundt’s sense)16—from the tangle of associative threads, detaches it from life. True, this requires tearing off two or three letters or fastening on a new syllable; in short, maiming the word such that it cannot creep back out into life. Thus the scholastics take the words “quid,” “haec,” and so forth, which for a thousand years have been rubbing up against one another, to the point of utter desensification, from the secular environment. There, in their cells, they transform these words into the frightening and fantastical Quidditas, Haeccitas, Aseitas, and so forth: the word, kidnapped from the outside world, jangling strangely with the new letters that enchain it, serves the scholastic in the conveyance of his heavy, cumbersome ideas. Having taken up the elegant verbal convolutions of Ciceronian phrasing, the medieval philosopher made of it a logical skeleton, joining words as the terms of an Aristotelian syllogism are joined. As a result—monotony, but after all, the truth is a “monos.” The inexhaustible diversity of lies is too much for the truth, unitary in its multiplicity. Chatterboxes are inexhaustible. Idea and Word

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The wise are boring: they repeat themselves, since they are unitary in their multiplicity. The Latin language itself, which harbored the metaphysician for so many centuries, would seem to be suited by its very nature to this: the language does not have, for example, the sounds “zh,” “sh,” “shch,” “ch”—that is, the letters that bring to language the fuss and rustle of life.

VI The fundamental Idea (fundamental for a given “I”), having seized possession of the individual’s brain, encounters a series of forms or limitations along its descending path into words.§§ The content of genuine creative work cannot be defined, because any definition will be in an already familiar form—that is, a limitation. For example, an Idea that has arisen in the mind of a poet will already be limited by the fact that it arose in the mind of a poet—that is, a person inclined only to verbal-rhythmical processes. In this way the idea immediately falls into a cell of mental form. The first form (the poet), having picked out the second form (for example, the sonnet), is thus trying to squeeze something that is already distorted (by its presence in the poet’s mind) into the fourteen lines of the sonnet. Of course, along with this the idea must be subjected to the demands of rhythm and

§§ “Form,” seen from the inside, is the idea. Form, seen from the outside, nearly merges with the conception of matter (in Aristotle’s sense). I point out once more that this word is meant in the second sense for the duration of my argument. [See note 7 above.—Trans.]

sound within each line (meter is the third form) and at the ends of the lines (rhyme is the fourth form), etc., etc. Once the process of removal from Idea toward material (τὸ μὴ ὄν)17 is complete, an extremely important moment in creative activity begins: the return of the Idea back into itself— that is, the partial removal or lightening of form; the concessions that the Idea made to sound are taken back. The result: the Idea, which was beating against the winding shore of form, hastens to flood back to unlined Infinitude, carrying form itself away behind it—that is, dissolving it within itself, reducing it to a minimum. Only the “metaphysician in the poet” knows about this ebb-tide of the idea, and strives via thought to flood back from the form that has only just been established (“introspection”): the metaphysician in the poet looks upon his stanzas as upon a vague trace of the truth, barely touching words, only to withdraw at once. For him the combination of words that remains here is just a memory: “there,” having visited him, forgot the verses back here. Attend to the so-called singing of stanzas—is this not already a funeral mass? The reader, chancing upon the sorrowful ceremony, naturally does not see what is visible to the poet: to the poet, the stiffened stanza is no dead body of letters. After all, he knew the stanza back when it was alive. The Indians have found a symbol that reconciles idea and word: it is Sphota,18 the ethereal word. Sphota’s native land is the ether, in which it is eternal– indivisible–simple. Only once it has descended to the earth and clothed itself in air does Sphota lose its immortality, indivisibility, and simplicity. Idea and Word

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People are deaf to Sphota: they just cannot make it out. Trying, like all who have fallen deaf, to work out what they can’t quite sense from what they can, people make frail languages out of their variegated conjectures. The ideal of the metaphysician and the poet is to make a “dictionary of one Word,” moreover one that the air dare not touch. 191? Translated and introduced by Timothy Langen

ARGO AND ERGO

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Along with “Love as a Method of Cognition” and “Idea and Word,” “Argo and Ergo” belongs to a series of philosophical articles from Krzhizhanovsky’s Kievan period, written before his move to Moscow in 1922. Neo-Platonic philosophy and theosophy thoroughly permeated the literary culture of the Russian Silver Age, and the genre of philosophical essays was common among famous contemporaries, such as Andrey Bely and Alexander Blok. Given Krzhizhanovsky’s deep interest in philosophy, it is natural that he began his writing career as a philosopher first and foremost. His first published fiction, “Jakobi and As If [Iakobi i iakoby]” is also a dense philosophical meditation on the nature of being, constructed as a dialogue between German philosopher Friedrich Heinrich Jakobi and the personified conjunctive. Showcasing his symbolist colors, in these essays Krzhizhanovsky constructs a series of binary sets that become a constant motif in pretty much all of his subsequent work. These are the dichotomies between idea and word, emotional and mental activities, imagination and reality, science and art, and philosophy and literature (defined by Krzhizhanovsky elsewhere as the difference between Kant and Shakespeare).

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All of these binaries are heavily influenced by neo-Platonic– Kantian metaphysics and rest on the distinction between two worlds: the immanent world of matter and the transcendental world of pure forms, or, as he puts it, the worlds of “this” and “that.” What makes this double-worldness different from that of his symbolist contemporaries is that here, Krzhizhanovsky actively destabilizes the hierarchy between the noumenal and phenomenal worlds, suggesting that poetic language can be used not only to gain access to the transcendental realm but also as a vehicle that effects the movement in the opposite direction and transforms ideas into matter. With his typical paranomastic wit, Krzhizhanovsky hints that the difference and the distance between these worlds might amount to just a single letter. Although the beginning of “Argo and Ergo” demonstrates Krzhizhanovsky’s preference for mystery over revelation, ultimately, even in this early work, he insists on the interpermeability between the two worlds. As his own prose attests, for Krzhizhanovsky the ideal medium for securing the flow of traffic both ways—from “this” to “that” and from “that” to “this”—is writing.

ARGO AND ERGO 1 Science is a systematic mystery-destroyer: it demystifies mysteries by means of “discoveries”; it attempts to penetrate the

impenetrable; “unknowns” are allowed into its equations only in order to be solved. Art is the enmystification of things: the ability not to know the unknown; it takes a thing that has been seen through and through, that has turned without stint on optic axes, and removes it to the world of mysteriousnesses; it takes a thing long since solved, “clear in itself,” accessible—and resolves it into a mystery, into a self-contained thing-in-itself; where there was access, now there is none. Before the scientist and the poet stands a globe: with white splotches—unpopulated by letters, unsullied by line or color— at the poles. Eyeing the splotches, the scientist says: when will these too be outlined? The poet: why is the globe covered with lines? Why aren’t there more undiscovered lands? Art is allied to religion, which rests on seven sacred mysteries.1 Art is like an unsystematic, disorderly religion; religion is akin to a systematized art; the artist’s little mysteries are without number; in religion the mysteries are seven, but driven all into the depths of Secrecy. Curiously, in the Middle Ages, when the seven sacred mysteries were finally made dogma, the seven sciences (septem artes liberales2) were defined in contradistinction to them. Two different minds, Hegel and the Archimandrite Ignatius, in defining seemingly different things (“aesthetic contemplation” and “sacred mystery”), said the same thing. Archimandrite Ignatius: “A sacred mystery is invisible grace granted to the believer in visible forms.”3 Hegel: “Contemplation of the beautiful is delight from an invisible idea presented in visible forms.”4 In either statement, the “invisible” replaces “visible forms.” Argo and Ergo

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Our world is too visible, eye and brain are overstrained by a superabundance of vision, by an overdazzlingness of apprehensions—and so they ask that the thing be removed from its visible and tangible place, that it be excluded from time and space; that the realness of reality be less.

2 All the things in my world I divide into these and Those. These have worn out my eyes; they have rubbed my hands sore; they are covered with layers of my touches; they surround me, chafing my very eyes, my skin, they are all right here and here. I know them to the finest flexure—point—mark; they have all been counted and recounted. Whereas Those things: are not within my grasp, my eye cannot reach, but I believe: they are the essence: beyond all distances, outside all tangencies, where lines of sight have come to an end and colors faded away. To think is to transpose things: from these into Those, from Those into these. Some people rejoice if, having taken this thing right here at hand, they can remove it to That: we shall call them this-intoThaters. This sort of person is usually drawn to poetry, music, and so on. People who would rather, on reaching for Those distant things, bring them as close as possible to eye and brain, we shall call That-into-thisers: their minds, attracted by science, by the exactitude of definitions, like to “reveal” mysteries and “discover” secrets.

This-into-Тhaters and That-into-thisers are antagonists. A this-into-Thater, for instance, never has any liking for That-into-thisers—because of their passion for rationalizing mysteries. Although scholarly books, written mainly by That-intothisers, hold as a constant that “man loves truth” (special terms have even been invented—for example, “philosophy”, i.e., truthlove), the universality of truthlove is more than doubtful. Although a small group of That-into-thisers engages in discoveries, in studies and the extraction of truths, most people suffer from the excess of knowledge pressed on them by That-into-thisers, from the extreme clearness and nakedness of life: the petals of all blossoms forced ruthlessly apart; legends broken open so as to see what there is inside; miracles reduced to mechanisms; the veils of tabernacles drawn back. The nineteenth century gave the brain of three generations more discoveries and investigations than all the preceding eighteen centuries did sixty generations. Naturally, a reaction was bound to set in against the excess of meaning, an urge to enmystify the demystified: the legend now took revenge on the formula. If Alexander Lvovich Blok5 (the century’s second generation) “could scarcely refrain from writing verses,” then Alexander Alexandrovich Blok (third generation) could not not write them. The soul looks to art to protect it from the mind, from science that “explains” everything to the soul, up to and including the soul itself. The soul of our century craves not truth but mystery.

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3 Scientific technique boils down to working out methods of coiling Distance. Both telescopes and railroad tracks strive to coil the intervening space between thing and eye, to replace Distance with nearness. Artistic technique searches for means of endistancing the near-at-hand “this”: the master must know how to uncoil nearness. Algebra takes the first letters of the alphabet to signify the “known,” and the “unknown” is relegated to the distant end of the alphabet—and that’s where art has settled, its every word, every letter in every word, resolving a thing into unknownness (the way of science: to solve unknowns). In Dal’s Dictionary6 we find this example of phraseology: “Is it far to ***?” “No, it’s near.” “And is it far to near?” To “near,” as the artist shows it on the canvas of a painting, or the poet on the page of a book, it must always be far. Though the network of European railways has all but liquidated the anguish of separation, the Indian drama continues to be built around one theme: the sundering of the heartsick by Distances. Spectral analysis finds earthly (these) chemical elements even on distant stars, turning the star-divinity (Sabianism7) into something comprehensible, into a quasi-Earth. Meanwhile the poet, with the beats of his verse, propels the body of dead Caesar, rotting here, in the earth, to the radiance of the fiery comet or star that blazed up at the instant of his death in the heavens (see Horace, Carmina8).

The mystery of artistic creation lies in its mystery, in the ability to insert in the interval between eye and thing the “marvelous Faraway.”9

4 The first inklings of poetry in the world were riddles. Nowadays That-into-thisers, who manage the business of art theory and criticism, teach us how to crack riddles, i.e., to unriddle them. But the ancient composers of riddles sought something else in them: riddles were the product of their artistic creativity, an attempt to make the comprehensible incomprehensible. If the creator of riddles had wanted to try to unriddle things, then he  would have set about this: all around him was an entire forest of yet-to-be-unriddled natural phenomena, but instead of puzzling over them, he tried to return what little he did understand to the realm of mystery. Thimble: “An open-ended barrel, I am shaped like a hive. I am filled with the flesh, and the flesh is alive.” Windmill: “Four wings I have, which swiftly mount on high, on sturdy pinions, yet I never fly.”10

Common objects slip away from the near in riddles. There have always been and will ever be both unriddlers and bafflers—composers of riddles, which grow up into stories and tales or branch into chapters and books.

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5 If Dante had wanted to study Beatrice, minutely noting and tracing her works and days, then, perhaps, he would have known her better, but we would never have heard anything of Beatrice. Three or four encounters, and that’s all. From Florence the poet was banished not only by the Signoria11 but by poetry itself. If the scholar, psychologist, historian, or doctor wanting to depict the life of the young Beatrice, daughter of Folco Portinari, who lived in the thirteenth century, would have done well to take lodgings near her and systematically shadow the “object” of his research, then the first thing the poet had to do, on finding this subject for his creativity, was to go far away from it. Vita nuova12 tells of Dante learning of the death of Beatrice’s father. His Madonna is grief-stricken, thinks he, but rather than go with the crowd to venerate the tomb and catch sight of Beatrice, he retreats to his room and “composes a sonnet.” Two ladies pass by his window speaking of Beatrice’s grief, but the poet, rather than question the passing signoras as to the particulars, claps his window shut: in result—another sonnet. Yet the possibility of meetings between Alighieri and the beautiful Beatrice has not been ruled out: their encounters could become more frequent, longer, more easily arranged: this threatens the terza rima.13 The terza rima remains in danger until the instant when death, from which poetry must diligently learn the art of parting and endistancing, removes the danger. Only the spring of 1290 secures life to the dead Beatrice. The date of her death is the Divine Comedy’s date of birth: now it cannot not be written. Shrouded in the secrets of

poetry and the mysteries of faith, she will enter a “new life” so as to live there, never dying. Death was slow to help Francesco Petrarca.14 Madonna Laura did not die for a long time: long enough to destroy the enchantment of her mysteries, to make herself known, to render further knowledge impossible and absurd: the lines of the canzones and sonnets in Messer Petrarca’s “In vita di Madonna Laura”15 were flimsily made—under the weight of such facts as Laura’s long marriage, frequent childbearing, passel of children, and the gossip of little Avignon, they might easily have broken off and fallen silent. Sensing danger, Petrarch resorts to a trick. In conversation with St. Augustine (De contemptu mundi, III16), he learns that Laura’s beauty has been marred by—there follows a word of all consonants—“prbs” (most likely, “partabus”—childbearing). Petrarch the That-into-thiser inserts the distance-coiling word partabus, turning the celestial Laura into an all-too-earthly woman bearing children like any other, but Petrarch the thisinto-Thater quickly confiscates the word’s vowels: the word announces itself but does not offend. (Read it—“prbs”: perturbationis,17 etc.—as you like.) From the same dialogue: Petrarch: First came I into this world and I shall be first to depart. Augustine: I think you will not have forgotten that time when you feared the contrary event, and made a song of your beloved as if she were presently to die, a song full of moving sorrow.18 (See Sonnet 254.19) Argo and Ergo

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But no matter how Petrarch tries to trick himself, this life is too importunate: one can wrest the vowels from the consonants in a word, but one cannot wrest the effects from their causes in life; only Laura’s passing—de facto—from this world into “that” gives new impetus to his weary inspiration (see note on the flyleaf of his copy of Virgil20): the genuinely immortal is born (the sonnets “In morte di Madonna Laura”).

6 “And slowly passing among the drunks, always alone and unescorted, wafting a breath of perfume and mists, she takes a table by the window . . .”21 You might make the acquaintance of this “Unknown Woman”: simply ask the waiters hanging about by the tables, or else the literary critics: they will supply all the necessary information, they will explain her to the last letter and mole: and when they have, it will all be clear and . . . unnecessary. Art needs people who, rather than acquainting us with the unknown, can disacquaint us with the known, who can take this thing that has become a mind-sore, this trifle right here, and raise it to the power of a dream or mystery. Distance, a coiled spiral, lies inside every last thing, no matter how small or dreary. Distance has many names (they make up the poet’s dictionary). Call out to it in a thing—and it will uncoil. In the window of Musatov’s house (Second Symphony, Andrei Bely22) is a bouquet of gray feather-grass: but as soon as it begins to grow dusk, we seem to see, there in the window, not a bouquet of feather-grass but the gray face of Eternity.

In 1823, the editorial offices of the Literary Broadsheet23 received a poem—“A Little Bird”: In alien lands devoutly clinging To age-old rites of Russian earth, I let a captive bird go winging . . .24

They liked it. But  .  .  . it wasn’t clear enough. The editor, Faddey Bulgarin, crossed out the title “A Little Bird” and inserted: “On a Little Bird’s Release.” To this title he added an asterisk: see note—“This poem alludes to the innocent debtors languishing in debtors’ prison, for whose ransom humanity’s benefactors give their fortunes”: that’s as bad as it gets.

7 Either “That”—or “this”; either the cognizing “Ergo”—or the Argo,25 sailing away to the land of myths; either devote yourself to “therefore” [poetomu]—or be a poet [poetom]. Reasonable Odysseuses return again and again to the shores of Ithaka [Itak] with their “Thus” [Itak]: but where the power of Odysseus-the-reasoner begins, there Homer’s Odyssey must end. Man is a composite: both principles live in him side by side. When, for example, man loves, he wants his “beloved” to be both That and this. Since love seeks beauty, it endistances this into That, and since love wants possession (“closeness”), it embraces the beloved, reducing her from inaccessibility to accessibility, turning That into this. The heart skips a beat: when first falling in love, this is raised to the power of That; Argo and Ergo

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and then, with the yearning “to know” (in the biblical sense), That returns to this; and again there is the boredom of life’s nakedness, or the betrayal of this for the sake of a new That. Beautiful people wear their beauty with a particular care—like something foreign to the world of visible and tangible things; if the distance to the lovely body is a few paces, then the distance to the lovely body’s beauty is insuperable. The ancients reverenced, on a par with Eros, Anteros26: his statue presents the image of a youth with unseeing, pupilless eyes; his arms (as so often happens with ancient statues) are broken off (see the Vatican Gallery). In restoring his statue, one shouldn’t glue the arms back on to the marble Anteros: for if Eros teaches us how to embrace the beloved, then Anteros teaches an armless love, leading us away from the beloved with a force equal to love. c. 1918 Translated and introduced by Joanne Turnbull

A PHILOSOPHEME FOR THE THEATER (EXCERPT)

04

In 1922–23, the Moscow Kamerny Theater printed two issues of a house journal titled The Craft of Theater (Masterstvo teatra), which was thick with substantial theoretical and philosophical essays on the stage, mostly written by writers employed at the Kamerny. The best-known piece to emerge from the journal was an outside contribution, however: the essay “Theater as Art” (“Teatr kak iskusstvo”), by Russia’s foremost phenomenologist and scholar of Husserl, Gustav Shpet (1879–1937). In the dry intonation of a professional philosopher, Shpet grapples with the question of how an object onstage transforms into a theatrical object and how a person onstage transforms into a character. The present essay by Krzhizhanovsky, written in mid-1923 and excerpted here, builds from Shpet’s core phenomenological questions to spin a fresh and imaginative argument about what theater is that is steeped in wordplay, striking imagery, scientific metaphors, and a cast of dramatis personae, both historical (Kant, Leibniz) and archetypical (a metaphysician,

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an actor). The essay was likely composed for this Kamerny journal from Krzhizhanovsky’s lectures at the Kamerny’s actor training studio, but the journal folded too soon, leaving it long unpublished. Instead, Krzhizhanovsky resurrected parts of “A Philosopheme for the Theater” in two lectures to colleagues at the Theater Section of the prestigious State Academy of Artistic Sciences (GAKhN) in December 1923 and March 1924, and traces of its ideas live on throughout Krzhizhanovsky’s later stories, plays, and essays. “A Philosopheme” begins with an analogy between theater and philosophy: both disciplines are concerned with truth and appearance. But theater “thinks” via real bodies engaged in consciously fictional dramas, a kind of truth that appealed to Krzhizhanovsky much more than did lonely metaphysicians, who distrust the reality of the objects around them in their preference for the noumena, or ideals, of an intangible and invisible world. It should also be said that a passion for concrete embodiment was a sensible survival tactic for a thinker-artist like Krzhizhanovsky, who soon enough would be accused of idealism. At times nearly opaque in its complexity, the essay draws contrasts among philosophy, the everyday, and the theater to conjure the metaphysics of the theater perceived as a world in itself, a world in which change, transformation, and acting are fundamental. This essay was first published posthumously in the Toronto Slavic Quarterly in 2003.

A PHILOSOPHE M E FOR THE THE ATER Chapter 1: Everyone as Everything Philosophenweg A street. Two people, proceeding one ahead of the other, stride along the cobblestones. The first sees himself between two rows of streetlamps. The second finds himself walking in thought among the stars. Both are correct. I’m not interested in where the first is heading, but I know: the second, wherever he may be heading, is heading into philosophy. In old German university towns like Königsberg or Jena, a street with the traditional name “Philosophenweg”1 can always be tracked down. Scholarly towns have reverently preserved this name since that time when some now extinct metaphysician roamed them: along precisely these little streets the thinkers conducted their usual strolls. Philosophenweg usually begins from the town square, which is cluttered with Ämter and Kirchen,2 and, gradually extricating itself from the rows of windows gazing on the Weg, retreats to a field: from a square covered in stone—to a broad expanse; from window cracks— to the blue chasm of the sky; from the multi-gauging and variegation of various somethings—to the simplicity of everything. Taking up and observing the metaphysician not from the crown of his head but from the soles of his shoes, we see even here that philosophy, in order to see things, turns toward them not its eye but its back; in the process of comprehending something, philosophy doesn’t approach that thing but withdraws A Philosopheme for the Theater

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from it, in order to find it lost in everything. On book covers one can place, next to the words “philosophy of,” any something: “of law,” “of love,” “of theater,” etc. But philosophy has only one proper object: everything as such. And a real philosophy of theater is possible only in that instance when theater and everything coincide, that is, when there is nothing in the world that could not be theater in one or another modification of it. And so the present work attempts to fuse the threshold of the theater with the threshold of consciousness, and the threshold of consciousness with the limits of the world. The Globe and the Globe The first line of a book by a certain German metaphysician: The world is my representation [predstavlenie].3 The first words shown to those crossing the threshold of Shakespeare’s Globe Theater: All the world’s a performance [predstavlenie].4 The curtain is raised and lowered. Pages rise and fall. And out from behind the curtain and off of the page come one and the same thing, only differently given and by different means. If we take the terminologies of the playscript and of the Critique of Pure Reason, we see that they are strangely similar: in the language of the Critique, a person exists among “phenomena”; in his consciousness “representations” [predstavlenie] arise and recede, replacing one another; driven by whatever causes to whatever “acts” (now I switch from the Critique to the playscript), the person has found himself by eveningtime at a “performance [predstavelnie] presentation” that unfolds “act” by “act.”5 Causality has thickened into the fate that moves the

“scenes” [phenomena] of the stage. The small, wooden Globe lit by dozens of smoky torches competes with the enormous globe brought into the sun’s rays. The big globe has an innumerable multitude of “phenomena.” The small Globe has but thirty or forty [scenes] in an evening. But for what it loses in quantity, the small Globe tries to make up in quality: behind Kant’s “phenomena” one still feels the things affecting them. Behind Shakespeare’s affecting “scenes,” things don’t exist: they have been ripped from things. The world “as representation” is put on in the unconscious; through consciousness, though, it is perceived as given from the outside. A performance in the theater, however, as everyone knows—from Shakespeare to the last little lad trampled down into the chomping mud in front of the footlights—is always presented wholly by human hands for human eyes. Kant extracts the entire world, from the stars to the dust mites, from the eyes: whether there exists something outside the subject he does not know. Shakespeare makes the world— with quill, hammer, and brush—for the eyes, for the spectator: when they’re done watching—that’s it. Kant’s dull causality, which he enumerates as the eighth category of reason, is transformed under Shakespeare’s quill into fate. Causality mucks about with those mites of dust. Fate helps itself to the stars. Causes and actions, which move like beads on a rosary around the large earthly globe, have already long ago tangled up their knots and threads such that the consciousness of an individual human is not strong enough to circle along some particular thread from its first to last cause. Upon arising in my consciousness, phenomenon “a” draws behind itself phenomenon A Philosopheme for the Theater

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“b,” but “c” is already outside of my consciousness—either it’s seen by others, or else it seeps into the unseen. And in the place of the broken-off series “a, b, c . . .” in consciousness, a different series is inserted: ?, ?, ?—so that upon breaking off again, it yields its place to a new series: d, e, f. The stage, however, extricating action from the intersecting of threads that bear causes and consequences, always shows, as it were, the entire alphabet of phenomena belonging to a given series, uninterrupted by any other: the walls of the theater box, in isolating the present action as it unfolds from phenomenon to phenomenon, protect it from the danger of getting mixed up and swirling onto the phenomena of an alien series. Onstage nothing happens behind one’s back. The spectator forgets that he has a back: everything is before the eyes. Prior to departing the stage, each cause leads out in its place its own visible consequence, and the qualified time of the Globe—which spins a thousand times faster than the enormous, heavy-laden globe and covers an hour in a second, its footlights now dying out and now blazing up again, in contrast to the slow sun, which crawls back and forth from dawn to dusk, now dying out, and now again blazing—this qualified Globe time grants the opportunity, swiftly pulling along the thread of causality that has been strung through the acts, to experience it as something stronger than causality: as fate. Resnota The human “I,” glancing inward through the eyes and seeing that it isn’t empty behind the pupils, does not dare to fence itself

off any longer with its eyelids from its own outside. The eyes, calling the not-empty the “not-I,” try to master it. Science, by twisting the “not-I” with wires, gripping it between the poles and rods of machines, tries to repair its “I.” Philosophy goes further: it seeks not to repair, but to kill the “not-I.” Every “I,” the history of which is included in the annals of philosophy, has tried to cross out the “not” in the “not-I”: to shorten the world into one through-and-through “I.” Straightening out the winding path of metaphysics, one can define it thus: the liquidation of the object. The physiologist Flechsig classifies the movement of the nerve currents enclosed in the cranial-vertebral system into the centripetal (senses), centricentral (thoughts), and centrifugal (movements, muscular category).6 Maybe the whole evolution of nerve processes stems from the centripetal through the centricentral to the centrifugal: from the epoch of senses through the epoch of thoughts to the epoch of deeds. But regarding the almost extinct species of the homo metaphysicus, one can say with certainty that in him the centricentral processes, shut off from the senses, have burgeoned on account of centripetal actions along sensory nerves from the outside. The sensorium of a metaphysician is partly torn away from the outside world: a careful study of the biographical details of the  lives of Berkeley, Kant, Johann Fichte, and in part Schopenhauer allows one to assert that for them, through the thick of thoughts, the sun shone a little dimmer than for others, things seemed more removed, sounds more muffled and indistinct: the centricentral currents inside the brain partly neutralized the nerve currents producing sensation A Philosopheme for the Theater

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from without. The brain’s distrust of, and its subsequent disbelief in, its outside, which lead to the logical negation of the outside world, were born initially from its physiological undernourishment by the outside world. From here comes Kantian criticism, idealism, metaphysical illusionism. But legends gradually transfer their themes to the newspaper chronicle. Century after century, homo metaphysicus transfers his thinking to homo vulgaris: a century ago, only barely in the jumble of streets, one could find Philosophenweg. Now all streets, little by little, are becoming Philosophenwege. Book metaphysics is over because the metaphysics of life has begun: now from the dullest of pupils the world will always end up tumbling out; the most average person, while sitting at the window of his room, occasionally will sense the motley “outside” only as a film on his eye, and space—as a flat, colored picture on the glass of the window. Each person knows the temptation: to tear the film off his pupils, having become resolved on nothingness; to wipe off space, like dust, and having made the window completely transparent, to open it wide onto nothingness. But Kant’s thinking, nested in the skull bones of a Schmidt, in a day or two will burn through and wear out the nerve pathways and cerebral gyri of Schmidt’s brain. The theater will come to the rescue of Schmidt’s small-mindedness: it, the theater, crosses out with the line of the footlights the “not” in “not-I,” uniting the separated “I” with “I.” There is an old word buried in forgotten Church Slavonic manuscripts: resnota, and the adjectival derivation, resnyi. The Church Slavonic language served only idealism: its lexicon never, not in a single book, worked on behalf of other

directions. For that reason, precisely in this language, despite its dearth of words, these strange terms were developed. Resnota is all the variegated diversity of the visible world that, in its essence, is no longer than the eyelashes, although it seems huge and multidimensional. The theater, abbreviating all the space of the world into the small, airy ten-arshin cube of the stage,7 is also close to the belief that our world is a resnyi world, and if ever the technique of the theater is refined, then perhaps it will succeed in proving in a most vivid way that all the fictitious depth and length of the world of measure are no longer than the length of the eyelash. Illusionism, expanding, abandoned the thinker’s lowly cell: now it is the size of the theater cupola and is likewise confined under it, hermetically sealed off within the mute walls of the theater; but no clamps can hold it back inside the closed-up walls: phantoms and phantasms, having seeped through those walls, sooner or later will enter into life, and these worlds, shortened to the length of an eyelash, will enter inside the “I.” Suns will light up on this side of the eyelids; the huge, flattened spheroid of the Earth, having squeezed through the pupil, will hide in the tiny spheroidally flattened lens. And then the theater, like a bridge over which everyone has already crossed, can be raised: it will no longer be needed. Not long ago gripes were still frequently heard over the new manner of writing: it was impossible—everyone and everything got mixed up.8 But isn’t it rather that a shift had occurred not in the manner of writing but in the manner of thinking: “everyone” and “everything” were equated. For me “everyone” expresses in itself “everything.” Where “everyone” comes to an A Philosopheme for the Theater

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end, there, too, ends “everything.” The primal social element— the path leading to “everything,” over whose margins we wandered earlier—leads to idealism: man is interesting only to man. The theater does not know any other “everyone” than “everything”: in it people are shown to people: “I” looks at “I” through eyes facing eyes; “not-I” is reduced to flat spots that gradually crawl away from the eyes: gray broadcloth remains—that, too, will be removed, and what will remain are people shown to people. Without the “not-I” it’s more convenient: just take it away, cart it off like scenery, and instead of one sun you have as many suns as there are eyes, divided by two. Lenau in his Faust resorts to a metaphor: to him, a black tree trunk with its branching seems to resemble the tree of knowledge. But if an ordinary Christmas tree with lights burning between its needles and a star pinned to its top were able to think, then of course, when extending its needles toward infinity, it would project from its tinsel stars some kind of sky, it would see the lights of its candles as suns in faraway orbits, but the tree would have been mistaken: the stars and sun are no farther than the points of its needles; space is no longer than the eyelashes. In Andersen’s fairy tales, a curious problem about kings, princesses, and princes is posed: princesses and princes can do only one thing—get married; once married, they become kings and multiply into new princes who dream of being kings. Andersen’s entire fairy-tale space is stuffed with crowns: from nearly every rose petal, kings of the elves or the sylphs politely bowed their little golden crowns to every fly that flew by. There’s not enough land to go around for all these kingdoms

that multiply from tale to tale. So the kingdoms get smaller: one of them, for example, is so small that there’s not enough room in it for one to get married. One needn’t protest the tale: one must let it develop to its logical end, when, multiplying the number of kings and decreasing their domains, the tale will make kings of everyone, will give to each a kingdom with the diameter of an eyelash. And when all become kings, when each has his own land and sun, only then will the real proletarian principle be realized: first—destroy dozens of kings; second— make a king of everyone. Essences Are Drawn to Phantasms The fundamental pair of terms with which metaphysics operates is: noumenon and phenomenon. Noumena are essences; phenomena are illusory. Phenomena do not have independent existence; the question of what appears in it can be posed to a phenomenon. The phenomenon or modus can be understood only out of some other thing, and not from themselves: they are unthinkable without a noumenon, or a substance, just as shadows are unthinkable without the things that cast them. But things, which are easily thinkable without shadows, and for whose existence shadows are not needed and are superfluous, nonetheless invariably become overgrown with moving patches of shadows. And the noumenon, the thing in itself, which is in itself sufficient for itself, nonetheless, despite all our logics and conceptualizations, becomes overgrown with phenomena. If phenomena are superfluous to essences, they do not add to and cannot be added to existence, since in essences A Philosopheme for the Theater

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the fullness of existence is already included, then, obviously, phenomena are the play of the noumenon (essence). This is a pure ontological fact, surrounded by a multiplicity of misunderstandings: “why do essences need illusoriness, noumena— phenomena?” Everyone misunderstands this in his own way. And I do, too. And for as long as this remains misunderstood, what’s understood is the theater. Everything ordinary is really strangenesses conjoined so strangely that they seem an ordinariness. For example: the neural process of cognition is inserted into the brain; the brain into the body; the body into the outside world. The brain is closest to the process of cognition; the body is farther; the outside world even farther. It would seem that the farther the object is from the subject, the more dim and unclear it is to it. On the contrary: the farthest thing—the outside world—is perceived clearly, distinctly, and precisely; the body—is felt dimly, only from its surface; the closest brain tissue, against which the process of sensation as though rubs—is not perceived at all. The same here; we do not exist in that which is. We find ourselves as if in de-essenced essences that have lost their way; we try to live among tear-off calendar dates, the sheets flying all over the place, days crawling along the hands of clock faces. In short, we try to live among phenomena that are because they appear and that aren’t because they all disappear. The striking fact that we do not have that which truly is and are given only that which is powerless to give anything—this should be taken just as a fact. Not so much through understanding do we know, as through a feeling, that the phenomenon, the appearance somehow points to

its noumenon; and also we know: the stage scene somehow points to the scene of life. Once it has begun, the process of illusorization cannot be stopped: alongside the noumenon there appears—the phenomenon; alongside the phenomenon there appears—the phenomenon of the phenomenon: the stage “phenomenon” [scene]. If in a dream I dream a dream (which often happens), then the second dream, the dream within the dream, I evaluate more correctly than the first. To the first dream I relate as if to reality—and am mistaken; the dream dreamed within the dream I take to be what it is: a fiction. Thrown from the world of essences into the world of appearing and disappearing phenomena, we continue to relate to them as if to essences: their appearances we take for things. But, moving them from Earth to the theatrical stage, from the world of phenomena to the world of the phenomenon of phenomena, we also relate to the appearances as if to a “performance,” not searching behind this dream within a dream for any sort of thing at all. And so two opposed errors combine into a truth. The above-named terms fit naturally into a progression: essence phenomenon = phenomenon phenomenon of phenomenon

That is, Shakespeare’s scene [phenomenon] relates to Kant’s phenomenon as the latter relates to the noumenon that can be grasped neither by Kant nor by Shakespeare. The stage models with a dozens of its own phenomena, just as a tiny maquette that is easily taken up in the hand models the stage itself. Or also: the Earth, long dubbed the “playfield of life” A Philosopheme for the Theater

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(ludum vitae), is so presented by the playful platform of the theater, just as this toy earth is by its maquette likeness. The adolescent Leibniz, while playing with the ideas of dead men that surrounded him in his father’s library, thought up a certain “globus intellectualis,” a closed sphere of symbolic signs that, without the mediation of words, expresses the whole system of essences in the universe. Now we have enough terms for the final progression, symbolizing that same alogical ur-fact: globus intellectualis earthly globe = earthly globe The Globe

Chapter 2: Being, Everyday Life, As-If Бытие [bytie] Быт [byt] Бы [by] 0[0]

Being/metaphysical existence Everyday Life As-if/the subjunctive 0

I take the word “Бытие” [Being] and tear off its two final signs: быт [Everyday Life]. Breaking off hereto the dimwitted “т,” I leave: бы [As-if]. I do the same with meaning as I do with letters: just as from one word to the next there are fewer phonemes and symbols, so, too, from one meaning to the next: ever fewer essences, бытие [Being] recedes and diminishes. Further I will not go: however black my ink might be, the night of nonexistence is blacker. Through three worlds—from бытие [Being] through быт [Everyday Life] to the world of

the pure subjunctivity of the all-proposing but nothing-supposing бы [As-if]—runs the process of the phenomenalization of essences: Globus intellectualis—the earthly globe—the windowless round Globe at the shore of the Thames. Being A sundial: an immobile rod—tip up; around the rod an oscillating shadow crawls from number to number, now lengthening, now shortening: born by dawn, killed by dusk, until the new dawn. But the rod is always the same, both at noon and at midnight—tip up: it doesn’t crawl along the numbers, isn’t born by the sun, isn’t killed by the night. Such are phenomena and essence, which is the existence that fills Everyday Life and is full of its own self. Being is atheatrical: only because it never permits the raising of its curtain. Being is: (a) invisible. Even Fichte complained: “everything hinders seeing—even the eyes.” And the eyes, of course, most of all. All metaphysicians, people from Being who have wandered astray into Everyday Life, toward us, bear witness through all their fragments, treatises, and globus intellectualises to the invisibility of essence. Theater, however, wants to exist, seeks out its spectator, forcibly squeezes itself into the eye. Under the sign (a), theater is not to be found. (b) It is unified: both in the fragments left by the Eleatics and in Spinoza’s ethics, Being cannot be thought of as anything other than unified. The multiplicity, fragmentation, and colorfulness of phenomena only torment the metaphysician. But colorfulness and multiplicity—is it not them and them alone A Philosopheme for the Theater

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that the theater seeks: dramatic characterhood, dialogue, and conflict are its fundamental devices. (c) It is unchanging: in Being everything comes at once. Changes are unnecessary to it: Being is a bright high noon that includes in itself all degrees of the strength of light. Theater, however, insists on the changeability of the actor, on the changing of masks. The curtain, whether falling or rising, acts like the blade of a knife that cuts the thread of time and events in time into various pieces. Thus—Being does not need the theater; nor the theater, Being: not in any of its attributes. And “I” is real waking life; this life is pierced through (if we look through unified and unchanging Being) by phenomena that seek to break loose from reality itself: such is the path of Being to As-if. Everyday Life Everyday Life is a bridge thrown across, a bridge that joins Being and the As-if. Everyday life, like every bridge, must be crossed. But just as the old Russian (more precisely, old Muscovite) construction projects loved to stick their sheds and dwellings onto bridges, pushing the city onto the curve of a bridge, crowding it and rendering it meaningless, so, too, pan-human life construction has not understood the Everyday. Everyday Life, it turns out, slowly accumulates from phenomena gradually elevated into things. The average citizen, who resides averagely in Everyday Life, is permeated day by day with a fetishism for what can be

touched and seen. At first, while he’s buying a thing, he thinks that it is he who has acquired the thing: but it then turns out that the things have acquired ownership of him. And the result is: the creature does not own the utensil, but the utensil owns the creature.9 A person from Everyday Life does not believe in Being, with its triad of God, immortality, and the soul; this person is suspicious toward the world of the pure As-if, populated by phantasms, but strongly believes in the reality of his three rooms, in the body of his wife, and in the official stamps on his residency permit. The person from Everyday Life is a stranger to eternity, but he lovingly hides time under the gold cover of a pocket watch and fetishistically endows it with little fob ornaments. Everyday Life, formulated briefly, is a phenomenon playing at being a thing; a fantasy pretending to be reality, helpless shadows trying, at least through their contours, to imitate real things. Thus Everyday Life strictly speaking does not need theater. But theater precisely arises in and apart from Everyday Life, budding off from it, because Everyday Life is a fiction that does not want to be fictional, that disavows itself. Everyday Life fears the theater because the theater exposes the blood relationship between them. Incidentally: into the composition of papier-mâché (the material of the maquette) go blood and paper: this gives papier-mâché a certain pretention to life. Wishing to protect itself from reminders of fictionality, wishing to localize its unreality, Everyday Life constructs among its buildings a special building with the inscription “Theater” on it, naively thinking that through its windowless walls, theater won’t seep any further than “Theater.” A Philosopheme for the Theater

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As-if If Everyday Life is a play at Being, then the As-if hiding in dark, windowless boxes is a play at Everyday Life: that is, a play at playing.10 Just as those living close to the crashing of Niagara soon stop hearing its noise, so, too, those living among words that say nothing soon cease to notice that the words say nothing, and they are drawn into the barter—of words for words. Breathing in oxygen, we don’t sense it: one needs to double the sign of its coefficient, take not a mixture of oxygen with nitrogen but so-called nitrous oxide (N2O), in order to sense its “laughing” effect. So, too, the coefficient of the playing must be doubled, must be given twice, for consciousness to say: theater.

1923 Translated and introduced by Alisa Ballard Lin

A COLLECTION OF SECONDS

5

In this feuilleton, Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky deftly splices key themes that recur throughout his fiction and nonfiction works: the connection between visual perception and temporal consciousness; the ability of photography and new film technology to capture the frantic pace of modern life in motion; the nature of time as a series of discrete instants or a continuum of infinite duration; and the essence of “byt,” or everyday life. Krzhizhanovsky’s city dwellers dash through a cityscape metamorphosing on the heels of the Revolution. Through his terse, laconic prose, they, too, appear as visual fragments—an elbow, a leather jacket, a briefcase. Their transient existence, like shifting reflections on a soap bubble, more image than reality, is juxtaposed against the enduring, tree-lined boulevards of the historic city. The double-sided canvas backdrops used by the street photographers whose work Krzhizhanovsky documents symbolize the choice for passersby between a romantic, fantastical imperial past and the construction of a prosaic revolutionary future; society is in flux, yet the new Soviet citizens linger on the brink.

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William James wrote of the perception of time, “these lingerings of old objects, these incomings of new, are the germs of memory and expectation, the retrospective and prospective sense of time.”1 Krzhizhanovsky’s feuilleton presents a minute crystal in his kaleidoscopic philosophical consciousness. The three facets of “A Collection of Seconds” each obliquely approach features of the fragmented, unstable present experienced by Soviet society in the 1920s.

A COLLECTION OF SECONDS I Butterflies are caught in nets; removed from the net, sprinkled with ether; then onto a pin and spread flat under glass. Seconds are caught in a photographic film chamber; transferred from chamber to fixing bath; then, spread flat on cardboard, tacked up behind a shop window. The second becomes yet more evasive and elusive from year to year. Modern applied psychology laboratories are working on the measurement of the so-called duration of the present. It turns out that the “present”—this atom of time that the consciousness cannot divide—once subjected to psycho-technological apparatus,2 splits apart and changes its magnitude, now contracting, now stretching like an accordion, ranging from fractions of a second to a time segment three to four seconds long. The more impetuously the stream of a given

consciousness flows by, exchanging perception for perception, the shorter is its “present.” One can assert that inner-city inhabitants are beings with an exceptionally short present. It has been noted that the art of the portrait is in decline: its leisurely technique can capture only the torpid flow of torpid minds. Moreover, the photography equipment of the past, which used an exposure interval, either cannot capture or only poorly captures the face of the modern city dweller, which manages to change expression two or three times per second. Our ancestors “turned out” even on daguerreotypes, whereas we often don’t turn out on even the most sensitive film. Our life, entirely made up of flashes and flickering, swirls with swarms of seconds,3 and while the artist, having laid out his brushes, seeks his model among the paint tubes, his model is already gone; either she’s been replaced, or the model herself has changed. The passersby of a metropolis, hurrying along past opening and closing doors with their briefcases tucked under their elbows, are people running in pursuit of seconds fleeting away. Even a refined camera cannot always capture the hunter of seconds: he walks nervously, zigzagging, now stopping abruptly, now practically breaking into a run. Only movie images jostling in pursuit of one another can keep up with the headlong, furious pace of the clanging and rumbling machine that is the city. Right now I’ve got nine seventeen. My photographer comrade and I head out to hunt seconds. The sun’s in our favor. The camera’s loaded. At our disposal we’ve got four eyes of our own and a fifth made of glass beneath a black metallic eyelid: A Collection of Seconds

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it blinks—a snapshot: from there, along the radius to the restless, growing bustle and clamor at the capital’s center. Our task: to take our camera behind the lines of those street photographers who snap up the street’s commotion, torn into instants; or, more precisely—a hunt for the hunters of seconds. While my companion searches, three-eyed, for what we need, my pair of pupils isn’t idle either: I observe him, a professional who deftly and neatly snatches one or the other shot from the motley heap of the city, freezing the moment into a cliché for the magazine. He throws his camera around almost like a Mauser, aims quickly, and hits contour and light almost on the fly. I remember a photo shoot of a Communist Youth International4 excursion: five or six press photographers, cameras at the ready, run in spreading loops, enmeshing the line along which the group paces; at intervals timed so that their lenses miss one another, the cameramen, now standing, now dropping to one knee, coolly snap shots of the moving target. I jot down in my notebook “the eyes of magazines NB.”5 But for the moment, this theme must wait. Tree-lined Novinsky Boulevard stretches out before me: along it stand the ranks of brightly painted square canvases belonging to the “street gunners” who take “instant photos”: now to work.

II Every spring, before gray turns green and the buds on the trees lining the boulevard have a chance to open, “gunners” hang out their canvas “backdrops” with hooks and string on the bare branches. Unfurling their colorful canvas rolls, the backdrops

blossom with flat but gaudy palm trees and cypresses, roses and cacti, promising Moscow an absolutely unattainable luxuriant southern spring. Here, amid the exotic flora, which darn the wilted boulevard with flat squares, three-legged black boxes stand between the puddles and gravel awaiting photo shoots. The “gunner” himself is ensconced close by on a chair or on the edge of the nearest park bench. By his side is a basket with bottles and small flasks, a towel wound around a stick, and a homemade display case with samples of his work fanned out under the glass. Browsing through the newspaper, he glances up now and then at the file of passersby or at his canvas billowing in the wind like a sail. In a photo studio, the backdrops are always colorless: black and white. But praxis on the street demands pigmentation of the background: just as flowers must tint their petals in order to attract a bug flying past, so, too, must the street camera arrest the crisp and hurried step of the passersby with garish colors and the uniqueness of the decorations presented to their eyes. The street photographers’ canvases are, in essence, the last romanticism preserved among the constructivist and businesslike “today.”6 Only here can one still find some sort of fantastical castles, half-crumbled towers, columns overgrown with moss and ivy, and the arcades of marble staircases. Only here can one still see the crude splotches of some sort of imaginary plants, the dark blue spikes of mountains and round blotches of overgrown ponds with the obligatory white swans bobbing among the reeds. A Collection of Seconds

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The romanticism of these landscapes, incongruous insertions into the prosaic brick and asphalt city panorama, above all attracts the curiosity of street urchins: they linger for a long time, mouths agape, eyes on the variegated colors. But now and then someone a bit older steps up between the backdrop and the camera lens. Right away the “gunner” ducks his head beneath the black drape, and the camera, stretching its stiffened wooden legs, springs into motion, like a spider sensing prey within its web. Snapping the shutter takes but a moment, but before capturing the instant, the complex fivelegged creature, angling beneath the drape, protractedly aims and readies itself. The number of spectators immediately grows, and the posing passerby feels surrounded by eyes. But one can’t hurry the hunter of seconds—only fools rush in where anglers fear to tread—the instant, before it’s captured, must be tracked down. If you observe the succession of faces who trade in their fifty kopecks for a snapshot by the street photographers, you soon realize that the most frequent buyers of these “instant photos” turn out to be credentialists and provincials. The former need the street camera’s product not for themselves but for their certifications and their work. They usually approach quickly, glancing at neither the backdrop nor the circle of gawkers crowded around; after the camera clicks, they try to hasten the development of the photo; once it has been obtained, the original, almost without casting a glance at his flat image, distractedly shoves it into his briefcase: the sooner to have it stamped. That’s it.

The provincial, a collector of souvenirs from the capital, shy but curious, squints at the painted square for a long time before he decides to commit to one or the other backdrop. In this respect, the provincial is choosy and has his own specific requirements for the backdrops: by posing in Moscow, he wants Moscow to pose with him: “The Capital and I.” It is precisely the provincial whom the painters’ brushes target in preparing dozens of crude, crooked, and flattened-out “Kremlins” to which, practice has shown, the provincial is susceptible. As you walk around the walls of the real Kremlin, which casts the crenellations and spires of its towers skyward, here and there you come across a flat, canvas Kremlin included among the street photographers’ squares. What is more, once or twice I happened to observe how, having arranged his Kremlin backdrop against the backdrop of the original Kremlin, a photographer angled his camera to be sure the real Kremlin would not accidentally be included in the shot. Incidentally, all newcomers fall for this bait: southerners, for instance, passing by a canvas depicting a peasant hut from their native land,7 can’t help but succumb to the pull of memories; they stop, come closer, even closer . . . and then the camera clicks—fifty kopecks, if you please. Sometimes the canvases are reversible: on the front a palace, on the back, a cabin. Take your pick. Once, having found a spot—this was on Smolensky Boulevard—across from one such double-sided canvas, I observed the following scene: a frayed jacket approached a canvas presenting a fantastical red and white palace. It stood

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for a long time, poking all its buttons into the palace’s splendid designs. Then the leather shoulders turned abruptly; the owner of the market studio, afraid to miss a second, deftly and quickly reversed the canvas: in place of the palace stood a square house encircled by poplars. In a minute the camera did its job.

III Now and again, I love to linger in front of a shop window displaying photos. It’s interesting to observe and compare these collections of seconds excluded from life, stopped like the hands of a ruined clock. Yet you can study the mechanism of a clock only by arresting its motion: precisely here, beneath the dusty glass of some photographer’s display case on the outskirts of the city, is the material of everyday life. I’ve even gotten into the habit of getting to know a new city by starting with the photo displays. It’s precisely here, and only here, that the osteology of everyday life is exposed, the backbone, stereotypes and repetitions of manners and mores, the everyday cliché, conveyed by means of . . . cliché. Everyday life itself, in its essence, is based on the substitution of a person by his image, of authenticity by semblance. Moscow’s photography shop windows have begun to fill up only in parallel with the filling out and embodiment of postrevolutionary everyday life. Previously, behind their broken windows were only bare boards. It is too late to prove it now, but my observations have convinced me that after the clicking of triggers was replaced by the clicking of camera shutters, the first exhibitions of images

presented a very large percentage of profile shots. One can only guess at the reasons. For instance: for a hungry, bony individual—all eyes and cheekbones—the visage en face is unflattering and almost impossible; he’s seen only “in profile.” But bit by bit, the people whose narrow faces are stuck to the flat slats get the chance to turn their en faces, which become rounder every year, to meet the camera lens: now they are visible. The flat shadow that had nothing but a profile begins to fill out and gain “face.” Mechanical scales are set up on the boulevards next to the first shyly unfurled canvases. People become interested in their weight, their cheekbones fill out with cheeks; now they begin turning, first to three-quarter profile, then, suddenly brave—a round sunflower—straight toward the light and the eye: a glass one, a live one—it doesn’t matter. Our everyday life hasn’t settled into its new forms as yet, and the display windows of the capital’s photo shops seem to gaze in different directions. The atelier on Petrovka Street shows one thing; “Artistic Photographs” on Khapilovka and Dorogomilovskaya Streets, another. In one shop window are ladies with the trains of their dresses draped around their ankles; in others are workers in peasant shirts; yet a third depicts actors dressed up however they like. It’s a kaleidoscope. Often, behind a single pane of glass are the foreheads of writers and public figures—and the naked backs of ballerinas. However, take a look for yourselves. There. In any case, the collected plethora of photographs awaits classification and a correctly applied inductive method. It would be a mistake on my part to force conclusions, to commit the sin that formal logic calls “hasty induction” ( John Stuart Mill).8 A Collection of Seconds

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But one thing you can assert even now without the risk of being mistaken: one can’t devote mere seconds to the collections of seconds that have captured within them elements of the old and the new everyday life. This material requires protracted and intensive examination. 1925 Translated and introduced by Karen Rosenflanz

THE POETICS OF TITLES

06

Literary translations are often praised for some ineffable quality, such as the text being alive, the text singing, etc. These mean that the translation convincingly renders the essential features of the original author’s spirit or genius. When much of this genius is in the cumulative effect of sustained wordplay, similar wordplay must exist in the translation; the translator must select individual words not for their literal meaning alone but also (even mostly) for their combined cumulative effect in English. Krzhizhanovsky’s The Poetics of Titles—which, among other things, sets itself the task of “tracing the corrections and deviations introduced  .  .  . by translators”—poses a formidable challenge. His paronomastic play, like poetry, uses formal elements in conjunction with linguistic and lexical ones to amplify meaning. He deploys the words tema (theme, topic, subject) and subyekt (subject) to evoke three interlocking sets of parallel pairs related to language (nouns and verbs, subjects and predicates), formal logic (subject and predicate, term and

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proposition), and discourse (story and discourse, fabula and syuzhet), generating paronomastic possibilities that do not easily obtain in English. Just a few more of the text’s puzzles include Krzhizhanovsky’s gleeful riffs on the etymologically related golova (head), glavnyi (main), and zaglaviye (title); on znak, which means both sign and written character; and on litso (face, person, figure, image, status, from which litsevye listy, literally “face pages,” i.e., title pages). The Poetics of Titles was the only book to be credited to Krzhizhanovsky during his lifetime. Though a very short book at just thirty-four pages, it was enough to secure him membership in an official Moscow writer’s group with the perks attaining thereto, primarily a valid claim to a Moscow residency permit. The Poetics of Titles was published in 1931 (by a cooperative press whose members took up a collection to print the volume, as Krzhizhanovsky himself lacked the funds, and just in the nick of time, since private publishing houses were liquidated later that year) and is essentially a much-expanded version of the dictionary entry on “Title” Krzhizhanovsky had already published in the 1925 Dictionary of Literary Terms. In his commentary to Krzhizhanovsky’s Collected Works, Perelmuter suggests that The Poetics of Titles might have been written in full as early as 1925 and taken out of the drawer for quick publication in 1931. In any case, Krzhizhanovsky apparently reworked and expanded this material at speed and under stress, so as to secure Moscow residency, and was not always completely accurate. (I have observed variances in endnotes.) Yet Krzhizhanovsky’s occasional mental skips in naming these texts are more like mental leaps, allowing us to trace his

interpretations of not only the texts themselves but their interrelationships with other texts. In other words, these are not so much mistakes as they are windows into Krzhizhanovsky’s intertextual world. Many of the themes and images from his work in the 1920s find their way into the pages of The Poetics of Titles. Given that a title is both an address to a prospective buyer in the real world and a distillation of the book’s fictional constructs, it marks the undecidable boundary between the existent and the fantastic, already a central preoccupation in Krzhizhanovsky’s earliest essays. As in “Countries That Don’t Exist,” quantity becomes quality: Krzhizhanovsky’s rehearsal of an inventory of names of books evolves into a comprehensive theory of a literary phenomenon. The Poetics of Titles turns on language’s contradictory tendencies to detail and abstraction and is the most fully realized of the scholarly inquiries (for example, “The Art of the Epigraph,” not included in this volume) in which Krzhizhanovsky fixates on a part that, something like the pianist’s hand in his 1922 story “The Runaway Fingers,” acquires a life of its own upon being detached from the whole. Beginning as an imaginative meditation on the title’s relationship with the reader, by the end the essay grows into a somber contemplation of how the  demands of the modern age—both financial and psychological—change our relationship to reading writ large. A final note: titles are conventionally italicized in English, but this book also employs italics to indicate words Krzhizhanovsky emphasized. To avoid ambiguity, this translation will bold words in titles that are emphasized.

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THE POETICS OF TITLES I. Method A couple dozen letters pulling thousands of characters’ worth of text behind them is customarily called a title. The words on the cover can’t help but converse with the words tucked under the cover. More than that: to the extent that it’s not isolated from the book’s unified body, to the extent that, in conjunction with the cover, it encloses both text and meaning, the title’s entitled to stand at the head of the book. The title is restricted by its area: from half a sheet to 32°. Note that the characters on the title page contract as age follows age; naturally, this condenses the phraseology. Consider the kernel, unfurling its gradually increasing, elongating leaves as it grows; in this way the title, too, gradually opens out, leaf by leaf, into a book. That’s what a book is: a title that’s completely unfurled, whereas a title, in turn, is a book condensed to the size of a few words. Rather: a title is a book in restricto, while a book is a title in extenso. An astronomical refractor sports a so-called finder telescope on its back: this is a short little tube with weak magnification that helps the user of the big, real tube it rides on start to find stars. First the astronomer finds what he needs in the finder telescope’s field of view, then he transfers his gaze to the telescope’s eyepiece and sees the same thing he saw, only magnified many times. A precise, well-made title is just such a finder telescope for a book. But for this to obtain, perfect parallelism must

be observed: the little tube to the big one, the name to the text. Otherwise, whether seeking stars or sense, it all falls outside your field of vision. Here is how you collimate a title: first, you identify the headline of the book, which is what entrances and enthralls you in it; second, you compare this to the title phrase. The two will be either сonsensical or non-consensical; they will either coincide or they will not. Only when there is coincidence between sign and significance, when the micro-book and the macro-book are aligned, can we claim: the headwork’s done, the title detected. The Topic and Its Margins The title page presents—with rare exceptions—the naked name, while the cover offers it in the presence of other, extralingual elements. Here the book’s name is often threaded through a complex typeface, or incorporated into certain color combinations or frames. Though it recognizes the full import of said paratitular elements, which combine cohesively with the cover’s lexical matter to create a unified effect, the present book is nevertheless obliged to isolate its theme: a word about words, i.e., the texts of texts’ names. To be sure, there’s no reason to narrow the subject unduly, either. For example, in most cases the author’s name can be excised only artificially from the concept of “title.” This is because the more fame an author’s name accrues, the more it turns from a proper name into a common one, a common denominator that aids in naming the book. Once a name feels The Poetics of Titles

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at home among its titles, they grant it the power to entitle, as it were, along with a special predicating meaning. Take Augustine, Rousseau, Leo Tolstoy: in contrast to the authors of a great many books with titles—often quite long ones—also beginning with the word “Confessions,” it’s unnecessary for these writers to add anything to that word except a name. Even the year and place of publication often seem to take root in the title, becoming inseparable from it. Thus, in perusing the title pages of books published by St. Petersburg presses in the second half of the eighteenth century, I couldn’t fail to see that the designations “in Saint-Petersburg” and “in the city of Saint Peter” alternate in a way that’s fairly strictly regulated by alternations in meaning that even then had already begun to separate into two nebulous orientations: Westernizing and Slavophilic (“Slavo-Russian,” as they wrote then). Regardless of the designation “Wydany na wieczność” (“published for all eternity”) on the title page of one Polish religious Calendar, the year’s still there: 1863. Remove that numeral from the title, and it’s left empty. The bottom of the title page of a cheap translated book, The Tales of Wilhelm, a Parisian Cabdriver, sports the jumbled year “100700805”; the lubok’s1 text is equally sprawling and jumbled. In discussing Vladimir Odoyevsky’s Colorful Tales with a Bright Bit of Wit (Saint Petersburg, 1833), it helps to know that the typography printed the title in kaleidoscopic, acutely colorful letters; the naiveté and obviousness of the device are justified by the naive, obvious content of the tales. Even a vignette or a printer’s mark can sometimes grow so attached to the title that you can hardly disentangle signs

from words without damaging it. Thus Nikolay Novikov’s The Drone, released in 1769 with the image of a cherub perched under the words of the title, chased the cherub off the page for its second edition from the very same year, replacing it with a picture of a satyr squashing a donkey. The magazine seems to have left its title unchanged, though its meaning has plainly evolved. But it’s only in exceptional cases that you can trace typefaces and typographical inks when studying the title as such; otherwise you’ll go off topic and end up in the margin. Wearing Out the Meaning The notorious “rivers” flowing with “bookish words” (St. Kirill of Turov, twelfth century) flow faster and more furiously with each day. Printing presses, then rotary presses have replaced the nib’s slow pace along the line, and now our planet flings over 100,000 titles at bookstore displays every year. There are so many texts grating on our eyes that we, average readers in an average European urban center, are neither able nor willing to absorb all those collected letters. The early monks’ “reverence of reading” picks up the pace into “reading” and frequently, due to the high gears into which our lives have shifted, devolves into “reading absentmindedly,” a rapid slide down the diagonals of pages, along lines tangential to style and meaning. A book disappears from the field of reading very quickly; its account is “read and rendered”; it exchanges the store’s display for the repository’s shelf. It takes just five to ten years for the “time machine,” that wringer into which all our book production is The Poetics of Titles

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sucked, to squeeze almost all the characters out of books, flattening them to the size of the title. At first people read a book; later they skim it; eventually they don’t read it, they just read about it. Bibliographies, annotations, catalogs, and literary dictionaries all gradually replace the book with its title. That’s not all: as Henryk Sienkiewicz realized, even a so-called conversation about literature usually boils down to “an exchange of titles.” By and by, the book enters literary history. At first it’s given a page; later, a paragraph; finally, a line or two, which is sometimes a tight fit, even for a title, so then the subtitle’s trimmed away, and here and there even some adverbial clauses. A book should pin its hopes less on the book repository than on the capacity of its title: only a mnemonically composed, solidly wrought title will ensure the book and its meaning any degree of safekeeping. Historians are storytellers, after all. Nothing makes it into either the history of political events or the history of library events unless it is readily told. The themes of books that can be easily retold in few words have an enormous advantage over tomes whose jumbled contents spill out of their synopses. The former remain, in textbooks and in memories. The title, which is the briefest of brief tales about the book, is protected by its very brevity from being dislodged and distorted by the historian’s pen; and as long as it gives the entire book in miniature, condensing it like a drop of liquid air condensing all the oxygen in a large cube of air, then the book will acquire a certain semblance of “immortality.” Long ago we stopped putting in the time to read the Satyricon (first century), In Praise of Folly (sixteenth century), Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained (seventeenth century), Vanity Fair

(nineteenth century), and so on; but these titles, as if detached long ago from their worn-out texts, still continue to wander among us, like some kind of “specters” of their books.2 A string of fragments and 106 titles are all that remain of the scripts and texts of the Attic-Atellan farces,3 but some of them have retained enough of the Atellan spectacle’s essenсe for us to infer their style and content. The old fairy tale with the witch’s picket fence that sports the head of a corpse on each spike is also applicable to the history of books: no matter how hard books try, like fairy-tale adventurers, to get through the fence, only their headings will be speared on the points of the critical pens that prevent literary retrospection from getting through.

II. The Schematics of the Title If you take one sentence from a book’s text, you will always be able to find a noun and verb inside. If you take a book’s text as a whole, it too can always be broken down into subject and predicate; into story and discourse; into what the book talks about and what it says. Because the title simply condenses the story and discourse of its book, it should naturally be cast in the mold of a logical proposition: S is P. Logically proportional titles are always made of two parts, too: subject and predicate. The Poetics of Titles

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Example: Philosophy (S) as Thinking about the World According to the Principle of Minimum Expenditure of Effort (P) (Philosophie als Denken der Welt gemäß dem Prinzip des kleinsten Kraftmaßes, 1876). The book to which Avenarius gave this name is simply a straightforward commentary on its title; though the latter may be somewhat poorly cut (in the literary sense), it is strongly sewn. Examples that are closer to canonical: Life is a Dream (“S is P”; Calderón, seventeenth century), or Life Begins Tomorrow (Guido da Verona). Predicate variation is the primary source of semantic variety in titles, which operate with a relatively limited number of logical subjects. Still, it’s not often that you come across a titular logogram that fits neatly into the schema “S is P”; during our lifetime, but especially these days, it has almost disappeared from bookstore displays. Doubling the Title Seeing as how the title isn’t able to quaff the entire book in one go, it tries to do so in parts; in several swigs, as it were. If the book is not established in the proposition’s first line, then a second one-line proposition emerges, and—just as with the intersection of coordinate axes—the intersection of those two lines on the title page establishes a reference point for the text. In this way a simple title that’s one proposition long accumulates additional titles, separated from the primary one, as well as from each other, by the traditional “or—that is—albo—aut (sive, seu)—ili—ou—oder” and so forth, often on a separate line.

For example: The Bruised Rose, or The Diverting Adventures of the Beautiful Angelique with Two Bold Cavaliers (1790). The coordinate axes have intersected. Or: Napoleon’s Thoughts upon his Entry to Moscow, or A Conversation Between his Conscience and his several Passions. September 5th, 1812 (Saint Petersburg, 1813). The urge to entitle something fully, to grant it maximum specificity, is what brings the Russian translator Mikhail Tsvetikov,4 for example, to double the biblical title of Ecclesiastes, thus: The Holy Satire on Worldly Vanity, or The Ecclesiastes of the sage Prophet, Solomon (Moscow, 1783). At the heart of doubling the title lies the double coloration of our psyche’s contents, which split into (a) logical processes and (b) emotional experiences. In constructing a text (especially one that has even a whit of artistic inclination), idea and image, logic and emotion challenge each other, as it were, over both the book itself and what it’s called: A Pharmacy for the Soul, or A Systematic, Alphabetical Catalog of Books  .  .  . (Kiev, 1849).5 Or: Theologia Naturalis sive Viola animae (Natural Theology, or The Violin of the Soul, by Raymond of Sabunde, published in the sixteenth century). Crossing the image with the concept becomes a sort of template for names designating poetry collections in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. For example: The Lyre, or A Collection of Various Compositions in Verse, and so forth (Saint Petersburg, 1773);6 The Every-Day Life of my Heart, or Poetry, and so forth (1817).7 Generally speaking, by the eighteenth century the logicemotion divide in titles is firmly ensconced on the book’s first page; it is employed as a ready-made, found form, used both The Poetics of Titles

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in earnest and in jest: The Lament of Eduard Young, or Night Thoughts on Life, Death, and so forth;8 A Maiden’s Plaything, which Men may also Use, or A Bouquet of Flowers for the Heart, not the Breasts (Saint Petersburg, 1791). Nonetheless, the emergence of the conjunction “or” inside the title speaks not so much to the division of the theme— or the writer’s device of doubling it—as to the stratification of the reader for whom the title and book are intended. Careful study of the titles of children’s books has shown me that even if it’s camouflaged, even if it’s only present in the meaning, not the words, there’s almost always an “or” inside them, doubling their verbal matter. In this instance, the entitler’s expectations are clear: children’s books are read by children but bought by adults. The title must address both the former and the latter. The more the reader is differentiated by class, faith, and party, the more he is stratified according to his degree of literacy and education, the more the book, too, stratifies its title, attempting to attract as many eyes as possible. Hence titles that are self-explanatory: A Dictionary, or Speechanary (Saint Petersburg, 1780);9 Meteorologia, or, The true way of foreseeing the alteration of the air in several regions (Moscow, 1792).10 The old, abstruse Dioptra unfolds into Dioptra, or The Mirror (1612), but then this “mirror,” after reflecting another, is itself reflected in The Mirror, or The Examining-Glass (Moscow, 1847). Polemical religious literature is where titles first become bilingual; in Russia, for instance, this is at the end of the seventeenth century. This literature strives to win over both sides

and to broaden its sphere of influence beyond the boundaries of educated “readers.” Hence the emergence of: Lithos, or the Rock of Faith . . . ;11 The Antidote, or, A Challenge to a book of Apology, written . . .12

. . . and many more in the same vein. The Demi-Title When studying old books, it’s easy to see the process of doubling and hard to miss an opposite process that is especially characteristic of the present day: the beheading of titles. These days, the compositor’s stick is often shorter than the shortest titular proposition, so either the predicate or the subject is severed. Hence the incomplete propositions, the titular amputees that are either apredicative or asubjective demi-titles. The most common variety of demi-title is the title deprived of its predicate. Occasionally this is motivated, as in the Dialogues of the Dead (a titular tradition from Lucian), which at one time used to appear in great numbers; these brought some recently departed luminary into dialogue with a “long-departed” one, such as, for example, Sumarokov and Lomonosov, or Kutuzov and Suvorov (Saint Petersburg, 1813). The names of the dialogue’s “participants” are always amply predicating (see above), so readers can predict their statements in advance; the only thing left unknown is how two such well-known people will get along.

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The apredicative title is also justified, at least in part, when the actual subject matter of the book’s narrative is new and keenly interesting, regardless of what the author’s own opinion of it might be. Thus, in penning her satirical pamphlet for the French, Popes et popadias (Paris, 1893), Marguerite Poradowska requires no predicate. Yet upon examination of great stacks of titles that make do without any predicate, it’s far from likely that you’ll find even a semblance of a reason that can justify severing the most essential part of the text’s name. Ninety percent of titles that have been deprived of their statements are tongue-tied because the books that bear them have nothing to state. These days, any bookstore shelf can take it upon itself to provide examples; we yield it the floor. The purely asubjective demi-title, in contrast to the apredicative title, is a relative rarity. Only a surge of emotion or steadfast effort of abstraction can sever the statement from its subject matter; otherwise any predicate that has been excluded, i.e., subjected to immateriality, defies logic, thus losing its persuasive power and the ability to make an impression. When Peter Abelard entitles his critique—the first in history—of the biblical texts Sic et Non (“Yes and No”), there is no need for him to add what his yes and no are disputing because for him, as well as for the twelfth-century readers the title addresses, the accentuated biblical texts are everything. The name Søren Kierkegaard was associated by contemporaries with the concept of dialectical morality; placing the name next to the titular predicate Enten-Eller (Aut-Aut: Either/Or) deftly concludes the book’s explanation. While asubjective titles like Vorwärts (or its iteration, Avanti)13 gesture but vaguely toward

the convenience, and the concomitant danger, of a system of broad, insubstantial titling, both the Polish collection of limp, wan verse, Frustra (In Vain, published 1908), and the “predicate” of the once famous Fyodor Glinka, who in 1854 released the book Hooray!, lead to the primitive, on which there is no reason to waste commentary. If amputating the predicate makes a title motionless and static, rendering it, in a sense, legless, then a title deprived of its logical subject is forced to live and be merry in a headless state; this doesn’t hinder its mobility, and it is by no means on its last legs, yet, same as with Vorwärts, feet without heads lead to completely unexpected thresholds. The “Potentate’s” Life Story One old book dated 1725 bears this notation: Writings from Potentates to Potentates.14 The history of the author’s name; its wanderings around the title page; its shifts from typeface to typeface; its accretion and depletion: all this tells the life story—practically an adventure novel—of the “potentate,” who only gradually reveals his potential. Initially, the title page was nameless. The book was thought of as having written itself, as it were; and it’s intriguing that even the fairly late-period philosopher Johann Fichte, who published his first work unsigned, repeatedly returns to the assertion that “the subject should explicate itself, using the writer as nothing more than its organ” (Reden an die deutsche Nation, 1807–8).15 The Poetics of Titles

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Indeed: initially, the author is merely an “organ” inside the organism of the book, and if his name does set foot on the title page, then it’s somewhere at the tail end of the complete title, constrained by small type. Innokenty Annensky’s pseudonym Nik. T-o [nikto means “no one” in Russian.—Trans.] is simply a memory of those times when a writer really was a nobody and didn’t even venture to request his dozen letters in the title. It’s true that a handful of giganticized names (Aristotle, Augustine, St. John) do provide cover for multitudes of the nameless, who hide inside these colossus-names like the Achaeans inside the Trojan Horse solely to link their writings to those ancient philosophical and theological traditions. In the antique Russian book, for example, whether translated or original, individual names are crowded out by general designations of the religion, nationality, class, or sometimes even city of which the author, dissolving like the particular in the general, considers himself a representative: Exhortations to My Soul: The Creation of a Christian Woman Yearning for Her Celestial Homeland (latest edition 1816); A Woman’s Dear Heart, or a most Prudent Admonition to the Female Sex, Adapted to the Rules of Our Current Age; A Russian Composition (Saint Petersburg, 1789). The Ard and the Plough, written by a Nobleman of the Steppe (Moscow, 1806). In the last case, where the author’s class or estate is closely bound up with his theme, that theme can, from time to time, compel the partly revealed name to full revelation. An example: A Writing of the Widowed Priest Georgy Skripitsa, of Rostov town, about Widowed Priests (no year noted).

Little by little, letter by letter, the author’s name seems to elbow its way onto the title page, seizing for itself the line after the title’s final “or.” It huddles in cramped, minuscule types; it often doesn’t dare name itself fully, hiding behind pseudonyms, asterisks, and ellipses; but what’s intriguing is that by the second half of the eighteenth century, we find that within the lines of the titles of Russian books printed in the capital, there’s always a declaration: perhaps not of the name itself, but of the right to a name. Verse, for example, is authorized as belonging to the pen of “A Certain Amateur” (Saint Petersburg, 1773). An anti-Masonic union’s book is half-signed by that unknown individual, “Not Implicated in This. 1780” (rumored to be Catherine the Great). The title of one octavo from 1794 ends with an evasive “. . . that He Wrote, but I Translated.” And with that, the theme of this essay has intersected the theme of the pseudonym. Initially the pseudonym tries to conceal the author, but, succumbing to the shared fate of the name on the title page, it gradually evolves from concealing, dormant forms to forms revealing as much as possible of the future “potentate.” Its defensive coloration gradually yields to aggressive hues. Although at first the “potentate” of the book uses a pseudo-name like a grey cloak, hiding underneath it, subsequently he will don the pseudo-name over his own, like colorful, well-cut clothes that sometimes even emphasize this or that particular feature. After all, his basic feel for titles must remind the entitler that even the letters of his own name can only be admitted to the title page, where every letter counts, once they have passed through into

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meaning; the title page must consist of continuous meaning, of the text condensed into a phrase (see above); as a result it’s the “real” names (the names that don’t express anything of artistic value), not the pseudonyms, that look like pseudo-names on it. The young writers Glikberg and Bugayev obeyed the demands of the title page and turned themselves into Chorny and Bely [“Black” and “White.”—Trans.],16 thus quite appropriately using the space the typography reserved for names to transmit that certain internal illumination or, rather, that certain true name that resonates throughout their creations. Pseudonyms such as Multatuli (multa tuli, “I have suffered much”: E. Dekker), Purr the Tom-cat (Professor Vagner), Baron Brambeus (Senkovsky),17 and so on are naturally part of the composition of the titles of the works they sign. This is especially evident in those cases where the title and its component, the pseudonym, form one unbroken line: Ode to the Queen Bee from her Loyal Subject, a Young Bee (1794), a fawning missive in verse to Catherine the Great; Pseudo-plotki i prawdy spisane przez Pseudonima (PseudoGossip and Facts, collected by Pseudonym, 1871): laying bare the device.

One way or another, the name or pseudo-name that, until the end of the seventeenth century, had typically huddled inside a cramped line in the back alleys of the title gradually starts to expand, capturing ever more territory on the book’s naming page. The literary era of the covertly named was drawing to a close. The name becomes overgrown with titles and

learned epithets, decorated with the names of medals and ranks, and drags behind it, on a towrope, a kind of echo of its own biography: The Russian Werther, a Half-True Tale and an Original Composition of M. S., a Young, Sentimental Man Who, Due to an Unfortunate Accident, Inadvertently Ended His Own Life (Saint Petersburg, 1801). The Essays of Mikhail of Montaigne, a French Nobleman, born in 1533. He Lived under the Reigns of his Kings: Francis I, Henry II, Francis II, Charles IX, Henry III, and the Monarch Henry IV, Renowned in France. He Died the thirteenth Day of September, in the One Thousand, Five Hundred, and Ninety-Second Year of Our Lord, 59 Years, Seven Months, and 11 Days from his Birth. Translated into Russian by Collegiate Counselor Sergey Volchkov. Printed in Saint Petersburg, during the Senate of 1762.

In the last example, the name has already resettled from the basement to the first line, which in the titular practices of the day was permitted only for especially prominent—and furthermore, foreign—guest-names. For a long time authors’ last names, along with their biographies and titles, would have to reside in the bottom half of the title, but by the end of the eighteenth century, at the cost of renouncing their “paranames” and their nimbus of degrees, titles, and laudatory epithets, these names could glide unencumbered up the file of the titular board and firmly secure the top line for themselves. Once there, free of verbal ballast and cut off by a typographical boundary from the subsequent sequence of words, they splay The Poetics of Titles

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wide their alphabetical bodies, decade after decade growing more boldfaced and potbellied. Thus bumping up against the top edge of the title page, the “potentate” of the book gets his way; this is the end of his life story. The Address of the Book Marcus Aurelius called his manuscript “To Himself,” thereby trying to reject the reader. But this title, once checked against the text, turns out to be incorrect: Aurelius’s manuscript, like all manuscripts and books, is meant for an actual reader, however filtered from the masses he may be. Any book as yet untouched by the paper knife resembles an unopened package: on top of the book, too—just like on top of the package—there’s always a more or less legible address. Sometimes, like a package inside a package, it’s hidden in the dedication, which continues the title’s work by naming that first reader to whom the book is addressed. But more often than not, traces of the “address” can be found right there on the title page. The Catherinian grandee Nikolay Struysky published only his own words, only in his own village of Ruzayevka, usually in editions of 25–50 copies, making him possibly unique in managing to publish something “to himself ” and instigate a correspondence “from one corner of the room.”18 Indeed, collections of literary exercises written by (and for) the tsar’s family, edited by the poet Vasily Zhukovsky, were explicitly entitled “For the Few” (Für Wenige, Moscow, 1818). The same words are used to name a book dedicated to the genealogy and heraldry of the Russian nobility (Saint Petersburg,

last edition 1872). Hegumen Juvenaly19 of the Novospassky Monastery (given name: Voyeikov), in his time an acclaimed genealogist, cultivated a whole orchard of family trees; he usually addressed his books even more precisely: A Brief Historical Genealogy of the Honorable and Illustrious Noble Line of the Lophukhins, for the Pleasure of that Renowned Family . . .; or A Brief Historical Genealogy of the Honorable Noble Line of the Korobanovs, in Satisfaction of the Request of Premier Major Pavel Fyodorovich Korobanov; on both official stationery and regular paper.20

A short-lived periodical publication undertaken by Count Vladimir Sollogub in 1843 calls itself A Sheet for Fashionable People. A small religious volume from 1821 is published with the subtitle For Dilettantes in Piety.* The majority of publications of this kind, addressed to a limited number of readers, is released in a limited quantity. But the more that publishing technology and the laws of the market insist on ever larger print runs, the more these limiting inscriptions, aimed at tucking the book away into a series of sealed packets, lose their meaning. The book’s address either degenerates into a certain kind of waggish device of feigning increasing constriction of the reading audience in order to burst it open (i.e., in order to achieve maximum expansion), or it assumes the form of a list of those persons for whose “use,” “good,” or “enjoyment” the book * An intriguing hallmark of the age: Bannefour, Leçons de spiritisme aux enfants (Liege, 1883).

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was written. As the list of addressees grows longer, gradually incorporating not only the country’s entire reading population but anyone who happens to know their ABCs, the need for such enumeration wanes; the book proves to be addressed to everyone, that is, to no one. Examples of this waggish device: A Pocket Book for Lovers of True Philosophy, and for Those Who are Not Numbered Among Them (Saint Petersburg, 1816). The Most Effortless and Effective Method for Young Ladies of All Ages to Acquire the Husband of their Choice, at Any Time (s.a.).

Example of the listing device: An Axiom for Every Rank, Condition, Sex, and Age: A Necessary and Vastly Beneficial Composition (Saint Petersburg, 1804).

An elaboration of that same device: A Compact Dictionary of Natural History, Containing the History, Description, and Principal Properties of Animals, Plants, and Minerals; with a Preceding Philosophical Discourse on the Method for Training One’s Mind on the Study of Natural History; a Useful Volume for Naturalists, Physicians, Apothecaries, Merchants, Artists, and Any Person Inhabiting the Countryside; Translated from the French Author Charles-Antoine-Joseph Leclerc de Montlinot, with Supplements from the Best Authors and from Things That Are Useful for Russia, by Vasily Levshin (Moscow, 1788).

Thus degenerates and, to some degree, perishes this titular component as well: elephantiasis leads to amputation. No longer would a title page note that its book “is nourishing for a sentimental heart” (1796), or that it is directed to the attention of “good-hearted Muscovites” (Moscow, 1842). The book that started out demure, giving its texts only to its own chosen reader and leading its lines only in one specific direction, begins to flaunt its title to all and sundry. As early as 1769–70, the weeklies Odds and Ends and This and That21 were anticipating the situation, shilling right on their title pages: I Serve with my Lines, I Humbly Bow with my Paper, and, to be Brief, do be so Kind as to Buy them Both; Once they’re Bought, Make of them a Gift for Whoever Isn’t Worth More.

The heyday of secluded conversation with a chosen reader (for example, Zeitung für Einsiedler—The Newspaper for Hermits—published by a group of German Romantics in 1808) had ended, or at any rate was nearing its end, even in the West, where the book invited all who could pay under its cover, without scrutiny of mentality or class. Odds and ends are amenable to even the oddest reader, while Mr. Thisandthat, dreamed up in the trenchant imagination of one of that fading century’s comedic authors,22 quickly became concrete reality, emigrated to Europe, and emerged there as the arbiter of the nineteenthcentury book market, the “cultural consumer” who bought culture with a vengeance: stacks of titles at bargain prices. The face pages of books began to look like Mr. Thisandthat, who was brought to life only to become just another face in the crowd. The Poetics of Titles

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III. The Art of Entitling The titular word must stand in the same relation to the words of the text as the words of the text do to that particular layer of words from our worldly life that the book mines. The title treats the book the way the book treats its verbal material: colloquial speech is diffuse, composite, branching, and vast, while bookish speech has pruned branches, it is framed, it has been stripped and condensed. The style of the titular phrase, in turn, is crystalline; it has no branches; it is maximally compressed. Bookish speech—which laconizes the phraseology of existence, offering its essence—achieves this through logical and artistic culling. As a result, titular technique is obliged to deal not with raw verbal stock but with material that has been artistically processed. What’s already passed through the text’s coarser mesh must be sieved again through the finer title page. It’s obvious: this kind of art directed at art, this comprehensive reartification of art, requires sophisticated mastery and immense refinement. Among writers, however, it’s the norm to have a perfunctory, almost condescending attitude about working on a title: you hastily plop a titular phrase on top of the book, any old how, like a hat on your head, forgetting that as a matter of fact this isn’t a hat, it’s not something extraneous you tack on, it’s the head of the whole book. The field of comparative anatomy has advanced the hypothesis that an animal’s anterior spinal vertebrae, gradually evolving, turn into the so-called head (skull). Comparative study of the book shows that in the course of its evolution and division

over generations, its anterior (beginning) line (or lines) would also, very gradually, develop into a so-called title: Oktoechos, or an eight-toned hymnbook under that title, an eight-toned hymnbook written with God’s help . . . (1494). At this point the title’s pulled into the text. But the process of differentiation is separating the head vertebra from the spinal column: A Book, Called the Worldly Prayer Book (Moscow, 1647); A Book, Named Manna of the Spirit, or of the Soul (no date).

Even now, first lines (rather, first words) continue to defend their ancient claim to titularity in, for example, papal encyclicals like In praeclara summorum . . ., issued in 1921 for the sixth centenary of Dante’s death (and in lyric poetry). But further differentiation continued headlong, which led to a beheading: the headline was wholly removed onto a special page, where it was accorded its own special spacing, script, and punctuation. The title page, remaining bound in the body of the book, gradually develops what we might call its own sympathetic nervous system and its own semiotic circulatory system. In consequence, a great many pens that feel just dandy on the book’s title page lose their sting and their sharp point once they step off it into the text, while on the other hand, the paper quadrate of the title page has often seemed “jinxed” to the great textual masters. If one were to undertake a “history of Russian titles,” in parallel with the “histories of Russian literature,” then our whole literary deck of cards would have to be redealt: Leo Tolstoy and Ivan Turgenev would rank merely run of the mill, while Pyotr Boborykin23 (Sororal Bliss, The Well-to-Do Virtues, The Poetics of Titles

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and so forth) and Dmitry Grigorovich24 (Gutta-Percha Boy, Acrobats of Philanthropy) would be the masters. Francis Bacon (seventeenth century) gave his texts distinctly confusing and stereotypical titles but found in the person of his secretary, the fairly obscure William Rawley, a man who beautifully supplemented his own labors: when Rawley posthumously published his teacher’s work—that whole confused, complex spider’s web where meditations are interwoven with experiments, and facts with quotations—he gave it a synthesizing title: Silva Silvarum (A Forest of Forests). On a par with Rawley’s logical technique is the emotional genius (if one may put it that way) of Stefan Yavorsky:25 when taking leave of his life in his final text (dated 1721, a few months before his end), he called it A Sad Kiss Goodbye to Books. It took Victor Hugo until the final chapter of his life to fully master the titular line. An example of this is his Quatre Vents de l’Esprit (1881), built on the dual phono-semantic association of Quatre Vents with quatre-vingt (the poet was about to turn 80) and with Quatre-vingt-treize (1874).26 The issue of how, precisely, to categorize a title, how to evaluate its artistic merit, is quite a thorny one. Even when the proportions are observed, when both subject and predicate are present, the name of a book might be unexpressive, whereas at times a demi-title, which is, logically speaking, incomplete, can provide a sense of finality and interior plenitude. In any case, we shouldn’t be in too much of a hurry with our critical judgments. For example, there is an opinion, solidly entrenched among our critics, that Turgenev’s original title Senilia, changed by the editor to Poems in Prose (a phrase

that was, as the foreword of the 1883 edition divulges, “let fall” in the letter accompanying the manuscript), is the weaker and less expressive of the two. But disputing this opinion is easy: the former title pertains to essence, the latter to form. Both Diogenes, who tossed a plucked chicken at Plato’s feet with the words “Here is your man,”† and Pontius Pilate, who said to the crowd, “Here is your man,” were correct (each in his own way, of course): the former was summarizing the outer form, the latter, the inner essence. The so-called polemical title requires exceptional virtuosity in turning a phrase and in turning an adversary’s words against him. A battle of two titles usually rages inside the line that names a polemical work; in this case, the rule of the minimum number of signs requires that these titles’ meanings be renewed as much as possible without the addition of new lexemes. Hence the masterly verbal application of The Poverty of Philosophy (Karl Marx) to The Philosophy of Poverty (PierreJoseph Proudhon), wherein one title overturns another,27 then drags it behind itself along the line like a victor dragging his vanquished enemy (Misère de la philosophie. Réponse a la Philosophie de la Misère de Proudon, 1847). Quicker, more staccato blows of words on words: What Did They Do in Chernyshevsky’s “What Is To Be Done?,” by Pyotr Tsitovich (1879), A. Polorotov’s Zephyrots and Idiots (Saint Petersburg, 1861): here the title’s letters are all aimed at the adversary.28 † Plato had defined man as “a featherless biped.”

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Writers and Their Title Pages Assuming that a writer does not change his literary image once it’s crystallized, the title pages of his books may be gathered into a single signature comprising a single meaning. The line of the title, threaded through book after book like floss drawn by its needle, accomplishes more and more stitches as it frays and is spun back together again. To each nib its own slit, its own particular system for gripping the text in its title. If we take the primitive scribblings of Victor-Joseph Etienne de Jouy, popular at the beginning of the nineteenth century, we get the following series: The Hermit of London, or Observations on the English Manners and Customs at the beginning of the Nineteenth Century (translation, 1822–25). The Hermit of Antin, or Sketches of Parisian Manners and Customs at the beginning of the Nineteenth Century (1825). Guillaume the Open-Hearted, or Sketches of Manners and Customs at the beginning of the Nineteenth Century (1827). The Hermit of Guiana, or Sketches of Parisian Manners and Customs at the beginning of the Nineteenth Century (1828).29

Both author and translator have obviously established their own trade formula, one that barely lifts a letter as it passes from book to book, remaining universally equivalent to itself. The same strategy is used by the author of a whole string of pamphlets. He concealed his own name, but did name his works: The Philosopher of the Alaun Heights, or Thoughts on the

Demise of Catherine the Second (1796); and The Philosopher of the Alaun Heights, or Thoughts on the Demise of Pavel the First and on the Accession of Alexander the First to the Throne (1801). Both the “hermit” specializing in Parisian mores and the “philosopher” working the death beat quickly and easily hit upon their own treatments of the title page. One Jean Larocque, who stumbled upon the fortuitous and lucrative title Les voluptueuses (Ladies of Pleasure), simply went from cover to cover over the next two decades, adding explanatory names: Daphné, Fausta, Fusette, Hémine, Louvette, Phoebe, and so on (1890). Each was enough for a print run. Once you have left literature’s outskirts, though, and returned to literature proper, even there the comparative analysis of columns of titles signed by the same name produces results that may not be quite as striking, of course, but are still analogous. George Sand’s cycle of novels unfurls into a long series of names, primarily female ones (Indiana— Valentina—Lélia—André—Consuelo, and so forth): these are individual designations for individual lives, novels about disconnected “I’s.” Jack London’s covers list The Son of the Wolf (1900), The God of his Fathers (1901), A Daughter of the Snows (1902), Children of the Frost (1902), and so on. The theme is obvious from the start: kinship. The Sentimental Soul’s Consolation, or the Collected Works of Arnaud, Containing Stories (Moscow, 1789):30 this rare title stands out as an attempt to entitle not the text but the sum total of texts. And no matter how naive that attempt may be, it stems from having a real head for titles and treating titles the way they treat the book. One author? One title, then. If the history of a The Poetics of Titles

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writer usually deals not with a succession of themes but with the evolution of one single theme that manifests in various ways, then so, too, does the chronological recitation of titles belonging to the same pen tend to demonstrate what is essentially one single title, displayed at different ages throughout its life. So different titular lines stemming from the same pen, stacked one on top of the other like rungs on a ladder, will lead the eye up to the crowning titular formula, where all the style and all the thinking of a given writer are imprinted in its characters. And so, if we compare Ivan Goncharov’s three main titles (I’m purposely choosing a less striking example), we see:

Ob-

yknovennaya istoriya (A Common Story, 1846) lomov (Oblomov, 1859 [oblomat’ means to “fail/break off.”—Trans.]) ryv (The Precipice, 1869)

The fourth title, presupposed by the three preceding it, must be sought in the idea of precipitously breaking off what is common, producing something that is uncommon, to wit: Goncharov’s posthumous “An Uncommon Story.”31 In his July 31, 1868, letter to Mikhail Stasyulevich, Goncharov writes that after an unsuccessful half-attempt to dispense with his humdrum days with the help of a handgun, he got hold of a book in a drugstore (“I never buy books, but suddenly . . .”) whose “title” extraordinarily bestirred his interest: Closet-Paper.‡ ‡ From the same letter: “But only after I’d bought it did I note the incongruity: there’s the pistol, i.e. the end of it all, while here’s a thousand sheets, i.e. around three years of life I’ve guaranteed myself!”

There’s an enormous stack of colorful material relating to the psychology of entitling, but it’s scattered by and large throughout the notebooks and letters of the literati. I am not going to open up my file, which has collected quite a fair number of notes; it’s easy to pour them out onto the page but extraordinarily difficult to prepare them and bring them into accord. The present cursory review makes do with broadly tracing out the theme and methodology of study. The broadest classification of this kind of material distributes it, so to speak, among three baskets: Ante-Scriptum, In-Scriptum, and Post-Scriptum. The Ante-Scriptum title, which psychologically (and chronologically) anticipates the text, pulls the entire book behind it. The title line demands a book; it looms in the writer’s consciousness like some kind of imperative, gradually, in the process of writing, tacking on chapter after chapter, finding them on various tracks like a locomotive collecting its rolling stock. The power of the pull hidden in the antescriptual title is usually transmitted to the reader’s consciousness: thus Sartor Resartus (“The Tailor Re-Tailored,” 1833) is a “pulling” title, thanks to which the text is easily distributed from issue to issue (Fraser’s Magazine). But even now, after almost a century, this title hasn’t lost its power to pull you into the book. Samuel Johnson’s “Debates in Magna Lilliputia” (1739)32 is halfway to a feuilleton at best, fragment upon fragment gathered together by a title; at the moment it suffers itself to be read only by virtue of its title’s will. It’s intriguing that the titles that never did unfurl into books, like Dostoevsky’s “Confessions of a Great Sinner” or Gogol’s “A Farewell Tale,” continue to The Poetics of Titles

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clamor for their texts, in a way, even after their authors’ deaths; sometimes these never-materialized books have had an entire critical literature materialize around them. At least, such was the fate of the philosopher Schelling’s last titles;33 these were well known to his friends, but after the death of the philosopher, the texts to which they were attached were never found. In our literature, the purest specimen of the “antescriptual” kind of entitler is Boborykin. All his books, as he himself declares, are drawn from his notebooks: two or three apt words jotted in a notebook turn into a title, the title’s squared off, and there’s the book. Sometimes the process of accumulation, the collecting of titular elements, occurs with extraordinary delay and difficulty. As a young man, Charles De Coster founded the literary Société des Joyeux; then he worked for a satirical broadsheet called Uylenspiegel; after that he was the author of Les Légendes flamandes; and finally he proceeded to his life’s crowning achievement: La Légende de Tiel Ulenspiegel et de Lamme Goedzak et de leurs aventures audacieuses, Joyeuses, glorieuses, en Flandre et alleurs.34 The greatest amount of documentation shows titles that took their final form while work on the text was in progress. Once this kind of inscriptorial word combination—the kind that’s engendered inside the text—has emerged, it in turn begins to regenerate the textual textile: the pre-titular growth of the manuscript virtually always stands in stark contrast to the growth of a manuscript that has already found its title. The meandering line of text winds around the title’s straight line like ivy around a staff. While antescriptual titles apply strong

traction, titles in the postscriptual category appear to be a kind of textual engine: they are hidden, as it were, behind the pages of the text as they move through the reader’s consciousness, and only with their last words do they become comprehensible and necessary, obtaining the logical clarity that had previously been apprehended either incompletely or not at all. Only after finishing the text entitled Fathers and Children do we grasp the underlying contrastive sense of the conjunction “and”: fathers, not children. Procreators are always foreign to their procreations. The name of Nikolay Leskov’s posthumous story “Hare Park” (published in 1917)35 is only decoded in the last paragraphs of the story. It’s interesting that in the course of his work on the story, this name came much later than the last lines of the manuscript: on the cover of the manuscript—a completely recopied, clean draft—it sits atop the old one (“A Game with a Blockhead”), which has been crossed out, evidently at the last minute, right before the manuscript was sent. The Titlo Once (in 1823) the editor of the Literary Broadsheet, Faddey Bulgarin, received the poem “A Little Bird” in the mail. The signature? A. Pushkin. The editor crossed out the bird and retitled it: “On a Little Bird’s Release.” Then he added a footnote explaining that in the guise of the bird, one was meant to see a man locked in debtor’s prison being freed by a benefactor who agrees to stand as guarantor. Undoubtedly, no small number of titles have fallen, and continue to fall, prey to the same fate: The Poetics of Titles

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once they land on the desk of some perfunctory pen-slinger for correction, they’re quickly trimmed to fit to an extant titular template. The ancient sign of the titlo ( ࣯)36 catches a word on its hook of ink, looping a word into a syllable, a syllable into a letter; this special, fully automated instrument is used by professional title-fitters, who attach words to covers according to reader demand and taste. By no means should the skilled labor of manufacturing title lines be the object of universal censure (as far is form is concerned, of course). Not at all. Knowing the skills of the trade; deft, quick handling of the letters; keeping strict tabs on characters; putting elegant finishing touches on the title; knowing how to present the book in the best possible light: all these are essential for the book’s name to have consummate madeness.37 In this sense, the window displays of Parisian bookstores easily defeat the book exhibits of Tverskaya or Nikitskaya Street. Take the titular dialogue of a schoolchild’s lesson book (Sais-tu? Oui—retiens. Non—apprends) and the manufactured titles of literary quasi-pornography (Monsieur Vénus [Paris, 1889], La garçonne [Paris, 1924]), even the cheap little yellow series that mechanically attach first “en chemise,” then “sans chemise” to a woman’s name (the publishers of the latter don’t lose their shirts; quite the opposite): none of these is without a certain chic; they all shuffle their deck of words with great skill. Only long experience and a keen grasp of the cover’s peculiar lexicon could teach these verbal manufacturers the fixed template-titles that have taken over the book market in the West. In any given epoch, analyzing this kind of title leads less to knowledge of its writer than to knowledge of its reader.

So by tracing the corrections and deviations introduced into the original title by translators—themselves often quasi-writers at best, whose very choice of books to translate usually reveals the tastes and sympathies of the milieu and class consuming the book—we easily see what readers of any given era and class thought should be headmost in their titles. Les Précieuses ridicules transformed into The Dear Laughed-At Ladies;38 the ascetic Ars moriendi popping up as The Art of a Successful Death;39 Œuvres divers par A. Voltaire turning into Oddments from the Works of Mr. Voltaire;40 De Virorum excellentium vita (C. Nepos) introducing itself as The Lives of Glorious Generals:41 thanks to zealous translators, all of this gives us not only the Russian reader of the beginning and middle of the eighteenth century but also his actual process of reading. After all, reading is translating: from another’s style and lexicon into your own. Rigorous application of the difference method, which compares elements of original titles to elements introduced due to otherness in thought and language, could yield results of great significance. The craft of the title is especially important when constructing a name meant for a periodical: only by trial and error was it established that paradoxical titles, or shocking ones based on wordplay or double entendres, don’t bear repetition very well and quickly get old by the third or fourth issue. Only a simple, unpretentious, yet sturdily made phrase can bear repetition. It’s most advantageous when the title’s cut large, so to speak, so there’s room to grow into it, that is, when it’s a little broader than the text of the first few issues; this leaves open the possibility of expanding the newspaper’s or magazine’s focus without disturbing the title (that last is dangerous, since it weakens The Poetics of Titles

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the inertia of habit that titular repetition develops in regular subscribers). Russian journals of the second half of the eighteenth century had not yet managed to cultivate these useful skills; therefore the satirical journals that were published from 1769 to 1774, for example, changed their titles every year, which—in conjunction with other causes—undoubtedly caused a reduction in their lifespan. Contemporary newspapers and monthlies have learned to use a dozen letters to make a name for themselves. In our day we can no longer have publications like the monthly from 1792 that entitled itself: An Action against Inaction, or, a Pleasant Diversion, that Brings a Smile to the Sullen Brow, Moderates the Feather-Pate’s Excessive Merriment, and Pleases Each according to his Taste, with Philosophical, Critical, Pastoral, and Allegorical Tales, Composed in Verse and in Prose. Title Snatchers Although the Roman Catholic priest Jean Pey acknowledges it in good faith on the title page of his book The Sage in Seclusion, Comparable in Part to the Composition of Young, which has the Same Title (as per the 1789 translation),42 the majority of authors before, but especially after, him have rarely troubled themselves with such caveats. Admittedly, in cases where everyone knows the originary title, it’s unnecessary for the title-epigones to even mention it. A duly established literary tradition allows titles to branch off from author to author, resulting in a series: La Commedia (Dante)—The Divine Comedy (various Dantesques)—

The Un-Divine Comedy (Zygmunt Krasiński)—The Human Comedy (Honoré de Balzac)—The Tragedy of Man (Imre Madách), and so on. In keeping with tradition, parody, as one of the types of polemical device (see above), also has the right to repeat and even deform the titles it sets its sights on: Smoke. A Novel in Caricature, by A. Volkov and Co., Captured Alive from I. S. Turgenev’s Satirical Literary Novel (SPB, 1869);43 Monday. Written by Count Thin, parodies Leo Tolstoy’s Resurrection two or three years after the latter’s publication [Tolstoy’s title, Voskresenie, means both “resurrection” and “Sunday.”—Trans.];44 The Life and Works of Mr. Know-It-All, Including the Commemorable Incidents Thereof, or: Woe without Wit. A didactic and satirical novel by A. P. (Moscow, 1834).

The connection of the latter title to Alexander Griboyedov’s 1824 comedy is indisputable.45 But there can be more complicated cases, which are hard to ascribe to authorized literary devices and traditions: Her Kreutzer Sonata, which came out in Germany on the heels of The Kreutzer Sonata, doesn’t just ransack the title, it hijacks it. The text of a little tome lacking even the slightest polemical tendency has latched onto someone else’s title, just to commandeer its market value—no other reason. If we compare two title pages: The Mason Without a Mask, or the True Secrets of Freemasonry; Published Accurately, without Prejudice, and including many Details The Poetics of Titles

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(translation by Ivan V. Sots; Saint Petersburg, 1784), and The Pug Without a Collar and without a Chain, or the Unfettered Disclosure of a Society, called the Pugs (Saint Petersburg, 1781),

then it’s plain to see that somebody borrowed something from somebody.46 The dates are in favor of the second title, while the meanings favor the first. Finding similarities is easy; proving them is hard. Be that as it may, we shall consider it established fact that once any given book has secured both reading market and readers’ affinities, its title page, in a way, tears itself from the book’s body and begins to circulate, passing from hand to hand as a kind of titular note ensuring a certain face value for any text that’s attached to it. The number of titles that leech onto other titles is innumerable: The Russian Scheherazade (Moscow, 1836); The Russian Decameron of 1831 (the year of the cholera epidemic); The Russian Hermit, or the Observer of our Domestic Mores (Saint Petersburg, 1817; one of our more worn-down cliches—see the section “Writers and Their Title Pages”); The Russian Werther; A Lady Prisoner of the Caucasus (1857); a good dozen titular variants of Poor Liza (1796), such as Captain Rayevsky’s Unfortunate Liza (1811)  .  .  . with this I’ll break off my list. All these parasite titles, made in good faith or bad, whether they steal or just take, are created with the assumption that the original title has already plowed a  path to the eye—and the pocket—of a book’s consumer. We need hardly mention, then, those flagrant cover-hijackers who tack whatever’s handy onto a bestselling title, tracking any whiff of typographical ink and pursuing it in writing, sometimes

overtaking the author himself. From Avellaneda, who gave us a sequel of Don Quixote even before its own author did, to the hack “Count Amori,” that notorious speed-scribbler of the pre-Revolutionary period who dumped a whole series of “continuations” on the market, counting on the continuing efficacy of other people’s titles, we could amass many big names—and even more small ones—of performers of the pen; parasites and saprophytes of the title page; those who understand what titles are really worth and know how to speculate in them.

IV The Analogion and the Storefront Long before the book took its repose on the slanted stand in the storefront, it nestled on the analogion’s47 slope. The greatest appreciation for “doctrinal” writings is their very name: the Bible, i.e., the book. The meticulously ruled laws, slowly lettered in early hands, squeeze words tight as the most precious of all precious things.48 Often, as a measure of theft prevention, the book is anchored by a special chain screwed into the analogion. Nor do the titles of books seek out eyes: they’re cached inside parchment and leather, behind the latches of locks and clasps. Only gradually, as the book turns from a rarity into a cheap paper good littering every table and shelf, does its title come creeping out: first onto the curve of the spine, then over to the book’s front board. If you compare the name of an incunabulum—which customarily overloads its title page from top to toe with a staggered stack of small types—with the large, widely spaced, The Poetics of Titles

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black-on-yellow titles of the European market’s latest offerings, you’ll see a distinct discrepancy: the incunabulum speaks slowly, thoroughly, and with careful pauses, not hiding the truth, rather laying out, link after link, the whole essence of the texts resting beneath their titles, whereas the truncated vient de paraître49 flings out a handful of letters, brandishes an idea, and abruptly breaks off in the middle of a word, referring readers for further information to the cash register and then the text. The suspicious due diligence of an old title is ubiquitously evident, recurring in subtitles, then in subtitles to subtitles, striving to explain the “explanation” itself. Thus the titular attestation that the literary material has been verified and is factually legitimate, the exception these days rather than the rule, is always present on old title pages. Here is a brief progression of such notes, the kind that used to appear in what gradually became the traditional titular template (I’m taking examples from a relatively late era): “a work lacking verisimilitude” (1785); “a half-true tale” (1801); “a fable with additions” (Saint Petersburg, 1830); “a true tale” (Moscow, 1794).

The antique title lived in fear of misunderstanding and bewilderment, clambering all over the title page in pedantic efforts to interpret itself to the reader and make him wiser; the closer it got to the page’s lower edge, the more it was forced to trim its successive typefaces, to the point that in books from those days, the title’s last gasps were often in smaller type than the text itself.

Open Oxford bishop Joseph Hall’s Sudden Thoughts, Unexpectedly Prompted upon Seeing some Thing (Russian translation, 1786);50 if we don’t get caught on that general designation, but flip through the chapter titles inside, we will see “Meditation on the sight of a fly” “Meditation on the sight of a great library” “Meditation on the sight of a dirty cleaner of sewers.”

Bishop Hall’s pen is equally intrigued and enraptured at touching upon the names of all things, no matter what they are like, great or small, consequential or trifling; in him dwells the joy of the entitler of all things; he is suffused with the pathos of the title page. The spacious, branching titles of old are gradually dying out. The ponderous heaps of words on both sides of the stereotypical “either-or” have been winnowed down by time. In Kierkegaard’s relatively novel title (see earlier), the only thing to remain from the old form is the dividing words themselves, now bereft of their verbal milieu: Either/Or. In 1668, you could still refer to a masked autobiography as The eccentric Simplicissimus, or the Description of the life of an eccentric named Melchior Sternfels von Fuchshaim; where and how he came into this world, what he saw, learned, experienced, and why he voluntarily quit this world again. Exceedingly diverting and in many respects useful to read.51 In 1921, you have to make it shorter: Notes of an Eccentric; I, an Epic.52 The famous shoemaker from Görlitz was able to cobble together his title thus: Aurora, or Morning-Redness in the Rising of the Sun, that is, The Root or Mother of Philosophy, Astrology, The Poetics of Titles

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& Theology on the true ground, or a Description of nature: how all was, and came to be in the beginning; how nature and the elements are become creaturely, and also about the two qualities evil and good; from whence all things had their beginning and how all stands and works at present, and how all will be at the end of this time, and also about what is the condition of the Kingdom of God, and of Hell, and how men act creaturely in each of them: all this set down from a true Ground and Knowledge of the Spirit, and in the impulse of God, dutifully written by Jakob Böhme in the summer of Our Lord 1612 in Görlitz, being of the age of 37, on Tuesday after Whitsunday.53 But our contemporary, the popular experimental biologist Voronoff, announces the sensational research conducted in his Parisian laboratory with Vivre (Paris, 1920). That’s it.54 Before, we had cozy buildings built of words: The Midwife, or a Reliable Instruction, through Questions and Answers, on How to afford Assistance to a Woman, Blessed by Fruit of the Womb, in giving Birth, and to protect her judiciously from terrible Paroxysms; but in the Case that such Judiciousness was neglected, by what Art she may be saved from Calamity and Threat of Death (Moscow, 1764).55 Now we have syllables, curtly rapped out: Stockham’s Tokology (with a foreword by Leo Tolstoy).56 The title of our own day and age seems to have been delivered according to tokological precepts: curt, clear, and businesslike. From A Tale Without a Title to a Title Without a Tale A sixteenth-century manuscript attributed to the cenobite Zinovy Otensky is known by the name of An Epistle of Many

Words. Modern manuscripts reach the reader’s eyes only on condition that they’re of few words. While the cumbersome folio once had ample space on the analogion’s incline, today’s manufactured biblio-goods are crowded even on the storefront’s ample shelving. After putting on an open display of titles to meet the gaze of passersby, books must then succeed in entering their pupils, leaping with every character in their titles straight into the consciousness of people walking past. One of the more masterful titles of recent times is Evgeny Lundberg’s From the Eternal to the Transitory (1923). We can’t count on all of eternity: we don’t take the lengths of time given us for our lives and wind them up, like yarn into balls; rather, we pull them straight, as taut as bowstrings. The second hand shoves us past, then onward. We haven’t the time to read all books. Not even their titles will manage to linger in our consciousness if they’re too long and convoluted. We insist on an hour squeezed down to a second; on a short phrase, not a periodic one; on a word instead of a phrase; on a letter instead of a word. In texts we shove periods half a line to the left,57 while in titles we’ve done away with them altogether. After a fleeting glimpse of fanned covers in the storefront, our brains retain just three or four words that stimulate thought— then we’re off. George Berkeley was the first to come up with the idea of building a worldview out of the fusion of theses and formulas instead of the heavy bricks of books. After Berkeley’s difficult, metaphysical phantasmagoria retracted its radii, the entire thing fit easily into a sheaf of paper weighing just five or six lots.58 “I do not love words,” wrote the metaphysician in the The Poetics of Titles

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foreword to the second edition of his conspectus of a book, “and I try to make as little use of them as I can.”59 Any writer, inasmuch as he is a writer, is a lexical laconizer: the words dipped in his ink should contract and grow denser, as though from collodion. The book removes the seeds from their hulls, the essential from the inessential, and casts the leavings over its fore edge. Given that all life in our era is laconic and lapidary; pursues schematization and simplification; and replaces the treatise with a slogan, the folio with a leaflet, and the prolixity of exhortatory “perorations” (seventeenth to eighteenth centuries) with a single command, then life and art naturally coincide in their shared fundamental device: the purge. Today, the art of entitling is at a breaking point. Too much must be—to use the language of typography—sent to the hellbox.60 The book’s “finder telescope” waits to be refitted. We’re the subjects of a different story now, since these days an old subject’s no subject at all.61 It goes without saying that in the next few decades, the title page will be the bridgehead for new, and old, methods of entitling. We should be grateful to one relatively old title, which is attempting to predict the battle’s outcome: An Amusing Review of Grammar, or the War of the Parts of Speech for the Supremacy of the Verb vis-a-vis the Noun (Moscow, 1816). If this prediction is to be believed, then we face the dictatorship of the verb over the noun; of the predicate over the subject (it will be “subject to”); of the dynamic over the static; of tomorrow over yesterday. And to some, this will prove far from “amusing.” A century ago, the static mode of entitling obliged Cabet to

expend around a hundred words on his utopia’s title, but by 1893, Chirac could use just one for his: Si . . . 62 The book, like everything around it, seeks to go out onto— and past—its cover, into its own outside. Once they’ve pronounced themselves slogans and aphorisms, titles can’t always manage to win the race of time and turn into books. Their pronouncements produce no progeny. Even our own texts, laconized into short, disconnected lines, are starting to resemble repositories for titles that didn’t earn a place on the cover. Ever less often does a paper knife make the cut with a potential buyer. We are beginning to understand that not only inside that little world made of paper and typographical ink, but also outside its borders, i.e., everywhere words stir, the title’s at the head of it all. The art of managing designations; prudence with words; registering each letter; all this is the new art of a new age. Whereas before, the pen signing a book could occasionally be pacified with the formula of a rejection of formula (the origin of all those Without a Title, A Tale Without a Title—a very widespread name for books—and so on and so forth), now the  writer, faced with his own either-or, will sooner choose a title without a tale than a “tale without a title.” The high speeds of our now have taught the pen to not only sweep down the line, but to stand squarely—on its line—and haul off some heavy blows. Reticence of style, the ability to dispose of a theme in two or three words, has become the style of the age. This is something one must understand. And accept. A quarter of a millennium ago the young Leibniz, as he was playing with the books in his father’s library, devised a revolution in language; he subsequently applied the scientific The Poetics of Titles

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method to it and called it the Globus intellectualis.63 He wanted to compress the bodies and meanings of words down to the capacity and precision of algebraic characters. Ever closer, now, comes the moment when the orbits of the earthly globe and the globus intellectualis will inescapably collide. This book’s task: to view the theme, both directly and askant,64 then turn it over to scholars who have more right than I to cultivate it. Therefore, I’ll reserve almost all my predicates and restrict myself to the title The Poetics of Titles. March–April 1925 Translated and introduced by Anne O. Fisher

COUNTRIES THAT DON’T EXIST

07

Composed in 1937, during the height of the great Stalinist purges, “Countries That Don’t Exist” was not published until 1994. Although the precise circumstances of its composition are unknown, it is clear that it was intended to introduce untutored Russian readers to a rich literary and folkloric tradition of fantastic creatures, worlds, and journeys, from Aristophanes’s play The Birds, to G. B. Shaw’s Back to Methuselah, and beyond. To write about unbridled fantasies, distant utopias, and imaginary journeys to new worlds at the height of the purges, and shortly after Socialist Realism had been proclaimed the only approved artistic method, was, to state the obvious, a remarkably untimely and deeply quixotic decision. To make things worse, the combination of endless curiosity, childish enthusiasm, and literary and philological erudition in Krzhizhanovsky’s writing make it seem as if the author himself comes from another such “country that didn’t exist.” The most rewarding way to read “Countries That Don’t Exist” is as an imaginary autobiography, an expression of the

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author’s desire to follow Munchausen and the other dreamers and leave the real world behind for the realms of fantasy and imagination.

COUN TRIES THAT DON’T E X IST 1 Among the so-called philosophical tropes of Sextus Empiricus (ca. 200–250 ce) is one that asks: if a slinger stands at the edge of the world and lets loose a stone, where will it go, forward or backward? The theme of this essay is the theme of a stone cast by this imaginary slinger, a stone that flies forward. It has taken humanity a long time to push back the walls of the world in which we live. Ancient drawings of the world show it either as a cube that looks like a gambler’s die or as a cylinder floating in the ether. But let us cross out all either/ors: they will only distract us from our goal. As little children think that the world ends just beyond the nearest ravine or river, or at the edge of the forest where their parents forbid them to walk for fear that they might get lost, so do people, not only in the long distant past but also in recent times, imagine that the ends of the earth are surprisingly close to where they live or roam. As late as the end of the eighteenth century, the Tatars were shocked to learn that beyond the bounds of the Western World where they had sent their

emissaries, there existed a west more westerly still! At first the inhabitants of the Mediterranean placed the world’s boundary at the pillars of Hercules, later at a small group of islands located to the northeast of the northernmost part of Great Britain, which they called Ultima Thule, that is, “the edge of the edge.” As a matter of fact, our ancestors, and not particularly distant ones, lived in countries that certainly existed, surrounded by countries that probably existed, beyond which—you never know!—possibly existed still more countries. By sending Columbus in search of a new continent, Ferdinand and Isabella were making what was, from their point of view, a rather risky bet. There definitely existed a banker by the name of Amerigo Vespucci, but “America” was, for the time being, still a pure “possibility.” This country could be won from nonexistence or it could disappear forever into the abyss of Tatarus.1 A map, let me be precise, a geographical map, of the assumed continent was handed to Columbus. The Spanish king and queen, so to speak, put America into his enormous empty pocket full of holes.

2 Among French titles (the French are great hands at titling their works), I remember the following: The Travels of a Stay-athome.2 Sitting in front of a warm fire, it is possible to travel in one’s mind to countries you’ve never visited, while spending neither a kopeck nor a farthing on travel expenses. How did Jules Verne write his books? He kept a large old globe in his study. The writer would sit down in front Countries That Don’t Exist

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of the globe, a cup of black coffee in one hand and a piece of chalk in the other. Peering into the contours of the continents, the blue spots of the oceans, he would then trace a line on the globe with his fingertip. According to his biographer, the “line” would resemble the zigzags of a cardiogram. The famous French author traveled widely while staying within the boundaries of his own bookshelf. The countries through which he led his heroes do exist, their geographical names are precise, but this world is nothing more than an artificially constructed model, a globe that rotates not due to Newton’s laws but because of the movements of the brilliant author’s fingertip. In his youth, Alexander Grin3 sailed for a short period on a merchant ship. Later—he began writing at a rather late age— he concocted stories this way: living in the Crimean town of Theodosia, he and his wife would walk out onto a narrow pier in the evening and, gazing at the smoke of departing steamships and the sails of outgoing sailboats, he would fantasize about unseen voyages, adventures, catastrophes, and unexpected encounters. In this way, the contours of “Grinland,” as the critic Kornei Zelinsky called the country of Grin’s fantasies, gradually began to take shape.

3 At the base of all folkloric constructions lies a trope that historians of literary style have not yet sufficiently studied: hyperbole. Hyperbole derives from two words in ancient Greek that mean “I throw” and “across” or “over.”

As dough rises with the help of yeast, any image can be heightened and enhanced. Take this elementary example from Russian folklore.4 Beard: “The beard’s in place but it covers his face.” “Small man, big beard.” “A beard as long as a haystack is tall.” “What the face conceals, the beard reveals.” “A beard as big as all outdoors.” “Himself no bigger than a fingernail, with a beard as long as his arm.” And so on.5 As it rises, a hyperbole can stop at any step on the ladder. For example: regarding a poor harvest, Russians will say, “So far between stalks, you can’t hear someone talk.” And after a hyperbole seems to have reached its final stage, a curious process of “dehyperbolization” begins. The fairy tale invents creatures so small with such weak voices that they can’t be heard from stalk to stalk. Swift’s Lilliput6 is constructed this way, as are many other stories about imaginary lands. Hyperbole can move along three lines. In the interest of concision, let’s take three Old Testament figures, Goliath, Methuselah, and Samson. Each is a hyperbole personified: extreme size, unusual longevity, and extraordinary strength. It goes without saying that each of these three principles can be subject to additional classification. For example, the spatial principle: a tale of unknown countries will often entail traveling to a “faraway kingdom,” so far away that it takes countless years journeying and traveling, traveling and journeying to get there. One must jump into the crater of a volcano or climb down through the opening of an empty well into the earth’s interior, a subterranean world. Or rise up on the wings of fantasy to the heights of inaccessible mountains and clouds gliding above the earth. And sometimes even farther. Countries That Don’t Exist

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Generally, how do folktales develop such fantastic stories about imaginary lands? Simplest of all is to refer to one of the printed columns of Dal’s Dictionary of the Russian Language, where, for example, one can find a dialog such as: “Is it far to X?” “No, that’s nearby.” “And is it far to Nearby?” The techniques of exposition in folktales about invisible lands are similar to those used by both Swift and Cervantes. Extremely detailed and realistic descriptions; the characteristics of objects as well as their interrelations all measured out as precisely as a pharmacist measures his medicines; the logic is not exactly ironclad but, I would say, is made of steel; but the objects and their characteristics are either monstrously enhanced or fantastically diminished. This is the living embodiment of hyperbole with a plus or minus sign. However, rather than abstract proofs, let’s look at real examples.

4 The Country of the Quirk. Although over time they became the familiar quirky eccentrics who populate our everyday life, according to ancient Siberian lore, in the depths of the taiga there once existed a tribe called the Quirk.7 This tribe shunned all contact with outsiders and settled in caves. When the elders of the tribe learned that Ermak and his Cossacks were advancing on Siberia8 and that white birch trees—the symbol of the “White Tsar”—were appearing in their path, the Quirk burrowed deep into the earth and hid in a gigantic cave whose earthen canopy they propped up with wooden support beams.

Persisting in their fear (how clumsy the Russian language can be!), the tribe obeyed their elders’ command to chop down the wooden supports and so the roof of the cave collapsed on them, burying them forever. Thus perished the tribe of the Quirk.9 Next up are the quirky. I tell this legend first because it contains the fundamental feature common to all stories about countries that don’t exist. Actually, if you will excuse the pedantry, there are two basic features of the genre: first, that the fantastic lands of both folktales and individual phantasmagoric stories might exist in either the past or the future but never the present; second, that in each story from the realm of imaginary geography, we encounter a deviation from the norm, a kind of logical quirk. The Country of the Wise. Late in his life, Plato (428–347 BCE) wrote an extended dialog with the subtitle “On Justice.”10 Its theme was the creation of an ideal state organized along the lines of the human organism’s main organs: the brain, heart, and liver. The virtue of the brain is wisdom, of the heart— bravery, and of the liver—moderation. In accordance with this, the Platonic state is composed of three estates: the philosophers who govern it, the warriors who defend it, and the peasants and artisans who provide the first two estates with the products of their labor, keeping for themselves only the bare necessities. Many centuries later, in the feudal period, this blueprint achieved a kind of fulfillment. There were warriors and a class of “peasants and artisans imbued with the virtue of moderation and organized in guilds.” The only thing missing were wise men. But the times were dark, the culture in decline. In place of philosophy there was blind faith and fanaticism. Countries That Don’t Exist

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In the year 1516, the famous scholar Sir Thomas More published an elegant little work about the island of Utopia (Greek for “nowhere”).11 A shipmaster just returned from a distant voyage tells the story of his visit to a mysterious island not included on any map. Its inhabitants live in a city whose streets radiate from the center in straight lines like the rays of the sun. Everything here is precisely ordered, everyone has a job, everyone receives an equal share, and yet this ideally drawn social blueprint is flawed by one annoying circumstance. For one profession is missing: there are no street cleaners responsible for removing filth and human excrement. And famed lawyer and philosopher Sir Thomas More couldn’t puzzle out this case. The Land of Fools. There is positively no nation whose folklore has not exploited this theme. Perhaps it has been nowhere more clearly and richly developed than in the English comic tales about the fantastically foolish inhabitants of the so-called Gotham Town.12 A sweet-voiced nightingale flies to Gotham and sings at nighttime in the garden of the Gothamites. Charmed by its singing and not wanting the nightingale to abandon them, the Gothamites build a low but solid fence around the garden— and are terribly shocked and disappointed when one night they cannot hear the trills of the nightingale. The inhabitants of the land of fools decide to capture the moon. Seeing its disk in a well (in another version, in a river), they set to work with buckets and fishing nets, but the moon somehow manages to escape. For the Hindus, foolishness is not limited to one particular island or country but wanders through the country, a walking

stick in its hand. I’m referring to that enormous Hindu folklore cycle about “foolish Brahmins.”13 Rather than suffer from their foolishness, the Brahmins are, in fact, proud of it: not only do they boast that it is a special gift of the gods, they often arrange “competitions in foolishness” in which the fortunate fool who out-fools the others . . . wins the prize. One of those Brahmins famed for his foolishness decides to prepare for the holiday of the wooden bells in Benares, as custom demands, by shaving his head. A barber answers his call. They agree on a price of five paise.14 His head is shaved. It’s time to pay up. The Brahmin gives the barber ten paise and asks for five in change. But the barber has no coins. They start arguing. The Brahmin and barber tear the coin from each other’s hand until they hit upon a solution agreeable to both: if the barber will shave the head of the Brahmin’s wife, they’ll call it quits! Despite her resistance—a shaven head is the greatest possible disgrace for an Indian woman—the foolish Brahmin ties up his wife and, in a flash, the unfortunate woman’s head is as smooth as a baby’s bottom. Only after it’s all over does the Brahmin suddenly realize that, distracted by the argument about the five paise, he had forgotten all about this ancient and sacred custom.15 The Land of Giants. Many stories, old and new, are devoted to this theme. It is impossible to name even one nation that has not made this theme its own. And because a giant demands space, fiction leads him to distant lands. Giants overturn mountains, uproot oak trees, even pile mountain upon mountain trying to scale the heavens. And, strangely enough, in their enormous bodies there live extraordinarily small brains: Countries That Don’t Exist

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they are constantly deceived by puny hunchbacks, gnomes, and various other homunculi. Legends about giants who live far from ordinary people are extremely old. Suffice it to recall the adventures of Odysseus in the land of one-eyed giants, the Cyclopes. It is inconvenient and bothersome for giants to live alongside ordinary seven-footers. This was experienced by at least one man of no more than ordinary height, Doctor Lemuel Gulliver, who, thanks to the imagination of his creator, woke up one fine day in the land of the Lilliputians. One misstep and you crush a manikin. Good luck to them! Although their death-dealing arrows can neither kill nor wound a giant, they can, like pinpricks or fleabites, certainly be annoying. So giants go off by themselves and establish colonies of giants. It’s true that we ought not forget about one important literary exception. I’m referring to Rabelais’ cycle, which tells the history of the Grangousier dynasty, Gargantua and Pantagruel, who ruled in succession over a tribe of runty little Gauls.16 The bodies of these good-natured rulers are enormous, though their souls are no bigger than those of ordinary Frenchmen. While their tears, as Rabelais describes in detail, are as large as ostrich eggs, they are evoked by the most banal, everyday bad breaks and misfortunes. Then again, they prefer laughing to weeping, even though their laughter shakes walls and bends trees down to the ground. Lilliput. There’s no point getting into the topography or population of this apparently nonexistent country, of which every schoolchild has read. Like the country of the

Brobdingnagians,17 Swift uses it for the sake of a bold psychological experiment. No sooner does Gulliver get used to being a giant among the Lilliputians than his author and creator suddenly transports him to a country of real giants, where he must quickly adjust his psychology and behavior. Instead of careful, short steps, he now moves with rapid, mincing steps and often breaks into a run; instead of a quiet, restrained voice, a shout; instead of looking down, he now must crane his neck upward to see the face of his giant interlocutors, as tall as bell towers, any of whom could squash him like a bug with one blow. It’s interesting that only once in the first two parts of Gulliver’s Travels did Swift, a true artist, allow himself to violate proportion—to shrink or enlarge the bodies of the people among whom his hero lived. Henceforth he was extraordinarily precise and adhered to a strictly realistic style. Whether it’s a question of Lilliputians or Brobdingnagians, we have no choice but to deal with them exactly as Swift described them. Already by the eighteenth century, his fantasies quickly became extraordinarily popular with contemporaries, including that most talented essayist and jack of all trades, Samuel Johnson, who, when allowed to publish accounts of deliberations at the House of Commons in a journal, boldly named the series Magna Lilliputia.18 Here we cannot but see that our slinger of stones at the edge of the world, the one who wanted to cast his stones farther, wants to strike his political opponent with the ricochet. It is difficult to establish exactly when the rather strange expression “a pill to cure an earthquake” [English in the original—Trans.] entered the language of British political journalism. Still its first appearance in print, which occurred Countries That Don’t Exist

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after Swift’s death, was clearly intended to express in one image the politics of half-measures: that is, the Lilliputian method, which always prefers fractions to whole numbers, a head in the sand to a head raised to the sky. This article is not, however, the place to discuss this. I can only briefly note here that on the other side of the channel in response to the politics of Magna Lilliputia, there ripened a plan to prepare, not pills to cure earthquakes, but enormous pillboxes wired with dynamite to provoke an earthquake that, while fatal to the enemy, would be “beneficial” for the builders of these steel pillboxes.19 The first to provide a serious and subtle analysis of legendary giants was George Bernard Shaw. In his wonderful little book The Perfect Wagnerite20 which, unfortunately, has not yet been translated into Russian, Shaw analyzes the myth of the “Rheingold.” Wotan has negotiated with two guileless giants to build Valhalla. The price set is the beautiful Freya, goddess of freedom. The palace is completed. Wotan refuses to pay in freedom. Moreover, he has already buried the gold, his capital, in the muddy depths of the ancient river. Shaw (I want to avoid long quotes here) describes with truly tragic intensity the situation of the giants, their empty hands worn to the bone by gigantic labors. This is the first of a long series of conflicts between labor and capital. The giants are unaware of their enormous latent power. But if their enormous muscles are capable of piling mountain upon mountain, their weak minds have not yet awakened. Meanwhile, the greedy and spiteful dwarf Albrecht, never once closing his eyes, guards the gold, the payment for the giants’ honest labor.

Shaw has also created a wonderful cycle of plays called Back to Methuselah,21 a long play about a tribe suffering from, you could say, long-livedness. These are giants of time. On the island where they live, far from short-lived people, even the youngest generation must resort to numbers of three or four figures to reckon their ages. It so happened that by a fluke of fate and a quirky wind, a respected elderly professor on a research trip lands on the island inhabited by these giants of time. This philosopher, this member of the Academy, finds himself in the position of a grey-bearded child, a baby who, for his egregious inability to understand the world, is lightly whipped by the giants of time for his own good. We could add something here about colossi of strength, as well as  .  .  . But I cannot allow this article itself to become a giant. Let it remain within the limits of an average-sized essay. Baron Munchausen22 and General Perogrullo. Both really existed: Major Munchausen and Genеral Perogrullo. Albeit in different centuries: Baron Munchausen in the second half of the eighteenth century,23 Perogrullo in the middle of the fifteenth.24 At one time, Munchausen even served in the Russian army. They say that he loved to tell extraordinary tales over a glass of punch—there even exists a small play on this topic, which has not, however, been performed in our theaters for thirty years.25 The adventures of Baron Munchausen are so well known that it makes no sense to waste my typesetters’ and readers’ time by summarizing them once again. Still I must mention one thing: although Baron Munchausen traveled a great deal, he always remained a complete stranger to the Countries That Don’t Exist

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god of wandering. A real traveler is in love with the thing itself. But Munchausen is so extraordinarily egocentric that the only thing that interests him is his own imagination, which is grateful to him and praises him. Traveling through Germany, he follows closely the fate of a song frozen in the postilion’s horn but is indifferent to the song of the landscape gliding past his eyes. Driving rapidly on smooth and snowy Russian roads, he is fascinated by the drumming of his sabre against the stone mile markers lining the road, with the speed of a stick tapping a beat against a picket fence. But he tells us nothing about all the things in between these mile markers. This is pure imagination, an imagination that takes pleasure in itself, its own complex meandering, and the splendor of its own colors. Perogrullo—whom I hereby introduce to Soviet readers, so few of whom know of this worthy Spanish general—is the complete opposite. He was, as reliable historical documents inform us, a professional soldier who served valorously at the Battle of Pavia, the pivotal battle of the Italian War of 1521–26, and spent his entire life wandering from one battle to another. We know nothing about his mentality or his temperament, but, one way or another, so many legends and anecdotes have grown up around his name that today every Spanish dictionary, even the abridged ones, has no choice but to include the phrase: verdad de Perogrullo, meaning “the indisputable truth of Perogrullo, A = A.”26 If imagination ruined Munchausen, transforming an honest old campaigner into a world-class fantasist and liar, then Perogrullo became a comic character due to his extraordinary truthfulness. More precisely, his inability to tell a lie, not, however, because of moral qualms but due to

an absolute and utterly fantastic lack of the imagination necessary to tell the tiniest white lie. Here is one brief speech made by the valorous general on the eve of a decisive battle: Soldiers! A battle awaits us tomorrow. A battle, as you well know, is what happens when men in uniforms attack and kill men dressed in different uniforms. I make no promises that I cannot keep but I give you my word as a soldier that whosoever is killed in battle tomorrow will definitely be dead and no one should imagine that he is alive. On the other hand, those who remain alive cannot in the future say that they died at the Battle of Pavia. And so, everything is clear. No wavering. For bravery is the absence of wavering. Tomorrow we will emerge victorious from the battle.†

Baron Munchausen, whose fantasies were first brought to the attention of Europe at the beginning of the last century by Rudolf Erich Raspe (1736–94), has had many imitators. Suffice it to mention just one: the Georgian writer Sergo Kldiashvili (1893–1986), the author of The Adventures of Squire Lachundareli.27 If Munchausen ascends to the clouds on a chain of wild ducks that, one after the other, swallowed bits of bacon fat attached to a long rope, then Lachundareli drives his heavy carriage faster and faster along a bumpy country road, bouncing higher and higher, until the carriage finally takes off from the ground and reaches the village in the clouds. Perogrullo had no followers. His name is unknown beyond the boundaries of Spain. And in Spain, no more than two or † The source of this quotation is unknown.

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three novels28 contain at most a dull reflection of his image, which was created by the Spanish people themselves. But I’m interested in something else. It’s curious that although his unusually lively imagination paints everything in bright colors, makes the simple complicated, and embroiders every image, Munchausen himself is always pictured in extraordinarily simple, everyday circumstances. Here we see him traveling across a snowy field. It is evening, and he is far from an inn where he could spend the night. Noticing a sharp ice-covered stake sticking up out of the ground, he ties his horse to it, wraps himself in his cloak, and lies down to sleep. A very ordinary situation. Something similar has happened to many of us. But then the imagination takes over: it turns out that the stake that he has used as a hitching post for his horse is really the spire of a church bell tower that has been all but covered by a monstrous snowfall. While the Baron sleeps, a fantastical sun melts the snow that had covered the church tower. When he awakens, the traveler begins scanning the horizon for his horse until, raising his eyes, he catches sight of a horse dangling by his halter from the spire of a bell tower . . . The effectiveness of the image of Perogrullo is built on the diametrically opposite principle: he is a simpleton who finds himself in extraordinarily complicated situations, a straight line drawn through a world of complicated curves. Acting alone, neither Major Munchausen nor General Perogrullo can create a successful artistic impression. A fantasy with the rank of major must be subordinated to a unity of higher rank, that is, to the plot’s general line.29 Without straying from the plan of this essay, I will simply point to that bizarre country created by English

folklore called Topsy-turvy,30 where everything happens in reverse and everyone stands and lives, as it were, on end, upside down. Old people are born in coffins and die in infants’ cradles; the sun rises in the west and descends into the eastern horizon; people walk on their heads, their legs held high; and life in general is turned “on its head.” Such a world provides space for the Munchausen principle, that is, the discovery of more and more new binary combinations, while, at the same time, it is strictly limited by the Perogrullo principle, which always demands the opposite: A is either equal to or not equal to A. Is there any real difference between the two? Paradise for Gluttons. Among the many works in the picture gallery of Vienna are two remarkable paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, or, as he is sometimes called, “Peasant Bruegel.” Both depict the country of the gluttons, which is surrounded by a dense ring of mountains made of sugar and gingerbread. Whoever seeks the paradise for gluttons must first gnaw through the gingerbread mountain, clearing a tunnel with his teeth so that everything that obstructs access into the gigantic and closed basin of the paradise of food passes through his stomach and digestive tract. The Dutch master’s first painting depicts the difficult labor of a man who, by virtue of a truly heroic gluttony, earned his place in the kingdom of the stomach. The second, more detailed painting shows the very place where the holy saints of gluttony live.31 Some are sleeping, their swollen, distended bellies sticking up in the air. Others are eating and drinking. Frying pans filled to the brim with meat and sausage willingly present themselves to the gluttons. Roasted geese, flapping their roasted wings, fly right into wide-open mouths. Countries That Don’t Exist

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Wine flasks in straw baskets saunter up to the saintly gluttons and with their round glass mouths, plant French kisses on the fat lips of the stupefied and drunken gluttons.32 Almost all the peoples of the world have expressed similar dreams of satiety. The English have the Land of Cockaigne,33 a more precise portrait of the glutton, or, rather, not a glutton but a “degustator,” a lotus-eater, one who sucks in the lotus.34 And we Russians have rivers of milk flowing past banks of kissel,35 etc. etc. We need not be repelled by this spectacle of gastronomic hedonism that has exaggerated the processes of satiety to the point of nausea. For at its base we can recognize the hunger dreams of the poor. The dreams of peasants and workers who go to sleep hungry. For when you feel like drinking or eating, when every day you are tormented by hunger and thirst, it might seem as if you could “drink up an ocean” or “eat a mountain of victuals.” But it only seems so, it is only the hyperbolic “dreams of an empty stomach.” The Itanesiesy is the name of one of the tribes discussed in the Christian Topography of Cosmas Indicopleustes.36 On occasion, a metabolic problem leads to a condition called acromegaly, which results in the abnormal growth of, for example, the middle finger of the right hand. Caricature is constructed on the model of acromegaly. Simplest of all (this is what is done in cheap humor newspapers) is to attach the head of a specific political figure, depicted in almost photographic detail, to a tiny body, half the size of the head.37 The object of the caricature (from Italian caricare, “to load”), has, for example, a nose slightly longer than the average. By lengthening the nose, the caricaturist turns it into a

hyperbole. Remember the Polish tale about Obstinate Stas, who had the bad habit of picking his nose. Eventually, his nose grew so enormous that he needed a wheelbarrow to cart it around. A whole series of fantastic countries, which have never existed nor ever will, have been created through the principle of acromegaly. For example, in the fourteenth-century alphabet book the Azbukovnik (one of the first books to be translated into Russian),38 there is a story about the marvelous country of the Itanesiesy,39 whose inhabitants have such large ears, and moreover such soft ones, that when they lie down to sleep, they wrap themselves up in their auricles as if in blankets.40 How can we not mention here the fantastic Monopods of African countries, each of whom has but a single leg, but with such an enormous heel that they use it as a parasol to shade themselves from the sun.41 And here’s an example with a minus sign: in his ancient Christian Topography, Cosmas Indicopleustes tells of a fantastic bird that has no legs. Having pecked its way through the shell of its egg, the bird spends its entire life in the air, soaring above the earth until, its strength exhausted, it falls dead to the ground. The country of the Itanesiesy is very important for the study of the poetic construction of nonexistent lands. Each relies upon the hyperbolic exaggeration of one of its characteristic features: as diminishment leads to the island of Lilliput, magnification leads to the country of the Brobdingnagians, etc. Vertical Journeys. Russian folklore contains many stories about a mysterious subterranean kingdom divided into three parts: cooper, silver, and gold. The entrance into each part is Countries That Don’t Exist

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protected by a dragon with bronze, silver, or golden wings.42 But I am purposely passing over Russian folklore—if I did not, my essay would double in size—for my main purpose is to acquaint the Russian reader with less familiar folkloric and literary material from Western Europe. The founder of Danish literature, Ludvig Holberg,43 is the author of the novel Niels Klim’s Subterranean Journey (1741). In this brilliant satirical work, Holberg writes about creatures who, totally isolated in their subterranean kingdom, have no neighbors with whom to make war or trade. As a result, all possible questions and all vexing issues are, to put it bluntly, dead as a doornail. And yet the habit of disputation survives in the minds of the subterraneans. And so they raise certain individuals to be what they call animalia disputatia, that is, argumentative animals. They keep them on short rations, feeding them nothing but pepper and mustard, and then pair them off to argue with each other for the subterraneans’ amusement: they will argue about absolutely anything, to their heart’s content, until they’re foaming blood at the mouth. But let’s return to the earth’s surface. The Birds of Aristophanes (414 bce) tells of two Athenians, Pisthetaerus and Euelpides, seeking refuge from social strife in Athens. When we first see them, each is holding a bird, a magpie and a crow. Purchased from a soothsayer at the marketplace, these birds are leading them to the nest of the king of the birds, the Grand Hoopoe. The two refugees eventually find the king of the birds—and make a treaty between bird wings and human thoughts. Not that the birds have an easy life: men hunt for them, lay snares, set nets, cut down trees in the forest.

And so, following the advice of Pisthetaerus, the entire kingdom of birds fly up into the clouds, carrying the two men on their wings. Once in the city of birds, the two Athenians start calling the shots. The first thing they do is intercept the incense and smoke of burned offerings rising to the kingdom of the gods. The gods are starving. They send their messenger, Iris. The two Athenians—to the approving twittering of the birds—send her back to the empyrean realm where she came from. Eventually, the gods request a truce, and having scaled back the power of the gods in their own favor, Pisthetaerus and Euelpides mercifully consent to peace. Pantagruel’s Ship’s Log. The fourth book of Rabelais speaks of a long ship journey made by Pantagruel and his friends, in which they drop anchor at least twenty times in the nonexistent harbors of countries that don’t exist. Although Pantagruel himself did not keep a ship’s log, I will provide a brief and fragmentary record of his travels. Turning the pages of this nonexistent log in one’s mind, one is immediately amazed at the grandiose images of the journeys thought up by Rabelais. It is an entire encyclopedia, spinning a globe with countries created by imagination alone. You will remember the passage in Munchausen in which a song that was frozen in the postilion’s horn gradually thawed. Rabelais forcibly defrosts the sounds of a long and stubborn battle in frozen lands. When Pantagruel’s ship sails into the arctic latitudes as the ice is breaking up, the sounds of a thawing battle, seething with myriad blows of sabre against sabre, axe against axe, horse hoof against shield, and the cries of the wounded and dying are heard. We were recently discussing Countries That Don’t Exist

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the scene in Breugel that depicts the obsequious willingness of fried geese and sizzling frying pans to satisfy the rapacious maws of gluttons. Rabelais describes a frenzied battle between gluttons and victuals that fight back with tridents of enormous forks and flourish butter knives and roasting racks bristling with sharp edges against those who want to eat them. But the mouths and stomachs of Pantagruel’s warriors are ready for battle: their task is not only to knock their opponents into bowls and platters but to consume them to the last tasty bit. And the victory is Pantagruel’s. I return to his ship’s log. The island of Ennasin,44 where all the inhabitants are relatives and kinsmen. They have gotten so confused by their complex system of kinship that now and then you can hear a conversation like the following: a gray-bearded old man walks up to a cradle in which a girl of three is lying and says: “Good day, Grandfather!” to which the child replies, lisping and pronouncing the words with difficulty: “And how are you today, my daughter?”45 In the Country of the Pettifloggers46 the only way to make a living is by denouncing one’s neighbor. So the Pettifloggers denounce each other, each one trying to come up with the most fantastic accusations while the objects of these denunciations respond by beating the accusers to within an inch of their lives: this allows the accuser to demand, in accordance with the laws of the land, monetary compensation for the beating he received. The Pettifloggers, in general, live in high style. The Island of Metal Tools47 where, instead of grass and flowers, wires, spades, and barbs grow from the ground.

Fruit in the shape of pincers and daggers whose steel shines through the cracked husks of leather scabbards hang from the branches of trees. The Island of the Charming Princess Quintessence,48 who cures her subjects of diseases with song. On her island dinner consists of а racy folk tune for an appetizer and a cansonetta for the main course, etc. The Island of Monosyllabic Replies.49 And, finally, the city of Chinon with its Temple of the Bottle.50 The Divine Bottle is an oracle. It is surrounded by an infinite number of clear streams. If you place a cup under one of these streams and dream of a specific wine, it will flow into your cup.51 And you will dream of those countries, whether they exist or not, that you would like to visit.

5 Fantasies, inventions based on true artistry, can never be based on nothing. They are all closely tied to the earth. Nonexisting countries are populated by half-existing flowers, animals, rocks. A country that doesn’t exist is the product of impatient human thoughts. Between the ages of three and five, children bombard adults with an unending stream of whys and wherefroms. The primitive mind of a savage also wants to receive answers—and as fast as possible—to all questions. Logic teaches us that although the same cause always produces the same effect, the same effect can be produced by different causes.

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This is how a savage, journeying from his “why” toward the explanation for this or that incomprehensible phenomenon, easily gets lost in a forest of possible causes. His ability to think abstractly is still quite limited, and, attracted to bright, shiny images, he wanders toward the ghostly light of a will-o’-thewisp. In his mind, the logic of images still dominates ordinary Aristotelian logic. For example, the Hottentots have a story that tries to explain both the origin of the spots on the moon and why hares have a split lip. They believe that the moon once sent a small insect to deliver this message to human beings: “As the moon grows dim before catching fire again, so too will humans die before being reborn.” The insect was crawling with the good news to humans when it met a hare along the way. In answer to the hare’s rushed question, the insect slowly started to repeat the moon’s words. Having listened to the first half of the message, the hare hopped off to tell people that they would die like the moon when it leaves the sky dark. But the hare also wanted to brag to the moon itself that it had beaten the divine messenger to the punch. When it heard the hare’s words, the moon grew angry and flung a lightning bolt that the Hottentots call kiri at the hare. But the bolt missed its mark, only splitting the hare’s upper lip. The hare then leapt at the moon and scratched its round yellow face. Terrified at what it had done, the hare ran away: from that time, the moon’s face bears the marks of scratching the hare, with its split lip, trembles and flees from everyone.52 You don’t have to travel to remotest Africa to find examples of primitive thinking. As recently as ten years before the

Revolution, there were two small villages not far from Viatka: Spasskoe to the south and Slobodskoe to the north. Over time, the inhabitants of Slobodskoe came to believe that “the bells at Spasskoe always ring before it rains.” Not only would they say this as they crossed themselves, but the truth of the saying was apparently confirmed by facts. For it is true that the bells at Spasskoe were rarely wrong. But the real explanation was this: the bells at Spasskoe were rung every day, but the distance between Spasskoe and Slobodskoe was such that the pealing of the bells in Spasskoe could be heard in Slobodskoe—if just faintly—only when the wind was from the south. It is also true that a southern wind would pick up moisture over the lakes near Spasskoe and bring clouds and rain to Slobodskoe. In this way a legend was the result of several links dropped from the chain of cause and effect. On the other hand, you can’t blame everything on the way that humans think. Nature herself provides sufficient material for legends: real countries harbor within themselves the possibility of imaginary lands. For example: to this day botanists cannot fully explain the following phenomenon: bamboo blossoms and bears fruit very rarely, once every twenty or thirty years, but then at the same time all over the world. Now although science is patient, folklore isn’t and will use images to find an explanation. After all, it’s quite easy to invent an explanation along the lines of this: when the wind circles the globe, no tree or grass bows lower than the supple bamboo: such reverence deserves acknowledgment. And so, every time the wind observes even one bamboo tree flowering, it hurries to inform all the world’s Countries That Don’t Exist

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bamboo trees, which, not wanting to be left behind, begin flowering as well. There exists a certain bright green bushy plant with stalks that closely resemble arrows, with notched shafts and green fletchings that pierce the ground. This resemblance is so striking that both Russian and French peasants have given it the same name: arrowhead (in Russian strelolist; in French, sagittaire). Arrowhead usually grows in the swamp, where frogs gather. In Russian there exists an additional name for this plant-arrow: frog grass (liagushach’ia trava). Around it you can typically find peat hillocks reminiscent of small earthen yurts, which sink down into the earth when one steps on them. And so, we can imagine a certain chain of associations: an arrow that flew into a bog, frogs, little frog huts that hide themselves at the first touch. This, of course, is the source of the well-known Russian folktale about the Frog Princess.53 Shakespeare’s Othello is described by everyone as a man of truth. He speaks of himself as a soldier, “rude” in speech and “little bless’d with the soft phrase of peace.” And yet, before the Venetian Senate, he admits to Brabantio that his truthful stories about battles and wanderings helped win him Desdemona’s heart: And portance in my travels’ history; Wherein of antres vast and deserts idle, Rough quarries, rocks and hills whose heads touch heaven, It was my hint to speak—such was the process; And of the Cannibals that each other eat,

The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads Do grow beneath their shoulders.* This to hear Would Desdemona seriously incline (act I, scene iii).54

Without, of course, wishing to deceive anyone, the truthful Othello is himself deceived by a complex blend of facts and legends. As memories of dreams are often more vivid than memories of real life, so, too, a legend sometimes manages to overcome the evidence of a colorless fact . . . 1937 Translated and introduced by Anthony Anemone

* Shakespeare, and his translator, are in error here. Shakespeare distinguishes between “cannibals” and “anthropophagi,” although, in reality, they are one and the same: and the Russian translation does not distinguish “anthropophagi” from “people whose heads grow beneath their shoulders,” whereas the original is quite clear: “anthropophagi, and people, whose heads . . .” etc.

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EDGAR ALLAN POE

08

Ninety Years Aer His Death

This appreciation of Poe’s strange genius can be read as an appreciation of Krzhizhanovsky’s strange genius. The chance to champion Poe’s poetics was a chance to champion his own. Krzhizhanovsky plays Poe, the unsung writer far ahead of his time, against a bestselling contemporary, the now forgotten Fenimore Cooper. Cooper can be seen as a stand-in for the literary establishment that spurned Krzhizhanovsky for most of two decades. This piece on Poe appeared in Literaturnaya gazeta in 1939, the year he was finally accepted into the Soviet Writers’ Union—and the year before his final story collection passed the censorship, seemingly poised to make him a published author at last.

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EDG AR ALL AN POE Ninety Years After His Death They appeared in parallel: the novels of James Fenimore Cooper and the stories and tales of Edgar Allan Poe. Cooper recounted the unusual adventures of white men among red (Indians). Poe told of psychological adventures, of extraordinary escapades in thought. In one of Cooper’s novels we meet “Leather-Stocking,” a knight without fear and without reproach, who, whether speaking or shooting, never misses his mark. Take the scene depicting a migration of birds, birds flying over the prairie in a solid living torrent. The hunters all fire, without taking aim, into the dark, million-winged cloud. Leather-Stocking stands by without putting rifle to shoulder; and then, when his “favorite girl” asks why he disdains to take part in the general hunt, he says: “That straggler there, lagging behind the flock.” A shot rings out—and the bird separated from the flock tumbles to the ground. That is how the brilliant Edgar Allan Poe hunts his subjects. He fires always and only at the straggler, the subject separated from the flock. And he never misses. In an American literature still young at the time (Poe wrote in the 1830s and ’40s), Poe led the dance in almost all genres. Chief among them: the fantastic tale, the short story (here he is especially strong), and the ballad. I would note two stories in which the author himself discloses the principal elements of his poetics: “The Angel of the Odd”1 and “The Imp of the Perverse.”2 The imp of the perverse

is Poe’s name for that force that brings a man to the very edge of the abyss and forces him to peer into it, that diabolical curiosity that makes him commit a crime so as to see “how it will turn out,” that passion for experimentation that stops at nothing. “The Angel of the Odd” is presented to the reader as a fantastic creature on legs like kegs with two long bottles for arms. This creature is full of maxims and kirschwasser; it speaks in gurgling words that leap out of its glass gullet by turns with bubbles from the brandy. This wingless “angel” embodies, per Poe’s design, the prankishness of a human imagination that defies the theory of probability with a sort of poetic “theory of improbability.” Somehow or other, Poe is always at the edge of possibility, on the boundary line. He has no verses on the usual theme of “dreams,” but there is the poem “A Dream Within a Dream.” “Never,” says an English proverb, “is a very long day”; yet “Nevermore,” with which the croaking raven ends almost every stanza in Poe’s famous piece, is not a long day but an eternal night. In one of his wittiest stories the master of paradox attempts to burst the finished cycle of A Thousand and One Nights by proposing a thousand-and-second night of Scheherazade. “MS. Found in a Bottle,” a remarkable story, describes the foray of a strange ship swept by a southern polar current and the author’s imagination toward the pole, to reach which, in those days, was beyond the possibility of navigational instruments. But going beyond the realm of possibility, Poe, on only the fifth page of his narrative, also goes beyond the images traced by him at the outset: the violent crash of a wave hurls Edgar Allan Poe

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the hero of the story onto the deck of an even stranger—one can only say: miraculous—ship bound not for the pole but for the truth. Its wooden ribs are porous; they breathe like the body of a weary but living swimmer; its hold is full of old and new charts and sailing directions. Plotting the ship’s course is a hoary captain who for thousands upon thousands of years has been searching for the pole of truth. Yet it must be said that Poe often rallies to his aid (in, for example, his philosophical story-dialogues) a poor companion: mysticism. He reveals the reason for the short story form of his art in the epigraph to one of his succinct works: He who has but a moment more to live Has nothing more to hide.3

Edgar Allan Poe is a master of the short-story style. The singularity of his technique turns on the fact that his works are  very short, whereas their vocabulary is extraordinarily wide. The English language is not enough for Poe; he invents neologisms. What’s more, he scoops up hundreds of new expressions from classical and modern languages. Everything must be done for his story to succeed in saying—before its three-page life comes to an end—all it has to say. The American Poe lived in a country and in an era ill-suited to his attitude of mind. America gravitated toward such authorities as Franklin and Bentham. Franklin had prepared a meticulous list of standards and formulas for “moderate living”;

Bentham, a founder of utilitarianism, had calculated the right action by adding and subtracting motives of conduct. New York, the capital of the New World, had been laid out like a chessboard, its streets given not names but numbers. Poe found all of this foreign. True, in his ironic treatise “Diddling Considered as One of the Exact Sciences,” he admits that in magnitude, the “financial operations” of a banker are to the pilfering of a pickpocket “as the tail of a comet to that of a pig”; but otherwise he considers the financier and the hunter after other people’s purses men of the same intent. To Poe, Bentham was “a great man in a small way”4 (Marx termed him a garrulous oracle of the limited bourgeois consciousness5), while his native America was a country run by an “aristocracy of dollars” in place of an “aristocracy of blood.”6 Théodore de Banville,7 who was slightly younger than Poe, speaks in his poem “The Trampoline Jump”8 of a clown in colorful costume who, standing by his trampoline, surrounded by a curious crowd, makes his first jump. The springy trampoline hurls him higher than all the rooftops, higher than all the record numbers, while the crowd, clapping, cries, “Bravo!” But the master of the jump is not satisfied, and amid the clamor of spectators, he turns to his old loyal trampoline and asks it to catapult him so high he won’t be able to see all these “grocers and notaries.” Now comes the second jump: the colorful body sails up over the houses huddled around the square and slips through the clouds—while the crowd, heads upturned, waits in vain for the return of the vanished master of the jump.

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Poe’s first jump was for his contemporaries: he wrote a fair number of stories that enjoyed success in his lifetime. These were his “extravaganzas,” as he called them, a casual and lighthearted game with images and abstractions not too at odds with the American taste for all things eccentric, for things that burst, but not too abruptly, the wonted orbits of opinion and events not too, of course, important. Whereas his second jump—from the rooftops to the stars— was made not for them but for us, people of a future era. And the first thing we must do is to study, exactly and objectively, the curve of that jump. For Poe was the only fiction writer of the 1840s to set literature (in his best works) purely scientific and philosophical problems. The very method of his exposition is mathematically exact, algebraic. His “thought experiments” (Professor Kelvin’s term) are almost always conducted with extraordinary consistency. His laboratory assistants—the “demon” and the “Angel of the Odd”—supply him with just the words he needs. Our Soviet literature, which shuns “entertainment,” which tries to plumb the depths of life, to listen to its breathing, to give it to the reader in images exact as a formula, cannot ignore the astonishing writerly technique of Edgar Allan Poe. 1939 Translated and introduced by Joanne Turnbull

SHAW AND THE BOOKSHELF

09

(Abridged)

Among left-leaning critics of capitalism in the West who fell under Stalin’s spell in the 1930s, George Bernard Shaw looms large. In July 1931, this famous Fabian socialist celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday in Moscow, replete with closely managed excursions and a two-hour audience with Stalin. The visit was widely publicized in the Soviet press. Until his death in 1950, Shaw championed Stalin and praised the virtues of radical social engineering over dysfunctional parliamentary democracy and corporate greed. Little wonder that Krzhizhanovsky, an expert on theater and an Anglophile, wrote eight pieces on Shaw between 1934 and 1942. Four were published. Although Krzhizhanovsky’s commentary is prudently Partyminded, his interest in Shaw was not merely politically correct. He found dry, cerebral Shavian wit very compatible and adored the attention Shaw gave to formal parts of the playscript: titles, stage directions, the polemical and intellectually sophisticated preface. As a theorist of theater, Krzhizhanovsky frequently contrasted Shaw and Shakespeare in terms of game

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strategy (chess, fencing, boxing, or dueling with words). In a footnote from the mid-1930s, he announced that he was “preparing a book on Shaw.” This undated typescript “Shaw and the Bookshelf,” first published in 2006, was probably part of that larger unrealized project.1 While placing Shaw among other artists, art forms, and philosophers, it reveals the appetites of its author. Krzhizhanovsky was fascinated with the precise physical placement of things he was not permitted to see. (Although he had never been abroad, his archive contains a plan for an annotated guidebook of Shakespeare’s London.) This essay, too, deploys books to map Shaw’s mind at work in his small, cramped study on the fourth floor of his London residence at Adelphi Terrace—a work space that must have reminded Krzhizhanovsky of his own tiny, closet-sized room on Moscow’s Arbat. Space for Krzhizhanovsky was always tightly tied to creativity, and Shavian paradox is shown to have its parallel in impressionist art. Hovering over everything are the painful issues of rejection, recognition, and writerly fame. Excluded from this translation are Krzhizhanovsky’s plot synopses (of plays, The Perfect Wagnerite, and the Soviet slant on European philosophies) as well as some repetitive passages. Abridged portions of the text are indicated with bracketed ellipses and are summarized in the notes. The typescript identifies only one of its sources, an unpublished translation of Shakespeare.

SHAW AND THE BOOKSHELF “Sitting at his writing table, he has on his right the windows giving on Portland Place. Through these, as through a proscenium, the curious spectator may contemplate his profile as well as the blinds will permit. On his left is the inner wall, with a stately bookcase, and the door not quite in the middle, but somewhat further from him. Against the wall opposite him are two busts on pillars: one, to his left, of John Bright; the other, to his right, of Mr Herbert Spencer. Between them hang an engraved portrait of Richard Cobden; enlarged photographs of Martineau, Huxley, and George Eliot; autotypes of allegories. [. . .] On the wall behind him, above the mantelshelf, is a family portrait of impenetrable obscurity.”2 This, for the time being, is not about the author but about one of his characters. A whole series of Shaw’s plays gives us variants on one and the same exhibit: a person at a writing desk amid bookshelves. Sometimes even the color of the covers is described, the titles and names, pressed into their spines, are provided. Thus books, exactly like extras in a mass spectacle, begin the plays with their silence. Only then does the action unfold. And so, mentally imagining the birth of a manuscript by Shaw, I always see the dry, precise profile of a person surrounded by bookshelves, rotary file catalogues, folders with engravings, and bale upon bale of journal issues and clippings. By the way, one of his miniature plays is called just that: Press Cuttings.3 Among the books waiting to be read there are always favorites, chosen ones, permanent residents of the mind, which enter the circle of thoughts of the bookshelves’ owner without Shaw and the Bookshelf

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ceremony, like friends or good counselors. At first they cozy up close to the writing desk, then settle down on it, then become ready reference books. In his articles and prefaces to plays, Shaw himself often provided a list of his “teachers.” Each time, the composition of the list, its length and distribution of names, changed slightly. One must remember that we’re dealing here with a “disciple” who happens to be the author of The Devil’s Disciple,4 a very obstinate man who loved not so much to bow down before authorities as to force them to the ground. Nevertheless there’s a short list of names to which Shaw returns over and over again. These constant companions of his thought are what I wish to address. Attention: this is the bookshelf speaking,5 located to the left of the desk in a study at 10 Adelphi Terrace, London.6

I Mozart, Marx, Wagner. In his youth, Shaw was much taken up by music. Even now there are musical scores alongside books on his bookshelf. His earliest teacher of optimism, of a joyous outlook on life, was Mozart. The music of this composer is cloudless, like a clear summer day that opens to the eye a space soaked with sun. Among his chosen themes there’s not a single one painted black. Even his Requiem, a funeral mass, moves forward in radiant harmonies, full of tranquility. Shaw’s thought always walked along the sunny side of the street, even though its face was always turned toward the shady side of the path. Thus twenty or so years after his first acquaintance with Mozart’s scores, Shaw stubbornly argued that of all Oscar

Wilde’s comedies, the most cheerful was De profundis (a book he wrote in prison, completely isolated from his friends—and, true, from his enemies as well).7 Of course, one can quarrel with this. But what cannot be questioned is that all fifty plays that Shaw has written so far belong to the comedic genre, and only one was given the title “A Tragedietta.”8 And even that play ends quite happily. In the brief introduction to a complete collection of his plays (The Complete Plays of B. Shaw, 1934), fidelity to the comedic genre is explained in this way: “If I make you laugh at yourself,” writes Shaw, “remember that my business as a classic writer of comedies is to ‘chasten morals with ridicule’; and if I sometimes make you feel like a fool, remember that I have by the same action cured your folly, just as a dentist cures your toothache by pulling out your teeth. And I never do it without giving you plenty of laughing gas.”9 Of all Mozart’s works, the one most attentively studied by our comediographer was Don Giovanni. And when Shaw’s new variant on Don Juan, Man and Superman, appeared in 1903, in several stage directions we encounter, alongside the verbal text, musical citations moved from the Klavierauszug into the book. Shaw’s Juan is armed not with a sword but with a philosophy; the very subtitle of the play is “A Comedy (and a Philosophy).” Inasmuch as the author is interested not in the motley surface of the theme but in its deep bottom, its philosophical meaning, he flips everything bottom up. First, the sixteenth century is replaced by the twentieth, Juan Tenorio is turned into Mr John Tanner, Doña Anna into Miss Ann; black cloaks become driving coats and lap robes; petty half-masks are Shaw and the Bookshelf

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replaced by large-scale English hypocrisy and self-righteousness; but most important, the seducer of Seville is turned into a man who doesn’t know where to hide from the woman who is trying to seduce him. But scarcely has the spectator adjusted to this new state of affairs than the already forgotten sixteenth century suddenly wedges itself, as it were, into our contemporary moment; together with it, a crowd of old Mozart characters, followed by joyful Mozartian music. (True, this music is obliged to sound in the depths of hell, but the statue of the commendatore refuses to sing, because the statue’s part is written for bass, and during his life he, the commendatore, was a high tenor.) In a series of articles devoted to musical questions, Shaw concludes that there are two types of musical construction.10 Old music is “decorative,” even at times “ornamental,” closed in on itself. It has no windows to the world; it is egoistic because even when it takes its subjects from outside, as in (for example) Mozart’s operas, this is only to realize the music, to achieve the roundness of pure-sounding forms. New music, in Shaw’s opinion, should be “dramatic,” that is, it should serve ideas and themes that stand higher than it does; it should aid people in the attainment of meanings, it should not ornament life but help to cognize it. I fear that my generalization here is perhaps not entirely precise, but Shaw’s thought in this area is very unsteady; one place contradicts another, and generalizers have a hard time of it. One way or another our author, reacting against the concept of “decorativeness,” set out in quest of a dramatic style.

In 1885, William Archer, working in the reading room of the British Museum, noticed at one of the neighboring tables a man with a parchment-pale face: he was sitting, this unknown man, between two books: to the right lay the orchestral score of Wagner’s Tristan, to the left, the first volume of Marx’s Das Kapital.11 This stranger, who was around thirty, first leafed through the pages of the score, then mused over the book in its black binding and jotted something down in his notebook. Archer became interested in his neighbor, and soon they got to know each other. After a while they came up jointly with an idea for a play, Rhinegold. But their thoughts sharply diverged, and seven years after their first meeting, Bernard Shaw independently wrote his own comedy, Widowers’ Houses.12 [. . .]13 Although not a single word from Marx can be found in any of  these quotations, everything here is permeated with a Marxist understanding of life. We saw above how easy it is to notice Shaw’s tendency to degrade his themes, to test their veracity by flinging them to the ground. This device is most obvious in the case of Wagner: myth is all but transformed into a newspaper article, Valhalla is brought down to the very surface of the earth, the “gods” frolic about in jackets and tuxedos. This trait is very characteristic of Shaw. He knows how to knock Nietzsche’s Superman (who had once fascinated him) down from his super-: Tanner—Bluntschli—Underschaft,14 these supermen of Shaw’s live not up above the clouds, and  not in the mountains like Nietzsche’s Zarasthustra, but in private mansions on Downing Street, and they speak not

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in high-flying parabolas but in the language of numbers and facts. The supermanhood of the armaments king Underschaft is wholly explained by the super-profits that he steals from his workers.

II Shakespeare. Two of the greatest writers from the end of the last century and beginning of this one, Leo Tolstoy and Bernard Shaw, until the eighth decade of their lives, repeatedly reread Shakespeare. Each time Tolstoy did so, he rejected this writer more vehemently, whereas Shaw became deeper in his acceptance and understanding. In 1910, the very year Tolstoy died, Shaw wrote a one-act play whose leading character was William Shakespeare. This play, The Dark Lady of the Sonnets, is preceded as usual by a preface, which artistically is probably superior to the play itself.15 Shakespeare is presented here as a person with a hungry brain that no quantity of impressions can satisfy. For the stage this brain is objectified, as it were, in the form of а notebook. Although the action takes place in a moonlit half-twilight, at night, the great Bill records in this notebook almost all the exchanges of his speech partners in the play. The sentry guard’s crude witticisms, the Dark Lady’s jealous words, Queen Elizabeth’s elevated declamation—all immediately fall under the pencil of our playwright, who need only touch a word or two—and a familiar line begins to resonate.16 In English the word genial has two meanings: ingenious [as in genius],17 and lively, full of life force, cheerful. Speaking about Shakespeare, Shaw always tries to unite both meanings into

one. Genius of this sort is a sense of the fullness of existence, existence overfilling the consciousness of the subject, and thus overflowing its own boundaries, as it were, in the form of artistic creations. Not everyone possesses common sense, but genius is always equipped with “robust” vigorous sense, with blossoming health.18 Shaw was a bit embarrassed by the fact that two-thirds of Shakespeare’s legacy consisted of tragedies, chronicles, and sonnets seemingly filled with grief and melancholy. This was distinctly not to the liking of Shaw, a “classic writer of comedies” as he called himself, and it prompted him to ask that rather brash-sounding question, “How is Shaw better than Shakespeare?”19 But later, analyzing the tragedies of this master of the early seventeenth century, he concluded that Shakespeare’s tragic repertory consisted of latent “hidden comedies.” Take only the preface of the aforementioned play. In the section titled “Shakespeare’s Pessimism” he several times notes Shakespeare’s irony, his “impish rejoicing in pessimism,” his “exultation in what breaks the hearts of common men.”20 Any person, Shaw announces, who has written the line “Hark, hark, the lark at heaven’s gate sings”21 . . . has by that fact alone pledged to give all his lines to joy—even if he wanted to, he could not be a pessimist. [. . .]22

III Ibsen and Chekhov. The playwright Shaw felt the impact of these two dramatists. Ibsen came first, as early as the beginning of the 1890s. Then Chekhov. Ibsen and Chekhov are similar in Shaw and the Bookshelf

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that they take as their starting point not conventional theatrical reality, and not conversational life, but life and reality as such. In everything else, however, these writers sharply differ from each other. Richard Réti, in his little book on the new school of chess,23 speaks of two types of chess players: one tries to think through a simple position as a complexity, the other seeks to resolve a complex chess situation into a simplicity. Ibsen always takes an exceptionally concrete, condensed situation to its very edge. His Brand is only a rural priest, his Stockmann the doctor of a small town.24 All have small, concrete tasks, but they all take these tasks into a realm of the most sweeping abstraction. In Chekhov, on the contrary, abstraction always lowers itself to the level of real-life facts, is even dissolved in them. The druggist’s apprentice Henrik Ibsen probably wrote many times on patients’ prescriptions “quantum satis” [as much as required], until came his dramaturgical time to fling this formula (Brand, act V) straight at heaven. All of Chekhov’s plays are constructed on the struggle of quantum (how much) with satis (enough). To simplify the problem, we might contrast Ibsen’s Wild Duck with Chekhov’s Seagull. Ibsen’s “duck” is deliberately symbolic, speaking in the words of Shaw himself: “Gregers Werle persuades Hedvig to kill the wild duck, in order to hand over to her the bullet from which she herself must die.”25 In Chekhov, Nina Zarechnaya says, when a dead seagull is laid at her feet, “This seagull too is apparently a symbol, but I’m sorry, I don’t understand. . . .”26 The dramatic works of Chekhov usually resolve themselves in some sort of mood. A play by Ibsen leads to a formula, a

moral maxim. As for Shaw, he forces his characters to remain on stage until some practical conclusion or practical exit is found. Precisely for that reason, while highly valuing Chekhov and Ibsen as playwrights, at the same time he decisively opposes the gloomy, pessimistic endings of these authors. “Catastrophes in Ibsen’s plays”—he wrote—“have always produced on me the impression of artifice, so much so that even the entire force of their magic cannot compel one to accept them.”27 In Shaw’s opinion, there was no reason to “go to the morgue” to get endings. In any case, before one drags the drowned man there, one must try artificial respiration. Might that not be the reason that so many of the final scenes in his comedies produce a decisively artificial impression? After all, under conditions of the old bourgeois world, the sources of authentic living optimism had quite thoroughly dried up. In his Peer Gynt, Ibsen creates a “Great Curve” that no one can get off of—and Shaw tries vainly to straighten it out.

IV Rodin and Whistler.28 In Shaw’s scenic interiors a very important role is played by pictures and statues, hung or arranged on or near the walls of the stage set. These are always alongside bookshelves, and together with those shelves they create an impression of the intellectual atmosphere in which a character lives. They are described in the first stage direction of the act, always with maximal thoroughness and precision. The spacious study at 10 Adelphi Terrace preserves on its walls one or two works by Whistler and, by the window, a Shaw and the Bookshelf

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large sculptured portrait of the study’s owner, George Bernard Shaw. As testified by Shaw’s authorized biographer, Archibald Henderson, Mr. Bernard felt a special fondness for this very bust, done by the hand of Rodin. At one time Shaw even declared: “[I have already taken measures to ensure my immortality by binding it to that of Rodin.] The biographical dictionaries of the distant future will contain the entry: ‘Bernard Shaw, subject of a bust by Rodin, otherwise unknown.’ ”29 About Whistler he wrote somewhat differently (Shaw not only engaged with music but at one time also practiced as an art critic): “I can remember when Mr. Whistler, in order to force the public to observe the qualities he was introducing into pictorial work, had to exhibit a fine drawing of a girl with the head deliberately crossed out with a few rough pencil strokes, knowing perfectly well that, if he left a woman’s face discernible, the British Philistine would simply look to see whether she was a pretty girl or not, or whether she represented some of his pet characters in fiction [in Krzhizhanovsky: ‘whether she was poetic or not poetic’], and pass on without having seen any of the qualities of artistic execution which made the drawing valuable.”30 We might presume that Shaw learned something from Whistler about the art of making paradoxes. His own paradoxical style essentially comes down to the ability to strike out ordinary rational truths, thereby forcing them to become acceptable. Here’s a question after one of his lectures: “And what is your attitude toward the Immaculate Conception?” To which the lecturer answers: “I consider all conceptions immaculate.”31 The naturalist, peering under this crossed-out line, sees

the rationalistic meaning of the answer and understands it. The Catholic theologian, feeling himself to be somewhat crossed out, anathematizes Shaw. We must not neglect one other rather important circumstance: the paradoxes of this great paradoxicalist tend to come in pairs. Almost every destructive paradox is accompanied by a constructive one (I use the terminology of John Collis).32 If Shaw writes on one side of the page that an intelligent man never works more than two hours in every twenty-four, then on the flip side of the same page he writes that every genuine person devotes both his waking and sleeping hours to labor. If in one place we read that men must evade by all means possible the embraces of the most marvelous woman, then not far off, the very same author zealously insists that the most repellant old maid has the right to demand from a man a child for herself. It’s easy to prolong the list of such mutually neutralizing paradoxes for dozens of pages, paradoxes that lead to a commonsensical judgment somewhere in the middle. This presence of “destructive” and “constructive” side by side in the Shavian system of aphorisms explains the sharp divergence in understandings of Shaw among critics of his work abroad: for some it’s easier to sense movement in the destructive series; for others, in the constructive. Shaw himself, when he was already nearly eighty, explained his rather late but burgeoning fame in this way: with the passing of years the pen of the writer, his thought, yielding to age, gradually grows more blunt and dull, until it achieves that degree of dullness that is accessible to the understanding of the country’s best critics. Shaw and the Bookshelf

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Both Rodin and Whistler belonged to the school of Impressionism. The first by the chisel, the second by the brush, attempted to “seize and stop the moment.” Claude Monet exhibited in a Parisian salon twelve studies made of one and the same haystack in the course of one and the same day: the same object from different angles under the same sun. This manner of writing was, of course, eagerly seized upon by that master of paradox, Bernard Shaw, who understood wonderfully well that his art of speaking many different things about one thing comes down to the art of shifting points of view, to focusing on one or another slope of the ray of consciousness. But at the disposal of his memory he had long, long years and decades, and this allowed him to reconsider the moment again and again. Shaw’s relationship to Impressionism very soon became complex. And it could not have been otherwise. Shaw was a great master at abstraction. He was an even greater master of the art of detailing the object. Let me repeat that again: the object. This writer once spoke about his quarrel with an Impressionist artist over the portrait of a woman.33 The model’s parted lips, Shaw declares, “seemed to me like a mouthful of virgin snow. The painter lectured me for not consulting my eyes instead of my knowledge of facts. ‘You don’t see the divisions in a set of teeth when you look at a person’s mouth,’— he said—‘all you see is a strip of white. But since you know, as a matter of anatomic fact, that there are divisions there, you want to have them represented by strokes in a drawing. That is just like you art critics.’ ”

Shaw closes the conversation by saying that “when he looks at a row of teeth, he sees not only the divisions between them but their exact shape, both in contour and in modeling, just as well as I see their general color.” This remark is extraordinarily important for characterizing the creative art of this writer. If these two definitions did not so closely overlap, I would say that Shaw is not an Impressionist but a pointilliste. Very characteristic for Shaw is precisely this extraordinary delineation of detail, preciseness of representation, this legibility of spaces between the teeth. I’ve written about this twice and don’t want to repeat myself. Here I’d like to say one thing with such brevity it is close to inaudible: Shaw, as I now see him after years of study—in his thoughts, in the structure of his understanding (see earlier on paradox)—is always impressionistic; but in his images he is always classically precise, he does not omit a single inter-tooth gap. When he’s alone in his study the middle of a London night, between the Whistler canvas and that moment enclosed by Rodin’s marble, only occasionally does he find some sort of middle path between subjectivism and objectivism.

V Leibniz and Schopenhauer. Both are Germans, and for both, the German language supplies two excellent words: Schönfärber [whitewashers] and Schwarzfärber [black-dyers]. The optimist, a gazer at the world through rose-colored glasses, frequently dropped his lenses on the ground and fixed them back again on his nose. The pessimist wore his elegantly framed dark glasses Shaw and the Bookshelf

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his whole life and sometimes glanced out at the world above their rims. The optimist (I’m speaking of Leibniz) was unhappy in love, and rarely were there coins in his purse. The pessimist (I’m speaking of Schopenhauer) declared that love itself was the greatest misfortune, and his purse was never empty. The optimist wrote six volumes of letters (see the Leipzig edition); the pessimist didn’t answer a single letter and thus saved a great deal on five-pfennig postage stamps. The optimist had to write a whole series of works, all unnecessary to him, on one or another princely dynasty and the genealogy of their families; the pessimist, meanwhile, wrote nothing at all or else wrote how the world was maximally bad; the optimist—but here let’s start a new paragraph. According to his first biographer Gerhardt,34 the optimist, in his old age suffering from painful rheumatism, thought up a special device: several slats fastened together with screws. If one dons this wooden machine, sticks one’s body into the machine as if into a case and then screws all the screws tight, then the pain, clamped in place by all those screws, subsides and simply ceases to be. Thus did the theoretician, having created the idea of “the best of all possible worlds,” apply this idea to himself in practice. Shaw only rarely mentions the name of Schopenhauer and almost never mentions the name of Leibniz. But he is always located between them, as an electric spark between the anode and cathode of an electric machine. What does Shaw take from the pessimist? Optimism. What does he take from the optimist? Pessimism.

Take another look, reader, at the chapter where we spoke about the life-affirming joy, the high intensity of life-feeling that our author senses in Shakespeare’s plays. Although William Archer35 maliciously wrote that Shaw is as much like Shakespeare “as a jellyfish is like a racehorse,” still, Shaw himself saw his advantage over Shakespeare precisely in the comedic (in the broad sense of that term), that is, in a joyful solution of problems. Schopenhauer, having tried to prove that our world is the worst of all possible worlds, intellectually rejoices at this finished-off, terminal worst-possible-ness. As Kuno Fischer36 once wrote very aptly and sensibly (and I once referred to it), the pessimist experiences a special philosophical gratification from his picture of the world, drawn with the blackest of black charcoal. Speaking in simple words, this is pleasure, the optimistic sensation of a tension-filled thought—even though it leads to pessimistic conclusions. The other one, curator of the ducal library of the House of Hanover, Privy Counselor Gottfried Leibniz, created a strange system, a thoroughly joyous world that for some reason one is deathly afraid of living in. The creature-monads have only one function: thinking. They do not communicate with each other, they only think about each other. Souls have no windows. Organisms are clocks run by one and the same chronometer, for all eternity. The watchmaker-God, having established once and for all the variously timed ticking of all those second hands, might or might not exist—either way, nothing in the world would change. From this sort of optimism there’s only one way out: into pessimism.

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And Shaw traversed that route: there and back. He took from the pessimist Schopenhauer his optimistic starting point and from the optimist Leibniz, his pessimistic subtext. The basic question, which is posed in almost all of our author’s comedies: in what consists the unhappiness of human happinesses? The resolution in a play by Shaw is always successful. But it is not full success; it is tainted, wounded. Mr. Trench marries the charming Blanche and again agrees to receive income from “Widowers’ Houses.”37 But Mr. Trench’s conscience dons a widower’s hat. And the end of the play is not especially cheerful. Apparently, the social disorder of the world is most visible not in its misfortunes (or more precisely Shaw, and a number of his responsible characters, consider poverty a vice) but in the petty insignificance, in the inferiority of its little happinesses, which perish at the first jolt. Schopenhauer taught that the world is Will striving toward that which does not exist. He created the image of a blind man seeking the purpose of existence with a lantern in hand. The blind man is Will, the lantern is Representation, thought. Shaw tried to remove the cataract from the eyes of the Blind ManWill and to replace the lantern’s light with the light of the sun. In all his treatises one and the same term is repeated: Life Force. The Life Force is that which is more intelligent than all minds, that which forces women to seek among men the father of their child, that which compels the poet to finish realizing his verses, at whatever cost. Several Western critics have given Shaw’s Life Force an almost mystical meaning. Shaw himself never did this. A remarkable experimenter, he was interpreting

a term taken (as everyone knows) from the natural sciences, wholly as a scientist would do. With the help of the Life Force—or, rather, by means of its fullest manifestation— he hopes to overturn the structure of his country, to change the face of the world. He explores this Life Force as a factor in revolution in the teachings of Spencer, whose portraits often hang as exhibits displayed in the first acts of Shaw’s plays, along with those of the great Darwin. But here (and evidence for this can be found in no less than ten of Shaw’s pre-play treatises) one sees our author’s weakness. Despite his knowledge of the concepts of Marx and Engels, he crudely replaces sociological elements with elements that are purely biological. In his quest for a panacea for the larger world, he points to artificial selection—to the social organization of marriages that would guarantee the best breed of people, to humanity selection, etc. In this he is not far from the recipe provided in the play Hidalla oder Sein und Haben by the almost forgotten author Wedekind.38 The English sometimes use the expression “pills to cure an earthquake” [English in original]. By making just such an anti-earthquake pill, Shaw, too, is keeping himself busy with his concrete positive pieces of advice to humankind. It is strange to think that such a great master at destroying the idea of capitalism could be so weak when it comes to creating the idea of a new world.

VI Shaw reads Shaw. Of course Shaw’s bookshelf also holds books written by himself. It makes up a rather long row of tidy little Shaw and the Bookshelf

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volumes in green and red bindings. I’ve long entertained this theme: the writer as reader of his own works. Many people, and sometimes the greatest masters, are not able to relate to their own written work with sufficient objectivity. Dostoevsky, for example, generally did not like to reread what he had written and complained that by the end of the novel he often confused the names of his own characters. The genius Gogol was a rather mediocre reader of himself.39 Shaw reads himself with enormous attention. Rather often he resorts to auto-citations. He almost studies himself, as one would study the classics. True, in his opinion the path to recognition passes through three stages: first, people try not to notice the writer, to ignore him, to bypass him; when that fails, they attack him in order to cast him out of literature; and when even that fails, they are forced to recognize him. Perhaps Bernard Shaw somewhat overpraised himself, and too rarely armed himself against his immature youthful works, but he never forgot a single page, no matter how long ago it had been written. [. . .]40 There remains in parting only to cast a thought at the Adelphi Terrace study, to take one more look at its owner, sunk deep into reading himself: his back—long, narrow, but always ramrod straight—making him resemble old Captain Shotover;41 his beard (as the biographer describes it), at one time red as flame, now seems white-hot; the pencil in his thin, knotted fingers slides across the margins of a book. “He who does not work shall not eat,” Shaw said not long ago, “but that’s not enough. Whoever does not work, let him not dare to live.” 193? Excerpted and translated by Caryl Emerson

DRAMATURGY OF THE CHESSBOARD

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Neither an essay nor conventional fiction, Krzhizhanovsky’s “Dramaturgy of the Chessboard” opens with chess notation— b5-b4—and proceeds through a series of exchanges about dramaturgy and chess between two players, White and Black, in a literary gambit that is by turns frustratingly oblique and dazzling in its erudition. Play is the best word to describe it: as a dramatic dialogue, as an unexpected combination—above all, as an authorial game. Krzhizhanovsky, not content to describe the underlying principles behind plays made for the stage and on the chessboard, instead stages them in a verbal duel between the players, a philosophical dialogue that mimics the thrust and parry of its subject. Black attacks White with the rectilinear logic of chess, constructing syllogisms that liken the chess pieces to tragic or comedic roles on the stage—each with its own function to perform in the game or play, each with its own intrigues and murderous (or adulterous) designs. White, a playwright, resists the easy metaphor or glib correspondence and rails against rule-books even as he’s played into a corner by Black. The end result is reminiscent of later writers such as Tom Stoppard (the Shakespearean match of wits in Rosencrantz

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and Guildenstern Are Dead, for instance) or chess-obsessed Samuel Beckett. In this respect, Krzhizhanovsky is only realizing the obvious metaphoric possibilities of chess that have been taken up by better-known writers such as Nabokov—indeed, the present essay replays the same themes found in Krzhizhanovsky’s earlier fiction (“The Played-Out Player” and “My Match with the King of Giants”), which uses the mechanics of chess to stage the machinations of power. But this piece isn’t about society any more than it is just about chess or dramaturgy. As always, Krzhizhanovsky aims higher. His chessboard and stage are not mere metaphors but microcosms—“toy universes,” in scientific terms; the player and playwright imagine into existence “their own small conditional worlds, endowing them with toy truths,” as he writes in this essay, synecdochally connecting these “as-if ” worlds to the larger multiverse in which they arise. This playful interrelation of levels—the emphasis on scalar symmetry, nesting structures, and the principle “as above, so below”—is an abiding element of Krzhizhanovsky’s fiction, which frequently toys with very large and very small scales. As a lifelong scholar and philosopher of the theater, Krzhizhanovsky also brings this fascination with scalar symmetry into his theoretical work. As he writes in “A Philosopheme for the Theater” (excerpts from which are included in this volume) “the Earth, long dubbed the ‘playfield of life’ (ludum vitae), is so presented by the playful platform of the theater, just like that toy earth is by the similar maquette”—that is, a scale model. But the match between them is not exact, nor should it be. Precisely because the chessboard and the stage are unlike real

life, Krzhizhanovsky finds them valuable as a tool of inquiry: both are simplified, codified by rules, reduced in possibility— and still remain dizzyingly, infinitely variable in how they play out. For proof of this claim, one need only look to the present essay—a late entry in Krzhizhanovsky’s oeuvre, written not long before his own clock ran out, but revealing a writer still at the height of his game.

THE DR A M ATURGY OF THE CHESSBOARD: ON THE GROUNDS OF PAR ADOX BLACK. b5 b4. WHITE. Kg1 g2. BLACK. b4 b3. If I were in your king’s shoes, I would’ve already shed my crown. WHITE. Is that so? BLACK. Look here, my pawn is holding fast to his b file. Two or three moves, and my black bauer1 will knock the crown off your wooden kaiser. Or don’t you agree? WHITE. (With feigned indifference). I resign. White wishes Black a long life. BLACK. A bit late. The battlefield is bare. A mass grave has swallowed them all up. Black and white bones alike. WHITE. If you haven’t yet tired of this, I’d like to go back nine moves. I believe there was still a light at the end of the tunnel then. If I hadn’t moved my bishop from e4, then . . . Dramaturgy of the Chessboard

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BLACK. We’ll replay it. Ultimately all of life is composed of two parts: first you either win or lose it, then you replay it. In the imagination, to be sure. First the skimpy indicative existence, then the prolonged subjunctive contemplation: “What if I? . . .” . . . Your late rook stood here, as I recall? WHITE. On second thought, never mind. Let the piece rest in peace in the wooden box to which I’ve consigned it. A cheap pun, wouldn’t you say? BLACK. Hmm . . . You truly are off your game today. What’s with you? WHITE. Well, I’ve been working on a play, see. And my thoughts have split asunder: some have stayed here on this wooden board, while others have been on the theater stage. BLACK. Your theme? WHITE. It goes something like this: the ordinary love of ordinary people. Not the tragedy of separation, but the middle-class drama of inseparability. Not Romeo and Juliet, but Ivan-andMarya,2 a story of a little blue blossom and a yellow blossom stuck together on one stem. BLACK. I get it: Doubled pawns.3 WHITE. How did you put it? BLACK. Just as you yourself would put it: the story of an ordinary him and ordinary her, two pawns, life’s footmen, one of them treading on the other’s heels. Both of them stuck to the same file on the board, the very same flower stem, the very same footpath. Now that’s why you bungled your twosome on the c file. No doubt one of your wedlocked characters suffers from the fact that his forward is blocked by his companion, who in turn . . . well anyway, it’s all so elementary that . . .

WHITE. To hear you speak, you’d think all these wooden pieces had some sort of volition and inner life beneath their black and white lacquer. Though of course they’re in the hands and thoughts of the chess player. The pieces don’t move; they’re made to make moves. BLACK. And are you so certain that the game—I’m speaking here about the great game—isn’t making its moves with these chess players who move their chess pieces? WHITE. Too clever by half. BLACK. Guilty as charged. I’ll put it more simply: by longstanding convention, the authors of chess matches are traditionally denoted as black and white. This same illusion propels both chess pieces and characters on a theater’s stage. If the author—or the chess player—doesn’t create the illusion that white does battle with black on its own accord, the righteous against the wicked, pluses against minuses, it means the author is rubbish and the chess player isn’t worth a damn. Incidentally, I might add that the doubled pawns on your board that found you lacking as chess player also found you lacking as dramaturge. This theme, you’ll agree, seems rather limited in its sweep for our time. I’d change it, or at least rearrange it such that . . . WHITE. Pièce touchée—pièce jouée.* BLACK. I agree and disagree. In terms of tragedy—yes; but for comedy, no. In tragedy the slightest bloodshed, the barely noticeable “little spot,” as Hamlet says,4 ends with one all sullied and blood-soaked. The dagger pulled from * “A piece touched is a piece moved” (French).

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its scabbard—to use the words of the old man Capulet— wounds and kills while it seeks a sheathe in all bodies, anywhere but in the scabbard it left behind. Thus Macbeth, having laid a finger upon the crown, is compelled by tragic inertia to “move” step by step along the ladder of crime. The same is true of Lear. And Coriolanus. There’s a folk legend: a raven brushes his wing against a clump of snow on a mountain summit and causes an avalanche to crash down into the valleys. But the essence—or rather, the inessence, the light and ethereal being of comedies, is that one can touch and . . . not move at all. In other words, you might come into contact with the causes but reject the consequences. The characters in comedy first vow, then disavow. They even disavow their disavowals. The temptresses in comedies first pretend to be in love, then take their move back. I remember how, when I waged chessboard wars as a schoolboy under my desk, playing poorly but with pluck, we would use a cork or stub of wood to stand in for a lost chess piece. When it fell under the sign of the colon—the “dead symbol” of chess warfare5—this crude stub of wood was replaced with a real chess piece. So it goes in many comedies. The characters first pine after blockheads—so that they might “make their move” to tie the knot, in the play’s dénouement, with some lacquered and appealing little felt-footed pawn. Take, just for example, the plays of Goldoni6 or the Shakespearean travesties. WHITE. Goldoni, Shakespeare—these are the sorts one can’t even touch. How about a level more suited to the likes of me?

BLACK. As you like it. I’ll take any play. Let’s try—I almost said “try on”—The Well-Made Frock-Coat.7 You’ll recall the final scene, when our poorly-made nonentity in his well-made coat appears as a sort of salaryman briefcase-bearer, a halo-limned zero amid bent backs and open-mouthed wallets. It’s a move straight out of a chess playbook. The theme of the passed pawn.8 A pawn who, thanks to political and other gamesmanship, winds up on an advantageous straightaway for its breakthrough. Some pieces, both major and minor, work for it, others against. The pieces annihilate each other, and in so doing they clear the way for the puny pawn, who marches one square at a time to weasel its way to queendom. This theme plays out in a multitude of variations in the work of Western bourgeois dramaturges. Or to be more precise, used to be played out. And small wonder. The whole of the bourgeois social order stands in terror of a talent threatening to reveal itself, an atom harboring an atomic blast. There’s a long-established tradition of choosing a pope from the ranks of the most decrepit and compliant elders. The same goes for members of parliament. The pawn-turned-queen is less trouble than a real queen, an honest-to-God queen. When I think about the Molièrian rogue9 with the Légion d’honneur ribbon in his buttonhole, I don’t see a pair of shoulders capable of bearing the weight of good works, but only the ordinary wooden shoulders of a coat hanger, the sort that’s good only for hanging and swapping out uniforms, frocks and riding coats—no benefit to anyone, and therefore causing all sorts of harm to . . . It’s all vainglory and mocking emptiness. Nothing more. Dramaturgy of the Chessboard

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WHITE. Nothing more? But I know a few comedy endgames that are solved, I’d venture, along the lines of a chess study. For instance, a passed pawn, advancing to the square that bequeaths it the rights of a queen, turns down these rights and settles instead for the social position of a minor piece. We should be fair: from time to time our dodger is no stranger to modesty. BLACK. It’s not modesty—it’s obsequiousness. Which gives him a more quick and incisive victory. It’s absolutely true. The most elegant comedic denouements unfold exactly in this manner. The lackey in Molière’s Les Précieuses Ridicules puts away his dandified nobleman’s suit for his old servant’s livery. Twain’s pauper—I’m speaking here of the dramatic adaptation of his famous moralistic novel10—after advancing to the ranks of princes, “touchingly” contents himself with the honorary, and purely honorary, title of “Friend and Counselor” to the monarch. These chess-study endings are testimony to a transitional epoch, a time when the feudal lord’s power, with the exception of various sorts of moth-eaten ceremonial roles, imperceptibly shifts over to the bourgeoisie. Feudalism still reigns, but it is no longer in control, while the bourgeoisie, the kings of capital, are already in control, though they do not yet reign. The comedy of this period generally marks the triumph of levity over ponderousness, the advertising shingle over the coat of arms, the factotum Figaro over the titled Almaviva,11 the minor pieces over the major. Situations are made simpler; lumbering tragedy is knocked off its high horse. Bourgeois

drama is as serious as one can go and still have it be acceptable on the stage. Going further . . . going further . . . the chess plot gives way on the board to the quid-pro-quo of checkers. In place of the individualized figures of dissimilar stature and status, we have identical puckish little pucks. The crudeness of the checkers game lies in the fact that its wooden characters hop over each other in a purely farcical game of leapfrog. Whereas the pathos of the tragic plot lies in the fact that the killer must occupy the place of the killed, only to die in his turn as a result of the murder. Claudius might strip Hamlet’s father of the crown, just as Macbeth does to Duncan, but the crowns have their revenge. How does that saying go? “As the forest grows, so too grow the axe handles.” WHITE. Your axe handles don’t quite hack it here. Philidor,12 the founding father of chess theory, focused his attention, just as we have here, on the figure of the pawn. He went so far as to say that the soul of the game is in this very piece. But your biography of the pawn is partial and one-sided. You’ve painted the piece as a sort of social climber, an entity that worms its way from rags to riches, perhaps even a total zero, a fat round zero that rolls its way to success. Philidor did not consider the pawn in isolation. No, it was always the pawn chain. These bauers, moving one square at a time, always forward (in contrast to the nobility) and slaying only with a backhand stroke, are strong not so much in their strength as in their unity. They do their deeds as if with conjoined hands. One pawn’s victory is the result of the common efforts of the whole chain. It’s true that the pawn is not born a queen, but Dramaturgy of the Chessboard

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it can be elevated to the highest rank as reward for its service upon the four-cornered battlefield. It isn’t uppity, as you have portrayed it, but no doubt merely modest. And at the very least tenacious. If you take the role of the pawn in chess games of the eighteenth-century French master or the role of so-called rank-and-file heroes in the plays of Soviet dramaturges of the last decade (most especially the last half-decade13), you can’t help but see their common features: the straight line, their interdependency, and the fact that the word “retreat” has been stricken from their lexicon. Indeed, no reason to go so far afield to the eighteenth century for examples, when we have the series of matches played by the young Smyslov . . . 14 BLACK. Well yes, certainly I don’t disagree that a group portrait better captures the image—or rather, the modification of the image—of the pawn than the individual impression. I’m reminded just now of Rembrandt’s rather drab and sternly rendered group portraits of guild members: All of them with hands on canes (or swords), all of them with pointy little beards and eyes converging on a single point in space. When you get down to it, though, such “portraiture of illustrious persons” is possible only with . . . illustrious persons, dignitaries. Although all these “rooks,” ‘bishops,” “knights” might carry the names of objects, their names are abstracted and they are but nominal notations of power in a nominal game of chess. The “algebraic” method of portraiture, let’s call it, is now largely discredited. On the stage, I mean. And here we’re trying to carry it over to the chessboard.

WHITE. What are you talking about? BLACK. I’m thinking of the play Six Characters in Search of an Author.15 That stunt of Pirandello’s. Speaking of the devil. You remember the work? Six characters. It’s an odd coincidence: we also have six figures on the board—the king, queen, rook, bishop, knight, and pawn. It might be stretching a bit to assert that Pirandello’s six characters correspond exactly to the characters of the chessboard. But there’s an undeniable resemblance. His “noble father” is slow-moving and grave like a wooden king—moving only one square at a time and availing himself of his prerogative never to be removed from the board; the “wife” is an aging but still attractive heroine who holds the entire plot in her hands (though she has no hands, it should be noted, so instead she holds the plot under the glued felt of her foot): she moves radially, along any line; the unflattering moniker of “elephant”16 should be linked with the play’s “ingénue,” a person predisposed to secrets, treachery, and oblique lines of attack; the half-witted “juvenile lead” bounds ahead and aside like the skittish horse of the knight, over obstacles that remain upright; the rook raisonneur moves as befits a raisonneur along an unbroken and unbending trajectory; as for the pawn, its role is in eternal and submissive service to everyone else: a pawn can be either a flirtatious soubrette, a dignified confidante or a funeral wailer. WHITE. But just setting up the pieces isn’t the same thing as playing. BLACK. You’re absolutely right. Moreover, note how easily and deftly the image of the pawn, moving as it does out from under your graphite lead to Pirandello’s colored Dramaturgy of the Chessboard

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pencils, is transformed from dignified guild member to wily soubrette . . . WHITE. Why put things into the heads of . . . the dead? Pirandello didn’t draw any chess parallels. That’s out of your playbook. BLACK. So what? I’m not ashamed of it. Just as with your unwritten manuscript and the game you lost, the parallel with the “six characters” is an obvious one. But I will repeat myself: one shouldn’t try to put a human face to power schematics, or draw portraits from geometric drawings. There’s no such thing as the character in the abstract, the pawn in the abstract, or the dramaturge or the chess-player in the abstract, like some type of medieval universalia. My point is this: Chigorin,17 Ostrovsky,18 Shakespeare, Botvinnik,19 the manuscript of the play that awaits you at home—for that matter, this very pawn that I’m knocking here against the board . . . What? What are you serving? Ah, right: black coffee, make it strong (beat). But I—I am ready, like one of those switchboard operator girls, to connect Chigorin with Sukhovo-Kobylin,20 Morphy21 with Shakespeare, and your idea with mine. WHITE. As for the latter—not a chance. “Hello? Put on Ostrovsky . . .” BLACK. Just not the chess player Ostrovsky.22 WHITE. Why not? BLACK. Forgive me for saying so, but Ostrovsky is pure checkers. A different beast altogether. And the area code . . . WHITE. Well, you know . . . BLACK. Don’t cut off my line. Sure: Ostrovsky stands tall, but his genre is small. Wait a minute before arguing. The language of

checkers will do for now. There’s something that resembles a game, an extension of the traditional melee in which one line of men brawls against another, a dozen against a dozen. I’m referring to the ingenious encounter between a black checker “wolf ” and four white “sheep.” The task of the wolf is to rend these four apart and break through. The sheep’s is to come together, closing ranks and “locking out” the predator. Recall the trusty lambs of Rolland’s23 Colas Breugnon: together these two lambs were ready to do battle with their enemy, hoof versus fang. At their core, all of Ostrovsky’s plays are about wolves and sheep. It’s not surprising, then, that one of his plays is called just that. On one hand, you have your Kit Kityches, your Januaries, your Kabanikhаs, your Afrikan Korshunovs.24 On the other, you have defenseless, dowerless daughters, fostered foundlings, browbeaten wives, boozing losers—in short, sheep. WHITE. If I may, I would catch you in a contradiction. There’s no real comedy to be had in a wolf ’s encounter with sheep. Particularly for the sheep. One of Schopenhauer’s logic-based attacks on Leibniz’s “best of all possible worlds” comes to mind: Schopenhauer points out that the pleasure experienced by the wolf tearing out the throat of the sheep amounts to nothing more than the enjoyment of just another breakfast, while for the sheep it’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience of fatal torment and agony. BLACK. I’m well aware of this; there’s no need to feed me my own lines. And one can go further. The relations between wolf and sheep are more complex than you portray them. To put a twist on an old saying—when the wolves are not full, Dramaturgy of the Chessboard

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the sheep are not whole.25 I concur with this. A smattering of Ostrovsky’s dramas fits this category. But the flip side, of course, is that while the wolves are full, the sheep remain whole. While. Nota bene! The maw of the wolf gapes open, ready to swallow the play’s ingénue whole, to destroy the soul trembling like a sheep’s tail within her—and just in the nick of time the dramaturge is able to stick some other delicious morsel in its mouth and force those wolfish jaws to clap shut. Little Red Riding Hood from the Zamoskvorechye District is saved, the rich repent their flaws before the virtuous poor, and even Grannie, swallowed whole but still unchewed, comes back to life. We should here give the creator of the Maly Theater’s repertory his due—there’s remarkable artistry behind the portrayal of the wolf: starting with the hungry predator, he proceeds to show the animal a bit more fed, then sated, and finally stuffed full. Drowsy with food, his instincts dulled, this faunal specimen in The Forest26 might even seem amusing. Which is entirely in character for a checkerboard character with a checkered past. But only until the first pangs of hunger. This is the reason that almost all of Ostrovsky’s comedies, which generally end in a fit of magnanimous caprice, might easily, in some sequel beyond the bounds of the play, verge into a less magnanimous caprice, perhaps even something senseless and vicious. This explains why nearly all the endgames of Ostrovsky’s comedies lack comedy. They are oddly disconcerting. The potential “sixth” act of this play-outside-the-play bodes no good. As we peer down this path, we see that the tale of Red Riding Hood gives way to the myth of Cronos and Zeus:

Cronos devours his own children; Gaia,27 having given birth to his son, Zeus, throws a stone into his maw in place of Zeus. “A ray of light” in a dark wood.28 Well then . . . What can he do? He needs not a ray of light, but a razor-edged sword. WHITE. While you were speaking, a less gloomy thought came to my mind. First about Ostrovsky’s Balzaminov cycle,29 and then about comedy more generally. If we accept—allow me to repeat: if we accept—your checkers-based theory of checkered scheming, the comedic faire-la-cour-ing of courtship, then perhaps the ideal balance in a romantic comedy is achieved only when . . . But I’ve leaped checker-like right over the major premise of my syllogism. Tragedy, as it nears its dénouement, divides its characters into victors and vanquished. The game is played, as we chess players say, to win. With the risk of losing, of course. And so comedy is left with the tendency to end in a draw. BLACK. No. On behalf of comedy, I reject out of hand your offer of a draw. WHITE. I made no such offer, I merely posed the question. Comedy, as you presume, does not agree to a draw? Well then, it will withdraw its draw. BLACK. Quoting Lear: Punctum.† Next? WHITE. No, let me finish. Your same Lear, surrendering the crown, does not surrender his wreath of weeds and heather. Death and sorrow should play no role in the final act of a comedy. There remains a third way, one that might be pulled off only in playing at checkers or playing at love. I’m referring † Period (Latin).

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to the case in which one player is playing to win, and the other is playing to lose.30 It is only in this sort of quid pro quo—both the dramatic “he” and the comedic “she,” the quid and the quo—that both might indeed win. A luxury that, in the conditions and conditionality of the comedic stage, is transformed into everyday reality. Or, perhaps, everyplay reality. For example, if we were just to take this same Balzaminov trilogy of yours— BLACK. Let’s cast aside Ostrovsky’s Holiday Nap Before Lunch for A Midsummer Night’s Dream. And we’ll not forget Love’s Labor’s Lost—or, as the title of the comedy was translated by Ivan Aksyonov, “The Wily Snares of Love.” More precisely, the romantic contest between Beatrice and Benedict. Oh, I can take on any dramatic situation, any play, and explain it without recourse to a sixty-fifth square. WHITE. For Timon of Athens—in Shakespeare’s version— generosity begets poverty. To the squanderer of promises, promises do promise much the same. I shall now overturn your chessboard, along with all the schemes you’ve laid out on it, with one small question: how do you explain the chess clock of Goethe’s Faust using only the language of chess notation? BLACK. The chessboard remains unturned. But the clock hands must do an about-face. The prologue of this play—a play that, incidentally, is not really a play at all—is the epilogue of the long life of Doctor Faustus and the writer Goethe. In every thinking being, to use Goethe’s own words, there reside “two souls”: a grizzled old soul and a youthful one, a seeing and a blind one, a soul of retrospection and a soul of anticipation.

In the match played by the senescent Faustus against juvenescent Faustus over the succession of years, the clock of the old man kept ticking away, while the clock of youthfulness awaited Mephistopheles’s key. The old man pondered; the young man stayed silent. But take a closer look at the two-faced clock. It seems that the old man has fallen into time trouble, Zeitnot, while the young Faust has yet to even set the clock hands of his life into motion. He has not been permitted to live. Once the clock button was punched, the heart of youthfulness, the heart that in its time yielded to the older one—even though, in essence, youth is impatience—began to either beat or tick. Or am I mistaken? If you’d like me to expand on this . . . WHITE. No. It’s clear enough. Don’t gloat, now—“clear” doesn’t necessarily mean “correct.” You’ve managed to evade being pinned down. Perhaps because the play we speak of is not entirely a play. Besides, in the prologue, the real prologue (as the scene that you referred to belongs actually to the first act proper), the theater director suggests providing a staging “in which anyone might find what he needs.” Well, here you found just what you needed to find. BLACK. You know, I once imagined the brain of one of my opponents as a pincushion. There’s a certain manner of arguing I find insufferable. Shaw, for example, does it. In his lengthy introduction to his pint-sized play The Dark Lady of the Sonnets (referring to Shakespeare’s, of course), our professional paradoxicalist declares that the great son of Stratford-upon-Avon, in choosing the titles of Twelfth Night, or What You Will and As You Like It, placed his emphasis on “you”: as if to say that you can do what you will and even like it, but I’ll pass. Dramaturgy of the Chessboard

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WHITE. You’ve gotten yourself all worked up, I’ve nothing at all to do with it. BLACK. Right then. So now the pin goes pointy-end into the cushion and . . . Here, allow me to at least get worked up properly. Why don’t you smoke? Back before the war, I ran across a cartoon in the German satirical newspaper Simplicissimus. It was drawn in two panels. The first showed two men with pistols raised against one another, while their seconds stood off to the side, choreographing the duel. In panel two, the enemies are standing just as before, thin spirals of smoke rising from their pistol barrels; the seconds lay sprawled out dead. The move is pure Shaw: to shoot the seconds instead of the dueling duo. WHITE. If we give your analogies free rein, you’ll be assigning seconds to chess duels. BLACK. And high time, too!‡31 WHITE. I give Mr. Bernard Shaw to you as your target. As a dramaturge. But better sine ira— BLACK.—et studio?§ That’ll do. Nearly sixty years of dramaturgical theory and practice gave Shaw a rich collection of literary effects to draw on. But never was he more of a virtuoso on the chessboard stage than in his mastery of the two-step move called castling. WHITE. You’ll have to be more precise. BLACK. Why not then? I’d call your attention to The Apple Cart, one of the more recent plays by the grandmaster of ‡ Note from 1948: Black’s wish has come true. § “Without ire . . . and prejudice” (Latin).

the stage. King Magnus is in a bind, one that threatens both check and mate. His cabinet of ministers, the complete set of them, assail him to demand a constitution. The king has but one shot: castling. And he avails himself of this last chance. The king’s nephew, who is to receive the crown, hastens to the throne. As for the king, he prefers instead to announce his candidacy for parliament, and, making full use of the sensation caused by his abdication, to be elevated into the ranks of parliamentary leadership where he may quash the proposed constitution. In response to this his dumbfounded ministers respond in complete accordance with the seconds:      Proteus: This is treachery.      Balbus: A dirty trick.      Nicobar: The meanest on record.      Pliny: He’ll be at the top of the poll. WHITE. Shaw . . . He plays with a long keyboard. Though even one key gives a good sense of his timbre. But what about Priestley?32 The cutting-edge playwright, the monochord with adjustable bridge? BLACK. The name in my mind is forever associated with a simultaneous chess exhibition—the sort where some sort of “examiner” (who is invisibly assisted by the author) moves from table to table, from character to character; on each and every chessboard, in accordance with chess tradition, the exact same opening moves are played. WHITE. That’s just the container, the way the plot has been packaged dramaturgically. What about the contents? BLACK. (After a beat). Suicide chalked up to others, or . . . Dramaturgy of the Chessboard

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WHITE. So you see: “or.” Admit it: your chess terminology has failed you. The world of folktales is both vaster and richer than our square little world. Should we cadge a loan from it, then? BLACK. I’m listening. WHITE. A certain “wandering hermit” is in possession of a bottle of aqua mirabilis. This liquid is a superglue, one that turns a grazing touch into the tightest bond. Two lovers arrange an illicit rendezvous and—squirt!—the lovebirds shall never be parted; the rival lover comes along and—splash!—the rival becomes inseparable from the adulterers; a neighbor hears the commotion and comes running—one swish from the magic bottle and . . . the obscene and seething human mass grows larger and larger until the wandering hermit intones the magic word to demiraculize the miraculous water. BLACK. All this is not devoid of colorful imagery, but . . . Following your lead: during harvest season in the northern villages, when all the peasant huts empty out, the owners of the houses prop their doors from the outside with a stick or a broom: not in order to lock them, no, but in order to indicate to some chance hermit passing by that their houses aren’t locked from the inside. These props from chess diagrams and fairytale miracles are also only conditional. Dramaturgy should be a closed system, hermetically sealed from within. And not— WHITE. Now you’re just like Baba Yaga, who lifts her head clean off her shoulders and then brushes it out by running a comb along her single hair. Such an image is found in our folklore, if we’re going to get into all that. There’s not much you won’t find in our folklore.

But there’s no sense in hewing to the old axiom, “When you lose the axe-head, the axe-handle goes with it.” The axehandle will still come in handy for our purposes. The chess analogies, if we use them with care, might provide counsel to the dramaturge. For instance, we can easily replace the archaic five-act play structure, with the opening, which then segues into the middlegame, which resolves itself in the endgame. This way of dividing the play avoids choppiness; it is more organic and broadly applicable. The power of this analogy is strengthened, in my opinion, when moving into the closed world of Steinitz-like33 dramaturgy. You—and I know this through personal experience and by . . . let’s say by having it beaten into me—are an adherent of a combinational style plus aggressive Andersonian34 gameplay. His “immortal” attack on Kieseritzky35 is immortal precisely because it trades away nearly all its soldiers for the final victory. At the vanguard of this sort of play is usually a gambit. What’s a gambit? A Trojan Horse (on the board, almost always a pawn), a gift to the enemy in exchange for a “hospitable” breach in the defenses. This is followed by a forcing of the breach. The game stretches out along the line of attack. But there’s another war going on, a war of hidden snipers, wide-ranging scouts and packet boats. BLACK. All this is very instructive. Perhaps excessively so. For your partner, that is. WHITE. My apologies. I wanted only to say that the “static drama,” as Maeterlinck36 first called it, and the “closed match” introduced into the game by Steinitz, both include Dramaturgy of the Chessboard

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features that, if not actually related, are at least similar in kind. An unsteady, wavering balance that is disrupted, or more precisely, half-disrupted and immediately restored—upon which rests . . . or rather teeters the very being of these similar things. And the same goes for the arts as a whole. I simply can’t abide lawn tennis—if nothing else than for the long procession of balls missed by racquets, the long procession of games. In art, there ought to be no such thing as a miss. What does it matter to me who checkmates whom: X beats Y or Y beats X? I want there to be— BLACK. Well then—if it please you—why don’t you go watch Chinese jugglers whirling their porcelain plates on the tips of their poles. And let your heart shatter—oh, the horror!— right along with the plate that falls off its pole. The battle of life!—Now that’s the theme of themes. In the arts, in games, in philosophemes and strategems. These one-legged denizens of the chessboard might pad about noiselessly on their soft-soles. But human thought has invested them not with timid little souls, but with . . . Anyway, what good are words—here’s a fact for you. This was back before the war, one evening during the international chess tournament in Moscow. Out on the street (this was in front of the Hotel Moscow’s lobby), caught in a mix of rain and hail, stands a mass of umbrellas and wet hats: the lobby is cheekby-jowl, and the auditorium is elbows-in-ribs. Who are they, these people? Stalwart guardians of aesthetic balance? Apostles of infallibility? No, these are the dueler’s seconds, the same people so comically portrayed in your Simplicissimus. Their hearts thrill with battle. They are not at all indifferent

to whether X beats Y or if Y beats X. Oh no, they are quite ready to turn themselves inside out for their man. These are seconds, I repeat, and not deep thinkers. And what about those football fans from London or Glasgow, who buy noisemakers “to express their feelings”? What, in essence, do these primitive noisemakers noise about? About something not quite so primitive: about the fact that the voice of the person is weaker than the voice of his feelings! Whereas you . . . Ah, really . . . WHITE. Odtrąbiono. BLACK. What’s this now? WHITE. A Polish military command. Literally, “pipe down.” What we say in Russian is plainer: “At ease, have a smoke.” Now strike me a match, please. Ah yes. Thank you. Allow me to continue. The closed game, when moved onto the theater stage, is transformed into hermetically sealed dialogue-asaction. Its moves are incremental but earthshaking. The dialogic nature of the characters—both amongst and within themselves—is extremely intense. In these sorts of plays, characters talk with “dear old book cupboards,” even “deeply respected” ones.37 The struggle of deeds is muted; however, the struggle of motives is very strong. An accumulation of minor advantages takes place. According to folk wisdom, should a stepmother stroke the crown of a child’s head, he’ll shrink by the height of a poppy seed, but if his mother does it—he’ll grow by a poppy seed instead. You’re expecting me now to quote Chekhov, but I . . . here I have . . . in my notebook—from a collection of folk sayings and expressions . . . here you are: “Wife, hey wife!” “What?” Dramaturgy of the Chessboard

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“Do you love me?” “Huh?” “Or love me not?” “Yes.” “Yes what?” “Nothing.” This is in the nature of life itself: the untying of knots, not hacking them apart. Even a playwright as subtle as Oscar Wilde railed against this sort of hackwork, which permits both sword and shield to be confiscated in the theater’s confines. A shield should be left to the antihero, no matter how reprehensible he might be. BLACK. (Interrupting). Most certainly not. Crush the serpent with its own shield. How does that Zhukovsky38 poem go? “The servant killed the knight by his treachery”—that’s the first line of the ballad; the last is “and his heavy armor drowned him.”39 Generally speaking, in all this vaunted theory of balance I prefer the honest steelyard balance to the eternally seesawing pans of the beam scale. And I’m not one to be touched by little poppy seeds. In chess, the piddling accumulation of small edges leads only to a sense of hopelessness, to predictions of death by draw for this most strong-willed of games that trains the muscles of our minds. The most dismal thing you’ll see on a chessboard is the stalemate: the moment of tying oneself in knots, the death by asphyxiation, the across-the-board leglessness of the pieces: Fifty steps in place. The American playwright Odets40 follows in Chekhov’s footsteps. His Paradise Lost is a play in which all the nondramatis personae wander about—no joke—as though they are lost. And what about the “paradise”? An obligatory American-style happy ending? The character makes no move, either forward or back; it falls to a lottery ticket left in a desk drawer to get fed up and win the day for these also-rans.

Who rake in untold thousands of dollars. What is this, a life? No—it’s a “supplement” to life, like those newspaper supplements, the flat sheets of paper the subscriber might cut out to make three-dimensional figures. WHITE. But then who is the subscriber? BLACK. Don’t interrupt. This Odets is clever, one must allow, in the way he squeezes into his play an old legend. . . . How does he have it?—A long, long time ago, people decided to build a tower with a spire piercing the clouds, up to the stars; at first the work went briskly, then slowed, until at last it stopped. And subsequent generations of people, forgetting the great builder’s plan, began taking this proud tower apart brick by brick to use in their homes and cottages. Thus their humble abodes grew larger and larger with each passing day, whereas the tower . . . Dramaturgy is a proud art. And its heroes should have mature psyches. I understand the concept of an energetic hero but refuse to understand an entropic hero. WHITE. (After a moment of silence.) We’ve both gotten carried away in our desire to pinpoint the similarities in how chess and theater schematics unfold. But surely logic dictates that before anything else, one must first establish a line of essential dissimilarities of these two types of dramaturgies. That would have made our path straighter. As for me, I believe one of the reasons for the analogies’ dissimilarities lies in the following: in the small world of the closed chess game (as in any other game), there’s the so-called touch rule; in the world of the closed, even if de-heroized, play, there’s a psychological law— maybe not a law but an inference, let’s say—that stipulates that “everything has been touched, yet nothing has been moved.” Dramaturgy of the Chessboard

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BLACK. Allow me to use a figure of silence. (Beat.) Albeit in the form of counterweight: one might indeed speak, as you have done, about the dramaturgy materialized in these small wooden actors. In this scenario, only the puppeteer is alive. Take this cum grano salis,|| I humbly implore you. But when Hegel constructs his formula for the tragic using the case study of Antigone, asserting that the collision of “civil law” and “sacred law” engenders a feeling of “fear and pity” in the viewer, inasmuch as goodness here in fact prevents realization of the good (a law violates a law), and continues by saying (turning the fur coat inside out) that comedy, which presents not so much a conflict of one character with another, one law with another, but instead a squabble of inconsequential figures with others just as inconsequential, lawlessness with lawlessness, subterfuge with ruse, eliciting the viewer’s sense of joy and relief, inasmuch as wickedness in fact prevents the realization of the wicked, and . . . whew, I thought I’d never get to the “then.” There’s the oppressive influence of the Hegelian style for you. Cutting to the chase: The figures of stage are either bad or good, black or white in their souls. Whereas the figures on the chessboard—covered as they are with either black or yellow lacquer—are neither positive nor negative; in other words, they lie outside moral considerations. This is crucial. I’ll widen this breach. We are surrounded by problems posed by nature and history, “the riddle of the universe,” as Haeckel titled his work. These are presented to us as an object. Guess the answer or get thrown by “nature, the sphinx”41 into the || “Not seriously,” lit. “with a grain of salt” (Latin).

abyss. Either—or. This is the way that the world is perceived by scientists, thinkers, and the spiritual leaders of humankind. But alongside such thinkers there also exist certain natural-born players. For instance, you and I. Not diviners of great riddles of the world. No, these are the concocters of new minor riddles, the sort fitting into this little box, for instance. Alongside the world of unconditionality, they create their own small conditional worlds, endowing them with toy truths, and afterward begin to immerse themselves in solving “chess problems” with immense gravity, dedication, and deep thought. To repeat: I’m a player and thus shall I remain to my last breath, but how can I object to Sheridan42 when he says that he had “ ‘heard of people knocking out their brains against a wall, but never before knew of anyone building a wall expressly for the purpose.”43

Beat. WHITE. Grant me this. It appears you’ve led me into a dense forest of images, forcing me to search for the way out, so that . . . But on what grounds? BLACK. On the grounds of paradox.

1946 Translated and introduced by Reed Johnson

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Physiological Sketches (Excerpts)

Emotionally and artistically bound to the city of Moscow, which many writers and artists had evacuated during World War II, Krzhizhanovsky resolved to document as closely as possible the survival of a city that had been no stranger to invasion. To this purpose, he turned to the “physiological sketch,” an essayistic genre that emerged in France in the early nineteenth century. Short pieces that might be characterized today as a “slice of life,” these sketches flourished in Russia in the 1840s, notably among such writers as Turgenev and Dal, and were championed by Vissarion Belinsky. As with so much of his prose, Krzhizhanovsky sought to breathe new energy into an old form. Unfortunately, Krzhizhanovsky’s ambitions for a book of these sketches, to be called Wounded Moscow, were never realized. Dispatched on long assignments to far-flung corners of the Soviet Union, the author could return to his notes only after the war had ended. By the time he was ready to publish the first sketches in 1949, there was no appetite for representations of the war that were not focused on Russian heroism.

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Windows Even before the war they had started to be on the lookout for war: the windows of Moscow. Paper crosses and zigzags lay along their transparent surface. We had outfitted the glass, working with scissors and glue, in a delicate white dress. The white strips were later replaced with dark blue and purple. The  windows reluctantly became unused to their natural nakedness. To us, too, conscripted as tailor’s assistants, they seemed an inhibiting attire, a hindrance to both sun and eye, a Londoner’s hand-me-down. And so, too, the war, handed down to us from others. Behind the paper strips’ braid, the thick blue lining of the curtain. Together with the oncoming twilight, unfurling rolls of camouflage. Open your hand: on its surface, lines running in crosses and zigzags. By their design, chiromancers divine the character of the owner’s hand, maintaining that for each of us the reading of the lines on one’s palm is highly individual, there are no repeats. Perhaps it’s nonsense. But then, what if it’s not? Since the day of the war’s arrival, all manner of what-ifs have sprinkled upon us out of the clear blue sky. Chiromancy has been with us since once upon a time, since the ancient Greeks—and let it stay, if only as pure supposition, and fenestrology, too. I often wander past such glass quadrangles, seemingly familiar, layered into the houses’ brick walls. Row upon row of them. Stacked in stories. On their flanks, the entryway gates, strapping in mirrored uniforms of rhombuses and squares. I don’t recognize them now. Wrinkles and furrows have passed over

the windows’ flat faces, each of them having their own expression, their own, I might say, view of the world. There’s a not-so-clever riddle: a glass lake with wooden shores. The solution: a window. But now every window looking upon a Moscow street has transformed into a riddle. And a far more clever and complex one than the one just told. Behind the x’s of pasted paper strips live certain twolegged, two-armed, two-eyed x’s. Simply put, the pasters. Working with scissors, hands, and paste—this is already an utterance. The de-camouflaging of the psyche. Sluggishness or swiftness, thoroughness or carelessness, downheartedness or cheerfulness—one way or another, this should all be reflected in how the window has been pasted over. Paper lines show up willy-nilly on the glass palm. The starting point of fenestrology. Let the glass panes lose some of their transparency, for those who live behind their positions are themselves becoming a bit transparent, accessible to the eye and understanding of any passer-by. On one condition: if this eye is sufficiently sharp and the ability to understand knows its business—to understand. But enough introductions. Let the street lead on. And let the windows speak. Over here, for example, on the second floor, first from the right. Slender little paper roads pasted pell-mell to the glass. Their ends are too lazy to reach the corners of the window frame, one has even come unglued and drooped down. The person living behind this glass surface slides over life like a drop of rain over a window. He doesn’t like to be doing, he prefers to be done with. His thoughts keep bad company: perhaps, perchance, and somehow are their inseparable friends. Moscow in the First Years of the War

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He’s always hastening somewhere and never gets anywhere on time. His basic reflex: the wave of hands waving you off. His catchwords: “It’ll work out.” “Oh, leave it!” “What’s the big deal?” “I wouldn’t dream of it.” And what if a German bomb waves its airy sleeve against the glass? What then? Then the pal of perhaps and perchance will think it over, shake his head, and say: “Who could have known?”—or: “Now there’s your pound of flesh!” Though under the given circumstance the word “ton” might have been more fitting. The window into the basement level speaks differently. Its wide surface, with vertical transoms in the upper portion—it’s completely sealed under sheets of newspaper. They’ve already managed to go yellow beneath the impact of the golden rays of sun trying to force their way inside, into the basement-dweller’s abode. But in vain. They’re messing with the wrong guy. A hypochondriac who’s driven out the sun, the past-the-transom man, firm and obstinate in his decisions. “Today white x’s, tomorrow blue crosses, the day after tomorrow paper curtains, and we’ll deal with what’s next when we get there. . . .” And the past-the-transom man, having smeared the window thick with starchy paste, has stuck sheet upon sheet and severed, once and for all, further encroachments on his peace and life routine. It used to be: day—night—day. Now let it be: night— night—night. In fact, isn’t it all the same, the sun in the sky or a bulb in the ceiling? You can read, you can write, you can feed. It’s not far from the book to the eyes, from the plate to the mouth. You won’t lose your way. I see him clearly. Though he has hidden from my eyes behind screens of newspaper, this past-the-transom man is a long face with sunken cheeks, sharp

creases of skin from the nares to the blunt chin, bushy eyebrows, owlish eyes accustomed to the muted day. He, the man from the basement, of course counts himself more farsighted than others. It is enough to look at his smile, frozen at the corners of his lips. However, he does not foresee: in a month they’ll shut off the light on his block—and his long face will have to stretch even more, and his smile—to blow its coop. Moving on. The semicircular window in the attic of a little old house with a hunchbacked roof, still mindful of the last century. This window’s expression is more affable by far. There are reflections of sunlight on its clean-washed cheeks, and the paper strips’ plaiting resembles a rough-woven veil. It is as though the dilapidated attic is squinting through the white netting and thinking to itself: “We’ve seen it all, and we’ll see more yet: will you deliver us, will you in some way delight us?” Or take that window, the one catercorner across the street: despite being sullied by the street’s dust, it has cheerfully flung its casements into the world. Along the glass, in bolts of paper lightning, there are sharp zigzags intersected at the diagonal by a flat arrow abandoned mid-flight. Evidently the owner of this room, too—there, behind the window-wicket tipped open to the air—wears his heart on his sleeve. Then again . . . Lift your eyes. Just beneath the roof, two square gapers. Identical and ceremonious, like a couple in love. Both purple-patterned, resembling the grid of a trellis. A triangle on the left one, a triangle on the right. Within the sash of the right, a little square and a cross, and in the one on the left, a cross and tiny square. The lives, those behind the windows, are like Moscow in the First Years of the War

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parallel lines. Correction: they were. Now he’s at the front, she waits for letters, and between them—earlier, along dividing partitions, and now, over thousands of kilometers—roam triangular and rectangular envelopes. Over there are a balcony’s long and narrow panes. On the iron railing, in boxes—flowers: geraniums, nasturtiums, buttercups. Neither the geraniums nor the buttercups know there’s a war on, and they bloom as though nothing were wrong. They’re equally unaware that they’re merely annuals. But I do know—of them, but not of myself. There are lots of them, windows, built up to the left and right along both sides of my steps. Some are gloomy and cold, similar to plugs of ice cut out and stood on their sides; others are like the surface of vertical lakes and ponds in which every so often a silvery scale catches an emergent fleck of sun. Dictionaries don’t have enough words, the imagination lacks images to inscribe them in these pages. It’s a shame that the artist’s pencil is busy with other, more urgent and important work. And cameras are forbidden, as well they should be, from snapping their shutters without permission. And so you will remain unportrayed, hieroglyphs traced by war upon the windows of Moscow. But for in certain people’s memories. Of people like me. And they’re the ones they’ll call freaks.

The Girls by the Water The water was stuck in the pipes. Well then, if the water doesn’t come to the person, the person goes to the water.

The housewives grabbed buckets and basins. I, unskilled in housely or wifely affairs, dug a Borjomi bottle out of a corner and set off in search. On an azure field, white letters promising liquid. In the form of fruit juices, mineral waters, etc. Behind the counter, next to three empty glass cylinders with three little spigots at the bottom, her hands withdrawn into the cuffs of her sleeves, sits Girl #1. Over her fur coat with an upturned collar, a clean white work robe. “A bottle of sparkling water, please.” “We’re only selling glasses.” “Fine, glasses, then. A little watering can would make things easier . . .” “We don’t have one. And it’s not allowed.” “What’s not allowed?” “Taking it out. You drink it here.” “Then I’ll have to wash up here as well. You understand, in our building . . .” “It’s none of my business what they do at yours or anybody’s. You drinking or not?” “That’s impossible.” At the din of our voices, Girl #2 comes out from the back. She makes an explanatory gesture: possible. Only now do I notice: a boy of about twelve is sitting beside a little table by the wall. In front of him are four glasses. Two of them are still bubbling, the third has gone quiet, and the fourth is pouring the obviously burningly cold liquid into his mouth as though into a watering can.

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What does one say to that? So concludes the transcript (by memory) of the first conversation. ɷɸɷ

Second conversation. I’m holding the bottle concealed in my coat pocket. Before me are Girls #1 and #2. And one more: #3. As though before a tribunal: “One glass. No, four, and I’ll handle it . . .” “The glasses are over there. But there’s no water. The store’s closed.” “So then why’s the door open?” “The door’s open, but the store’s closed.” “But doesn’t the door lead into the store? . . .” I feel like I’m becoming embroiled in some neither-nor-ness. “After all, you’re sitting here.” “They sat us here, so we sit.” “But—” The last word belonged to the loudly slamming door. ɷɸɷ

Third conversation. The store plunged in semidarkness. At the counter, beside the flickering fire of an oil lamp, the head of Girl #2 and an open book. I hear the gurgling of water—thank the Lord. “Well, then, I’ve brought my watering can. Here you go.” “I can’t let you have it.”

“But there’s water.” “There’s water, but there’s no light. The store’s closed.” “And yet you’re reading a book. What the hell? . . .” “Citizen, I have to ask you to leave, you’re making the wick go out. And whether I’m reading or not is no one else’s concern. You’ve been told—it’s not for sale.” Girls #1 and #3 were peeking out in alarm from the slightly open door to the back. ɷɸɷ

Fourth conversation. Dark. No lights, no lamps. I ask the darkness: “Is there water?” The darkness replies: “There is.” “So where’s the lamp?” “Burned it out.” “Who did?” “The kerosene.” “I see  .  .  .,” and, turning toward the threshold, I open the outer door: in the bright light of a winter’s day flash the faces of the three girls by the water, the marble-painted counter, and the glass tubes of the spigots. In response, three angry, shouting voices: “Close the door! Hurry up. Some man of culture you are!” “Pour the water. Right to the brim. Then I’ll close the door.” Blasts of frosty air, like a crowd of phantom, thirst-afflicted apparitions, burst in just behind me. Moscow in the First Years of the War

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Now I hear not shouting but a frozen whisper: “Listen. Close it. You see, it’s . . . That’s not how we do things.” “The water.” A minute later I place three ten-kopeck pieces on the counter. The bottle, now grown heavy, slides into my coat pocket. Gently closing the plywood-forged armor of the door behind me, I hear quietly, like a swishing of silk: “Five kopecks change.”

The July Baby It’s possible the first bombs to rain down on Moscow slightly sped up your “release date,” as the newspapers say. July baby, a terrible July of the most terrible of years, you should understand . . . then again, you don’t understand anything yet. And that’s good, since one can die of understanding, the way they die of diphtheria, pneumonia, bowel disease. Incomprehension is your chance at life. Take it. But understanding is your debt. Someday you’ll ask, “Where’s my father?” They’ll answer: killed. “What for?” For you to live. For whatever you were then. But that’s all rhetoric. Maybe you won’t ask. And then people aren’t obliged to answer. These might do it for them: your father’s crutches, or his jacket’s empty sleeve. But for now the center of your world is the nipple of your mother’s breast, and the radius extends first by inches, then meters, and there . . . How often I have observed you, July baby, in the “shelters.” Under the roar of explosions everyone raised their anxious

eyes toward the ceiling. Even the soldiers who’d ended up here by accident. You alone maintained complete serenity. Listening to the cannonade, the smokers nervously rolled their cigarettes, trying to hide their trembling hands. You, tiny lamprey, had nothing to hide: there wasn’t a single speck of fear on your little blister-swollen, browless face. O July baby, hold onto your infantile fearlessness. For as long as you can. It will come in handy: wars are still with us. 1949 Excerpted and translated by Benjamin Paloff

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A HISTORY OF UNWRITTEN LITERATURE

12

A Prospectus

Krzhizhanovsky’s proposal for a monograph on unwritten literature showcases his erudition and scholarly ambition as well as his perennial obsessions with synecdoche, potentiality, and his own obscurity. Ostensibly a survey of prerevolutionary literature’s unfinished works and unrealized ideas, complete with visual aids, the project’s real focus is Krzhizhanovsky’s own unpublished corpus and the question of his place in literary history. His prospectus alludes at one point to Pushkin’s unfinished short story “Egyptian Nights”— possibly an intentionally incomplete romantic fragment that breaks off at a moment of narrative and erotic tension. Given that Krhizhanovsky had written a continuation of that text in a partially drafted novel entitled That Third Guy, which evolved into a drama by the same name (completed but never staged, it is now available in English in an excellent translation by Alisa Ballard Lin), he represents himself as the heir to the imaginative legacy of Pushkin and other writers of nineteenth-century Russian literature. By taking on himself

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the duty to liquidate the creative debt of his predecessors by bringing their inchoate ideas to term, Krzhizhanovsky implies a hope that future generations would take on the responsibility to give flesh to his own jotted ideas and clothe his own manuscripts in printed letters. The text resonates with the second section of “The Poetics of Titles,” which takes up the question of vanished or unwritten texts that are known to us only by their names. The conceit of a potential text that haunts our imaginations and demands our attention is also an animating force in Krzhizhanovsky’s fiction: his novel The Letter Killers Club is framed as a series of ideas for stories related by authors who have sworn not to write them down. At the end of the narrative, the stories possess the body of the narrator and compel him, in a grotesque version of Romantic inspiration, to realize the tales in the medium of ink on paper. Here the stories indeed have a life of their own, and the spirit of the tale can be put to rest only by giving it body—a metaphor to which Krzhizhanovsky resorts repeatedly in his prospectus for A History of Unwritten Literature. The book itself, of course, remained unwritten, a fact that lends the proposal a self-aware poignancy. Although the piece speaks to Krzhizhanovsky’s own situation only through historical material, its displacement of censorship and solitary writing “for the desk drawer” onto tsarist Russia makes it a pregnant document of literary life under Stalinism.

A HISTORY OF UNWRITTEN LITER ATURE Realized and unrealized literary ideas. The law of unrealization: the more slowly a work is born, the more new themes it gives birth to. The biological cause that prevents ideas from being fulfilled: as the quantity of themes and materials increases, life decreases in proportion. Examples. Social causes: discouraged themes; the imbalance between plot supply and demand. Censorship: materials swallow up the theme, etc. The essential is displaced by the urgent; the peripheral; literary tasks imposed from without. As a result, every author at the moment of his death has accumulated a debt to literature, a set of unmaterialized ideas still, as it were, owing to society. A “literary legacy” thus comprises both reality and potentiality. The class of objects that are inadequately realized, half-realized, outlined, existing only as notes, presents us with an ever-increasing series, possessing a distinctive “problematic being,” which might be subjected to scholarly inquiry. First there arises a host of questions of a purely methodological character: to what degree is research into the unrealized realizable? When does an idea acquire sufficient literary-historical maturity? Are ideas extinguished together with the life of their creator, or are they passed on to other writers (to new literary generations) to be completed? The question of “escheated themes” and “executors” of the idea. A History of Unwritten Literature

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We cast our method, like a net, into the place that promises the best fishing. My “from—to—”: from the end of classicism to the beginning of symbolism. That is, from the start of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth. This is the period of the monarchical police state, protecting itself with the cheval de frise of censorship from the ideas spread by literature.1 This is a period in which the radius of the circle of themes sometimes expands, sometimes (and rather more frequently) diminishes, occasionally shrinking down almost to the length of zero. Literature protected itself either through “Aesopian language” (Shchedrin) or through silence, i.e., the nonrealization of themes.2 At the end of this work I will set forth a fairly complete list of this period’s conceived but unborn literary themes and in advance I will ask this question: ought we to cancel the unrealized thematics and plot structures imagined by the best of the writers thinking on the other side of our great revolution; or ought we rather ourselves undertake the repayment of at least some part of that thematic and narrative debt that previous generations did not liquidate?3 Briefly put: ought we establish graveyards for ideas alongside ordinary graveyards; or ought we rather, distinguishing the dead from the living, fulfill our final obligation to the latter?4 Chapter I. End of the eighteenth century. Courtly prejudice against the printing press, which intrudes on the epoch of album poetry and familiar letters. Literature “for the few” (“Fuer Wenige”)—for the one (remnants of this genre in the

“novel in letters”)—for oneself (the pages of a diary, closed with a key).5 The political theory of falling silent (“blessed is he who silent was a poet”).6 Literary work that seeks “honor” and not an “honorarium.” The slow tempo and themelessness of a life that compels the ink to dry up in the inkwell. Idle poetry. The first steps of Derzhavin.7 For the time being there is no talk of nonrealization: there sooner arises the question of over-realization, i.e., repetitions and variations of a single theme. Wind from the West: the last works of Trediakovsky and Lomonosov, in which the struggle to realize in practice a theory of style and meter is clearly visible but which ends up in no more than a half-realization.8 Examples (two columns—to the left, theoretical propositions; to the right, attempts to realize them in verse). Karamzin and Zhukovsky.9 Enlisting the help of neologisms and images of antiquity and contemporary Western poetry. The unrealized designs of these two poets. The relatively small scale of their “nonrealization.” Chapter II. Pushkin and the Pushkin Pleiades.10 The poet’s thoughts on the slow maturation of themes. Variants (see pasted-in sheets in 1833 copy of Onegin). Side-branchings of thematics from one genre to another (“The History of the Pugachev Rebellion,” “The Captain’s Daughter”; “The Blackamoor of Peter the Great” [unfinished], “The History of Peter the Great” [unrealized]).11 Pushkin’s epistolary correspondence as a set of unfulfilled literary promises. The poet worked in all genres.

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I provide a table of genres. Some boxes in it remain empty, if one refers only to the poet’s published works. But research into his sketches and outlines will thematically populate those boxes as well. The question of “bequeathing an unrealized idea”—as applied to the legacy of Pushkin’s ideas.12 Lermontov as “executor” of Pushkin’s partially realized ideas.13 During his lifetime, the allocation to Gogol of a “thematic lot” (The Inspector General and Dead Souls).14 Our whole literature is a genealogical tree of Pushkin’s plots, branching in various ways and yielding complex combinations. Panorama of examples. Chapter III. The Pushkin Pleiades. Delvig: his orally narrated tale of the two lovers and the chance observer. Uncompleted minor works. Iazykov: Unwritten poems. Viazemsky’s archive as a list of themes that came in but never made it to the outbox.15 Chaadaev—an unrealized talent. Draft notes of Griboedov: a great multitude of unwritten works. Unwritten memoirs of P. Nashchokin. A number of other examples from this circle. Chapter IV. Gogol. Unfinished works of a theoretical character. The reasons for their unfinishedness—inadequate knowledge and the author’s incomplete method.16

Second volume of Dead Souls. Gogol’s “dreams” of a new thematics.17 Chapter V. Nekrasov.18 The Scavenger Muse poets.19 Satirical experiments of Dobroliubov.20 Bérangerists and Heinians.21 Struggle with the censorship that drove a number of ideas back into nonbeing. Populist literature. The “brushed-aside” theme. Chapter VI. Dostoevsky. List of ideas for novels.22 Why this list was not realized. Chapter VII. Saltykov-Shchedrin. The technique of “Aesopian language.” Shchedrin’s unpublished manuscripts. Intentions that never made it even to a draft incarnation. Chapter VIII. L. Tolstoy: the unfinished “Landowner’s Morning.” The unwritten “History of the Day Before.”23 Tolstoy’s relative prosperity in the field of the unincarnated. Chapter IX. Chekhov. The writer’s “notebook”: a list of unrealized plots.24 Chekhov’s epistolary correspondence, tracing themes he never managed to bring into being. Chapter X. The symbolists. The theory of incomplete realization on principle. The artistic work as the theme of signs that signal on a theme. I. Rukavishnikov and his theory of themes and plots that are immanent to one or another meter and rhythm.25 A History of Unwritten Literature

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Blok: his projects for unwritten plays (The Stork on the Roof, etc.)26 A. Bely: a theory of realized and unrealized variations on a theme.27 Bely’s plot practice. L. Lunts and his thoughts on “endless plot.”28 Chapter XI. On the author’s two literary “I”s: the prevailing “I” and the fallow, sidelined “I.” M. Gorky as an author of realistic works and as a creator of fantastic stories (“About the Devil,” “A Person from a Novel,” etc.)29 The two faces of Chernyshevsky, Turgenev, and others.30 Chapter XII. A table providing a concise list of unrealized works. This list runs the course of unwritten works in chronological order. Then it repeats them in their thematic aspect. Index of names and themes. 1936 [?] Translated and introduced by Jacob Emery

A HISTORY OF HYPERBOLE

13

In this undated proposal for a book that was never written, Krzhizhanovsky again takes up the trope that he claims, in “Countries That Don’t Exist,” to have been “insufficiently studied by historians of literary style.” In that essay, he explores hyperbole as a folkloric motif, which facilitates the invention of imaginary lands and mythological heroes. Here, hyperbole is no longer a tool for categorizing folkloric trends; it is the very prism through which Krzhizhanovsky tracks the development of Western culture, philosophy, and literary history. Measuring the heights of hyperbole over the centuries as he would water levels in a flood, Krzhizhanovsky characterizes various authors and periods according to the use they make of this single trope. From the ancient Babylonians, the shape of whose cuneiform letters were hyperbolic, to Rabelais, who “hyperbolized” language itself, through to the realists who “banned” hyperbole altogether, Krzhizhanovsky defamiliarizes literary and historical periods. His planned study culminates in the suggestion—also offered at the end of his novel The Return of Munchausen—that hyperbole meets its match in the Soviet

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Union. When “overproduction” becomes the policy of industry and literature, life itself takes on the function of hyperbole. Reducing these periods to manifestations of strength, size, and scale, Krzhizhanovsky ultimately encourages his prospective readers to consider literary history as the evolution of attitudes toward excess.

A HISTORY OF HYPERBOLE 1. Hyperbole. A lexical and figurative designation. Hyperbole as a trope of excess. A figure, “slinger,” standing at the brink of the world, attempting to cast a stone beyond its limits (Titus Lucretius Carus).1 Hyperballein (ὑπερβαλειν)—a thrower beyond (upward). Analogous to the “apical meristem” (in botany).2 The movement of speech proceeding vertically upward or horizontally outward. Hyperbole and period. The slung stone, rebounding from the edge or flying beyond it: negative or positive hyperbole. A musical scale of hyperbolisms. 2. Hyperbole as trope. Hyperbole as stylistic tendency (hyperbolicity). A hyperbolical epithet. Hyperbole—cothurnus3 and hyperbole—stilts. A parody of hyperbole via hyper-hyperbole (υ2). Examples. 3. The hyperbolized syllable (Rabelais’s reduction of consonants in the Maistre’s speech, etc.). The elephanticized word (Shakespeare’s “honorificabilitudinitatibus” in Love’s Labor’s Lost, etc.). Hyptertrophy of the phrase. The swelling of the image.

The upper and lower limit of hyperbole. Any feature or literary coefficient, gradually increasing the intensity of the feature or the integer of the coefficient, can be taken to the point at which they exceed any correspondence with the real and will be apprehended as hyperbole. But arithmetical hyperbole rarely coincides with the artistic variety. Examples from Góngora4 and Gogol. A finely graded scale of ever increasing hyperbole, shown through examples: “Drawing three souls out of one weaver  .  .  .”5—“Six Richmonds in the field, five have I  slain  .  .  .”6—or “Oh that I had him, with six Aufidiuses, or more, his tribe, to use my lawful sword . . .”7—“Oh, twenty times beloved and once more for good measure  .  .  .”8—“Let Tybalt be slain some ten thousand times . . .”9—“As forty thousand brothers”10—etc. The upper limit of the hyperbolic—when in force or number it exceeds the boundaries of art. Examples from Shakespeare, Rabelais, Gogol. 4. The dialectics of hyperbole. Its upper boundary and the mark of its passing from quantity into quality. Two crude examples from Gulliver’s Travels. The attempt to interpret the  lower boundary of hyperbole as indicating the passing from quality to quantity. My doubts on this point. 5. From the history of hyperbole.—The history of literature, like a river conveying figures, motifs, plots, themes, and styles through time, knows its baseflows and freshets. Hyperbole— a freshet, an overflowing of literary images and symbols, the gigantization of their features. Just as the dark stains on Leningrad buildings remind us of floods past, so will I, with

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various quotations from the history of literature, try to mark in what follows the hyperbolic ascents of its style. 6. History speaks. Ancient Assyrian and Babylonian inscriptions. The hyperbole of self-glorification. Royal cuneiform, tiered wedges—like the very edifices of those empires— elevating epithets of kings from the human to the divine. Polynomial hyperbole, characteristic of Asia Minor. The hyperbole of Egyptian hierophants,11 enabling the dung beetle (scarab) to stretch its little legs all the way to the sun. Quotations from Egyptian tales and The Book of the Dead. 7. Greece.—Hyperbole lulled to sleep. A study of measure. Eight concentric earthly spheres and eight strings of a Pythagorean octachord with various weights.12 The primacy of odd over even and of the finite over the infinite. The slinger Lucretius Carus lowers his sling. The immobile arrow of the Eleatics.13 The tortoise overtakes Achilles, slowly periodized speech—the dynamic leaps of hyperbole. Quotations from Homer and Theocritus. Interpretation of the few instances of hyperbole in Homer (“as loud as the screams of ten thousand men” and others).14 Gnomic aphorisms: their a-hyperbolity. 8. The vegetative existence of hyperbole in the centuries that culminated in the renaissance of antiquity. It huddles only in correspondence manuals, in their tiered honorifics, and in the chance Eastern fairytale. A few examples. 9. Hyperbole resurfaces in the era of the chivalric romances. It is preceded by a few hagiographies as well as the apocryphal gospels, both clearly playing with the gigantization of images. Examples: both from the apocrypha and from the romances.

10. Sixteenth–seventeenth centuries. A new and exuberant rebirth of hyperbole in its purely stylistic existence. Gongorism. Marinism.15 Euphuism.16 Shakespeare as an imitator and, at the same time, parodist of this last style. Pantagruelisms (16th century). A full set of examples and comparisons. 11. Jonathan Swift (seventeenth–eighteenth centuries). Gulliver’s Travels as hyperbole’s almost sole attempt to take possession of realism. Examples. 12. Late seventeenth–eighteenth century. Classicism as a system of hyperbole stopped in its growth. Exaltation that abstains from excessiveness. A few dialogues from Corneille’s tragedies. Voltaire’s negative hyperboles. 13. Nineteenth century. Romanticism as an attempt to exaggerate images through shifts in perspective by displacing them in time or space. The poetry of exoticism and reminiscence. The third and final device of Romanticism: the gigantization of images by enlisting emotions, as if stretching the contours of images. Sentimentalism. Examples from Western literature as well as our own. Realism and its desire to establish an exact classification of literature’s weights and measures. Hyperbole’s banishment. It finds shelter in this troubled time only with occasional “tale-tellers” and political orators. The penitent hyperbole of Munchausen.17 Hyperbole lying low: naturalism as hyperdiminution, the microscopicization of reality, i.e. the negative hyperbolization of things. Examples. 14. Modernity.—The hyperbolic approach to life. The seven-league stride of events. The writer need only record A History of Hyperbole

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realistically the pace of history, which has exceeded realism’s customary orientation. The industrial and literary policy of “overproduction,” to overtake the West and ourselves, i.e. to seize control of hyperbole and subdue it. No date Translated and introduced by Elizabeth F. Geballe

WRITER’S NOTEBOOKS

14

These epigrams were selected from a much longer list of jottings, story ideas, bad puns, and other momentary inspirations recorded by Krzhizhanovsky in a series of three notebooks, plus additional fragments. They were first published in full in Russian by poet Vadim Perelmuter. Subsequently, Perelmuter realized that this version (which was provided by Anna Bovshek, Krzhizhanovsky’s widow) was not, in fact, conclusive: the discovery of another copy of the notebooks revealed that Bovshek had, in places, corrected or edited some of the jottings. The following translations have been made from Perelmuter’s final version of the Writer’s Notebooks, published in the six-volume Complete Works. I have classified them (where feasible) in topic order, rather than in order of composition. Thus I hope to make it easier for readers to find the connecting threads between these fascinating aphorisms, and also between these fragments and Krzhizhanovsky’s finished essays in prose. Within each category, the fragments have been placed in approximate order of composition, proceeding from first to

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third notebook (with some exceptions); an increasing sense of despair might be noted in the later jottings.

WRITER’S NOTEBOOKS BOOK AND CHAPTER TITLES

The club of bald women (a title). Question marks (a title). Sketches: 1. Chess players, 2. She waits, 3. 5 ways to conquer a woman. The algebra of biographies (a title). The veterans’ march on Washington (a play).

STORY IDE A S

Wonderful adventures inside a textbook of logic. “The White Mouse.” A dozing knight. A sword across a brook. His soul crosses the sword, like a bridge, on its own business. When it returns, the current has placed the sword edge upward. The soul is cut in half. (1): The halves confer with each other. (2) One half is borne away by the stream, the other returns. Further adventures (of the knight) with

half a soul: the cleavage between logical systems, love, father, mother, and so on. Back to Don Quixote. Don Quixote as Sancho Panza’s servant. The journey of a rapier. A tale about a knight. A youth reads in his late father’s papers about an insult he had suffered (from an influential person—a slap in the face). The young man sets off through various nations—with his father’s sword under his arm—seeking out the one who insulted his father. Adventures. A girl from an aristocratic family. Love. The offender is her father. A play: John and Joan (Falstaff and Jeanne d’Arc). A play about a commander of mercenaries (fifteenth-century Italy), who speculates with the salaries of slain soldiers. A fairytale. There was a highly estimable man. The street he lived on was named after him. But, out of modesty, he moved to a different street. Then they called the other street after him, too. Soon all the streets of the town had the same name: people lost their way in them and cursed the estimable man. A suicide: he visits a newspaper office; places a notice about his own death, and then . . . Character for a comedy: in childhood they scared him with purgatives; in old age, with a purge.1 A tiny (fantastic) creature falls into a cavity in a tooth: for him, it’s a crater. A dentist fills the cavity. Under the filling. The thief who publishes a stolen manuscript. The man with three initials (N. N. A.): The tale of a manuscript. No one accepts it. A thief steals the briefcase with the manuscript.

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He’s disappointed. Then—vainglory—he goes to a publisher’s (the very same one), and they treat him better (the motivation). The author, expiring from hunger, sees in the window of a bookshop: his book. A man is dying in a foreign country. There’s not much air. He dreams about “air from my native land.” The dream becomes a kind of mania. Then he is prescribed a balloon filled with air from his homeland (covered in stickers and postmarks). The sick man dies happy. First variant: And this was really just air—simply . . . Second variant: A rupture in the balloon. (Topic): A half-frozen man finds a booklet of tram tickets; he sits in a carriage and is whirled around until all the tickets are used up. The window sweeping by—the same one over and over again—instants. Long-distance themes and commuter themes. The track from the logic of the subject to the predicate. Two elbows: left and right. Two elbow-biters (a parody).2 The poetry of prose writers. A research study. The general situation. Exercises. The peculiarities of prose writers’ verse. Metaphysicists: Leibniz, Hegel, Fichte, Schelling, V. Solov’ev. Gogol, Turgenev, Maupassant, and others. A tiny little nation-state. Strikes. The government replies by also declaring a strike, refusing to rule. Confusion: everyone satisfied. The earth is going bald. (Forests are shaved off. The earth is barbered with an axe.) A play. A wealthy man, dying, wills his fortune to be spent on a tombstone for his heir. The heir simulates death and robs his own monument. He is captured. The trial.

EPIGR AMS AND APHORISMS

One might meet Truth by accident. But remember that when you meet her, she never acknowledges your bow. (Variant: The only thing that I know about truth is that she never curtseys in greeting.) Form is the fulfilment of certain formalities while composing content. I am known for being unknown. The epigraph is the epigone of the epigram. The archaeology of one’s own self. Doctors are the lackeys of gravediggers. [From the first notebook—Trans.] History of a writer: first he reads, then he is read, and then one reads upon him. [From undated jottings—Trans.] The life of a writer: he writes—he adapts others’ writing—he tweaks what he’s written—he writes furiously and . . . he’s all written out. When I shall die, let stinging nettles grow over my grave—in memory of me. I’d quite like to exit literature (and conscience), but I don’t know where the door is. File No. . . . On the eviction of conscience from literature. The thoughts followed the General Line, or: along the knifeedge and through the eye of the needle . . . 3 To be a writer is to sign the world’s visiting book. Living means poking sticks in the wheels of the hearse in which I am driven. I am a man jailed in my own mind. (Elsewhere: I have nothing to lose, but the chains . . . of my mind.) Writer’s Notebooks

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Parody is an art: to go forward, looking backward. A mind of average height. Some day they’ll stuff me in a case, like a pince-nez. Let them. Personally, I have never had need of short-sightedness. It’s more likely that short-sightedness needs its philosophers. An intellectual is a person who, when he’s jostled, says, “I’m sorry.” I have noticed that in games played for one’s life, the trump card is always from a black suit. In childhood one fears a dark room; in old age, death. The ecliptic of the Earth, round—flat—slightly off-kilter. Well, clearly, this happens to God, too: the first pancake is always lumpy. If God had ever existed, people would long ago have driven him to suicide. I am enough of a poet that I do not write poetry. To the crossed-out: believe. I am a crossed-out person. A theme of any kind sits upon the brain as upon the cushion of a barber’s chair. And you say: “Are you sitting comfortably?” This man has the kindest of natures: he is ready to share his syphilis with everyone. I am not a man but a sword. I will lie in my grave as in a scabbard. He speaks six Russian languages. An Englishman, before cutting his throat with a razor, uses it to shave. Virginity is stolen, robbed (by breaking and entering) or sold at auction (the beat of a heart = the blow of a hammer).

The people who now live and gather in Herzen’s house are just the type that Herzen would have chased out of his home.4 In the Gospels it’s written: forgive your enemies. But nowhere there is it written: forgive your friends. Friends are those whom we love without forgiving them anything. This resembles literature just as a zoological garden resembles nature. Without liquor, I am liquidated.5 One doesn’t see the log in one’s own eye, but the wisp of straw in another’s. Attitudes changed. People began removing logs from their own eyes. Thus the logging industry began.6 We are polite, but only to corpses. If you want to hear a deeply felt speech, expire. The roots of learning are bitter, but its fruits are . . . acid. The art of vision is in being able to see one’s own eyes. Prostitution is passive necrophilia. Better to be three sheets to the wind than to trim your sails to it. For those who write with their heart’s blood: the heart is a poor inkwell. “God” created man on his day off. Employees are permitted suicide only in cases of urgent need and only on days off. I’ve made my choice: it is better consciously to not exist than to exist without being conscious. A straight line is crooked to an infinitely small degree. The art of thinking is easy, but the art of finishing a thought is the most difficult of all. To think is to disagree with one’s own opinions. Writer’s Notebooks

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The soul, when one appeals to her, goes awry; she knows wryness is the only demand ever made of her. Must one be true to the person with whom one is unfaithful? He resembled a man who, after peeling an egg, throws it in the garbage and swallows the shell. I respect God for not existing. A paradoxalist (Shaw) fears only one thing: that somebody might agree with him.

ON SOVIET SOCIET Y

“Only for the ungifted”: talentovator for hire. From real life, at the ticket office. “I was first!” “No, me!” “Comrades, don’t quarrel—husband your strength for the construction of socialism.” Revolution is the acceleration of facts, too fast for thought to catch up. The slowest process of all is the process of thinking through to the muscles, to the transformation of thought into action. I observe how the future is transformed into the past (capitalism thinks of the past as the future; socialism makes plans, tracing the future like the past). The Apostle Peter loses his keys. Much searching. Meanwhile, the righteous pile up at the gates. He finds the keys and opens up; the righteous scuffle, as if queuing for butter, in the queue for heaven. Intelligence has no practical benefit. It is for the long term, knowing a foreign language without knowing how to get an overseas passport. It is profitless, bringing only pain;

bringing the humiliation of the small by the great, the shaming of facts by ideas. As a result, through selection of the most highly adapted (those who must adapt are dying out), intelligence is becoming a relic. Someday, all that will be left of it will be just a flat impression on a few pages—like the archaeopteryx. Literature is an example: “stupid, but talented.” Soon this will be: “talented and, moreover, stupid.” A man in a communal apartment catches his finger on a nail in the bathroom—a bloodstain on the floor. He goes to his room, then hears quarrelling female voices through his wall: “Why don’t you clean up after yourself? Are you too lazy to clear up once a month?” “I’m perfectly clean. That’s your blood. Mine finished five days ago . . .” And the man with the bound-up finger learns the most secret sublimb-inal truth. We resemble people who walk at nighttime on the sunny side of the street, thinking it’s warmer there. As a writer, am I with the majority or the minority? If counted by the number of heads, I’m in the minority; but if we go by the number of thoughts, surely I’m in the majority? They hung a man from a lamppost, but the lamppost didn’t shine any brighter as a result. Were Ovid among us now, he would find his Metamorphoses without resorting to mythology. Wit and paradoxicality come from the squinting of mental vision. Logic with a squint. Sometime (under socialism) there will be a cure for this. A desert is a desert because it is waterless. Our literature is a desert because it contains nothing except water. Writer’s Notebooks

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Out of all of us, Gorky has the sweetest life, and Bednyi the richest.7 I was flung back by socialism, like a fish too small for the net.

MISCELL ANEOUS AND AUTOBIOGR APHICAL

The ontological proof of nonbeing. To gamble away the plan[etary] system, the Milky Way and so on; to be left with a couple of constellations. A spare pair of parents. Once upon a time there was a king called Lear. He had three daughters. Yet all the same I managed to “make the stars weep”; at least, two of them (her eyes). A sensible man, going out of his senses, assures himself he will return to them. In essence, any metaphysical excursus is an outing beyond the limits of sense, in order to return the very same way, an entirely un-pleasure trip to the ortus [Latin for origin—Trans.], with a return ticket. But even a ruffian might be unhappy. He lives with the perpetual threat of being un-ruffled. A letter is addressed: “Lord God. General delivery.” No one collects it. It is returned with a note, “Addressee not found.”

[A conversation—Trans.]: – My little flower . . . – Wear a condom. Or else I’ll soon be a berry.8

The canalization of thoughts. A thought rises or flows from one head to another by means of the equalization of intellectual levels. The lower pond always has the advantage. A man who had passed through absolute zero touched a corpse and said, “He’s got a fever.” Time takes a stroll through life. At the doctor’s. He hears: “One must kill time”—everywhere he goes. A very agitated Time complains about his ill-wishers. A deviser of separations. (Separatologist).9 All you need for suicide (a cooperative store). The “Red Nose” Sobriety Society. A dream: my manuscripts being interred in the garbage can. War. Death has so much work—not a moment’s rest. Death expires of exhaustion. A miser, dreaming of the pennies that will be placed on his eyes when he’s dead: “In truth, that’s really not such an unpleasant vision.” (Variant: A man asks to borrow the pennies that will be placed on his eyes.) Teeth the color of tooth powder. The days of the turbines.10 A thought, oozing through the seams of the skull. My manuscripts lie like a weight on my neck and a stone on my soul: “water (literature) doesn’t flow under a resting stone.”11 My cutting wit sharpens a weapon that will never cut anything. My life has been forty years’ wandering in the desert. The Promised Land will be offered to me at the end of the gravediggers’ spades. I am bored with my part as a failure in this world; I grow weary not as an actor but as a spectator. Writer’s Notebooks

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Try to scalp a man wearing a wig (the impractical savage). By uneducation, I am a philosopher. – No, forgive me, I cannot; I know the French language, but I specialize in translation from languages unknown to me. I cannot. The French translation of Tolstoy’s War and Peace: the Russian peasants speak good French, while the aristocrats mangle the French language unbelievably. A translator must be an accompanist, not an improviser (accompanying the original, the author). I am an Intourist in life. Time to be repatriated in nothingness. (Variant: return to the homeland.) All my difficult life I have been a literary nonbeing, working honestly for being. – You are a talented satirist, but you should be re-edified. – Really? Isn’t satire the art of being unedified? I am not alone. There are two of us: the grave and I. The body is a sail, the soul is the breeze. Death is a calm. No more. On vacation, in Death.

Excerpted and translated by Muireann Maguire

NOTES

INTRODUCTION: RESTORING THE BAL ANCE 1. James Branch Cabell, Beyond Life (New York: Random House, 1919), 12. 2. Stanislaw Lem, Imaginary Magnitude, trans. Marc E. Heine (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), 57–61. 3. Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Penguin, 1997), 287. 4. Svetlana Boym, Another Freedom: The History of an Idea (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 8. 5. Vadim Perelmuter, “Posle katastrofy” in Sobraniye sochinenii v pyati tomakh, by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovskii, vol. 1, ed. Vadim Perel’muter (Saint Petersburg: Symposium, 2001), 69; all translation from Russian is by the editors. 6. Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, The Return of Munchausen, trans. Joanne Turnbull (New York: New York Review of Books Classics, 2016), 107. 7. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin, 1988), 175. 8. Krzhizhanovsky, Sobraniye sochinenii, vol. 1, 556. 9. These are “Jakobi and As If ” (1918), “Catastrophe” (1919), “Runaway Fingers” (1922), “The Story of a Prophet” (1924), “The Lost Player” (1923–24), and “The Unbitten Elbow” (1939). For a thorough account of Krzhizhanovsky’s intra vitam publications, see Caryl Emerson’s “Krzhizhanovsky as a Reader of Shakespeare and Bernard Shaw,” Slavic and East European Journal 56, no. 4 (2012): 577–611.

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10. Krzhizhanovsky, Sobraniye sochinenii, vol. 5, 70. 11. Krzhizhanovsky, The Letter Killer’s Club, 50; Sobraniye sochinenii, vol. 2, 58. 12. Velimir Khlebnikov, Sobraniye sochinenii v shesti tomakh (Moscow: Dmitrii Sechin, 2014), vol. 6, 174. 13. Khlebnikov, Sobraniye sochinenii, vol. 6, 168. 14. Krzhizhanovsky, Sobraniye sochinenii, vol. 5, 327. The printed text actually has “dice = die,” but the version first published by the University of Toronto Press, also under Perelmuter’s editorship, has “die = die,” which seems more likely (http://sites.utoronto.ca/tsq/19/krzhizh -zapisnye19.shtml). We have not been able to verify the manuscript. 15. Viktor Shklovsky, Theory of Prose, trans. Benjamin Sher (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive, 1991), 6. 16. Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Memories of the Future, trans. Joanne Turnbull and Nikolai Formozov (New York: New York Review of Books, 2009), 63. 1. LOVE A S A METHOD OF COGNITION 1. Vladimir Solovyev, The Meaning of Love, transl. Thomas R. Beyer, Jr. (New York: Lindisfarne, 1985). 2. A Russian religious philosopher of the Silver Age, Nikolai Berdyaev (1874–1948) was a major representative of Russian existentialism and personalism. Krzhizhanovsky’s quote comes from “The Introduction”—not chapter XIII—of Berdyaev’s New Religious Consciousness and Society, a chapter of which was dedicated to the discussion of the metaphysics of sex and love. 3. To be initiated into various esoteric philosophical groups of ancient times, neophytes had to undergo a special spiritual examination that indirectly tested their capability for self-abnegation and love. 4. The philosophical problem of the existence of unity in plurality is a major concern of Platonic philosophy. 5. Although “radioactive” has negative connotations for our contemporary ear, radioactivity was discovered only in 1896, a little more than a

decade before Krzhizhanovsky’s article. Here it is used as a metaphor for knowledge that bypasses consciousness. 6. In Plato’s Symposium, it is Diotima, an ancient Greek prophetess and philosopher, who teaches Socrates “the philosophy of love.” 7. The understanding of the word as a manifestation of the idea of the good was first put forth by Plato. See his Republic. 8. Heavenly Aphrodite, or Aphrodite Urania, is a goddess of celestial love and is distinguished from Aphrodite Pandemos, the goddess of sensual pleasures. 2. IDE A AND WORD 1. Dusha. See translator’s introduction for a discussion of the scope of this word’s meaning. 2. The word translated here as “hostel,” obshchezhitie, is formed from components meaning “general, common” and “to live.” Krzhizhanovsky’s image suggests that these words must find some way to get along in a somewhat depersonalized space. “Communal dwelling” might also render Krzhizhanovsky’s expression, except for its strong associations with Soviet communal apartments, which did not yet exist when he wrote this piece. 3. Krzhizhanovsky’s quote is drawn from Schopenhauer’s “Über Schiftstellerei und Stil” (“On Authorship and Style,” from the second volume of his 1851 Parerga und Paralipomena). 4. The distinction can be found in both Leviathan and (especially) De Corpore. 5. Krzhizhanovsky seems to refer here to E. M. Curr, The Australian Race: Its Origin, Languages, Customs, Place of Landing in Australia, and the Roots by Which It Spread Itself Over That Continent (Melbourne: John Ferres, 1886–87), 4 vols. Koongarra is defined there as “rattling or whirring noise caused by birds rising” (vol. 2, 92); Piyacooduna as “noise caused by birds settling on land or water.” The name of the ethnic group is rendered in that source as Dieyerie but is now commonly spelled Diyari or Dieri.

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6. The Russian word for “eyelid” is resnitsa, which Krzhizhanovsky is relating to the Church Slavonic word resnota, which he defines as the truth of the flesh. He does the same for the Russian istina (truth) and Church Slavonic istniti (which he glosses as “to refine,” though normally it’s closer to “pulverize”). 7. A description of “militant” and “industrial” types of society can be found in Herbert Spencer’s Principles of Sociology (New York: Appleton, 1898), vol. 2, chaps. XVI and XVII. 8. The words “therefore” and “poets” in the earlier sentence are nearly identical in the Russian original (po-etomu and poetami). Krzhizhanovsky’s point with this pun is that poetry and sense are not at odds. 9. “To the city and to the world,” indicating that a papal blessing or address delivered in Rome is intended for the whole world. 10. Mica, a translucent to transparent mineral also known as muscovite, from the expression “Muscovy glass,” was commonly used in Russia for windows before glass became more widely available. 11. Krzhizhanovsky appears to have in mind Fichte’s 1794 Wissenschaftslehre (a title rendered variously as “theory of science,” “science of knowing,” or “science of knowledge”), where Fichte describes the self ’s positing of itself as both finite and infinite, in a sort of dynamic interplay. 12. See Childe Harold, canto III, st. 97. 13. Krzhizhanovsky refers to a passage from Madam Bovary (pt. 2, chap. 12). 14. Ernst Mach (1836–1916), physicist and hugely influential philosopher of science. Krzhizhanovsky’s page reference is to a Russian edition of 1909 (Poznanie i zabluzhdenie. Ocherki po psikhologii. Moscow: Skirmunt). The passage occurs in chap. 4, sec. 4. 15. The passage Krzhizhanovsky is quoting comes from the fifth lecture in Fichte’s Grundzüge des gegenwärtigen Zeitalters (1806), typically rendered in English as Characteristics of the Present Age. 16. Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920), pioneer of experimental psychology. Perhaps Krzhizhanovsky has in mind a passage in chap. 1, sec. 5 of his Grundriss der Psychologie (Outline of Psychology), where Wundt argues that psychological experiences are composite in nature and

that scientific analysis of them therefore requires first that the sensations that (partly) form those experiences be isolated by abstracting them away from the composite mental experiences. 17. “Nothingness.” Here Krzhizhanovsky draws on a long tradition of seeing inert, unformed matter as equivalent to nonbeing. 18. Sphota is drawn from Sanskrit linguistic theory. More specifically, Krzhizhanovsky might have in mind the theory proposed by Bhartrihari (fifth century CE), in which sphota refers to the invariant aspect of speech that does not depend, for example, on an individual’s quirks of pronunciation. Given that meaning for Bhartrihari inheres in large-order units such as sentences and is distorted or lost at the level of the word, sphota is “indivisible” in something like Krzhizhanovsky’s sense. 3. ARGO AND ERGO 1. Or sacraments: Baptism, Confirmation, Holy Communion, Confession, Marriage, Ordination, and Extreme Unction. 2. The seven liberal arts: arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy, grammar, rhetoric, and logic. 3. A common idea in nineteenth-century Russian Orthodox theology. 4. A paraphrase. See Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 70. 5. A. L. Blok (1852–1909), a professor of law and would-be poet, was the father of A. A. Blok (1880–1921), the greatest exponent of Russian symbolist poetry, best known for “The Twelve.” 6. Vladimir Ivanovich Dal (1801–72), whose four-volume repository of the living Russian language is still in use today. His Danish surname rhymes with the Russian for “distance” (dal). 7. Star worship. In ancient times, Sabianism was especially widespread in Babylonia and Assyria, where temples doubled as observatories (Brokhaus i Efron). 8. From Ode 3.25: “In what caverns, meditating the immortal honor of illustrious Caesar, shall I be heard enrolling him among the stars and the council of Jove?” (trans. C. Smart).

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9. An allusion to Gogol’s interjection at the end of Dead Souls (chap. 11): “Russia! Russia! I see you, from my wondrous, marvelous faraway, I see you.” 10. English-language riddles for thimble and windmill have been used in place of the Russian: Na yame-yamke sto yamok s priyamkom (On a pit-pitlet a hundred pitlets with a pitful) and Stoit ptitsa-ostritsa— krylyami mashet, sama ne letit (There stands a mythical bird—it flaps its wings but does not fly). 11. The ruling body of Florence. 12. The title refers to the “new life” that began for Dante at the age of nine, when he first saw Beatrice; this “book of memory” was written after her death. 13. An Italian verse form in three-line stanzas: the second line of each rhymes with the first and third lines of the next. 14. Petrarch (1304–74) Italian poet, scholar, and pioneering humanist. 15. Petrarch’s Canzoniere, an autobiographical novel in verse inspired by his love for Laura. He first saw her in the Church of St. Clare in Avignon on April 6, 1327; she died twenty-one years later to the day. Some of Petrarch’s sonnets were written during her lifetime (in vita), others after her death (in morte). 16. Petrarch’s Secretum: a private book of self-examination in the form of three dialogues with St. Augustine. In the third dialogue, Augustine chides Petrarch for being “distracted from the Creator by the creature” (Laura): “When those eyes close in death, you will be ashamed that you tied your immortal soul to a mortal body” (trans. Morris Bishop, Petrarch and His World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963), 204). 17. Distress, agitation; strong emotion. 18. Trans. William H. Draper in Petrarch’s Secret (London: Chatto & Windus, 1911), 115–16. 19. Written during the Black Death, it begins, “There is no word of my adorèd one, my lovely and belovèd enemy, and frantic hope and fear alternately rowel my reason, and my spirit stun” (trans. Morris Bishop in Petrarch, 253). 20. Now in the Ambrosian Library in Milan.

21. From the poem “Unknown Woman” (1906) by Alexander Blok, trans. A. Wachtel, I. Kutik, and M. Denner. 22. Poet and writer (1880–1934); founder of a symbolist circle called the Argonauts. Bely’s Simfoniya (2-ya, dramaticheskaya), a prose poem, is divided into parts, the parts into passages, the passages into numbered “musical phrases.” Three phrases toward the end of part three evoke the window bouquet mistaken at dusk for the face of Eternity. 23. Literaturnye listki: a short-lived journal of manners and letters published in St. Petersburg by F. V. Bulgarin. 24. Trans. Walter Arndt, in Alexander Pushkin: Collected Narrative and Lyrical Poetry (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1984), 51. 25. In Greek myth, the ship sailed by adventurous Jason and his heroic companions, the Argonauts, in quest of the Golden Fleece. 26. In Greek myth, the god of “love returned.” 4. A PHILOSOPHEME FOR THE THE ATER (E XCERP T) 1. Philosophenweg (German): Philosopher’s Street. 2. Ämter and Kirchen (German): state agencies and churches. 3. Krzhizhanovsky is referring to Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, 1818). Vorstellung can be translated as “representation,” “idea,” or “presentation.” 4. The Globe’s alleged motto in its original Latin is “Totus mundus agit histrionem,” or, “All the world’s a stage.” This famous Shakespearean epigram appears in Jacques’s monologue in As You Like It, a constant touchstone for this essay. Krzhizhanovsky’s translation of the phrase (“ves’ mir igraet predstavelnie”) differs from the standard Russian translation (“ves’ mir—teatr”) in order to echo Schopenhauer (“mir est’ moe predstavelenie”). In Krhizhizhanovsky’s Russian, both phrases use the word predstavlenie, meaning “representation,” “presentation,” “performance,” or “spectacle.” 5. Krzhizhanovsky’s lexical overlap is difficult to reflect here, as English does not share the same vocabulary between the stage and Kant’s Critique. In addition to the ongoing pun on predstavlenie,

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Krzhizhanovsky exploits iavlenie (both “phenomenon” and “scene”) and deistvie (both “action” and “act,” as in the acts of a play. Paul Flechsig (1847–1929) was a German neurologist who derived a map of the cerebral cortex. Unknowingly or not, Krzhizhanovsky invents the word centricentral (центроцентральный), and Flechsig defines only two nerve currents: centripetal and centrifugal. The arshin is an obsolete unit of Russian measurement equal to twenty-eight inches. The original Russian gives все (everyone) and всё (everything). The diaeresis is often left off the letter ё in print, leading occasionally to confusion. This clause is formed from elaborate wordplay in Russian: “не утварь у твари, а тварь у утвари.” The word igra in Russian, translated here as both “play” and “playing,” has several meanings, more flexible than the English “play”: “game,” “play/playing,” as well as “acting” or “performance.” Unlike the English “play,” it does not refer to a dramatic text. 5. A COLLECTION OF SECONDS

1. William James, The Principles of Psychology (New York: Macmillan, 1890), chap. XV, “The Perception of Time.” 2. Krzhizhanovsky was fascinated by experiments regarding the subjective perception and objective measurement of the specious present that were being carried out in psychology laboratories using a tachistoscope to expose subjects to visual stimuli for intervals of varying duration. William James discussed factors affecting the varying length of perception of the duration of the present in his work noted above. Vittorio Benussi, a prominent member of the Graz school, had published his Psychologie der Zeitauffassung in 1913, detailing his experiments in the field. 3. Krzhizhanovsky published a translation of “Słovo i ciało,” a poem by Polish poet Julian Tuwim (1894–1953), which first appeared in the collection Słovo w krvi in 1926. Krzhizhanovsky’s Russian translation from the Polish reads, “Мне чужды все ремесла, / Рожден ловцом

4.

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я слов. / Весь в слух преображенный, / Я вышел в мир на лов. / Мгновения словами / Кружаться надо мной, / Жужжат с утра до ночи, / Как пчел звенящий рой.” “All trades are foreign to me / I was born a hunter of words / Transformed wholly into hearing / I set out into the world on the hunt. / Instants / Swirl above me with words / They hum from dawn to dusk / Like a swarm of buzzing bees.” Krzhizhanovsky’s depiction of the artist or writer as a hunter setting forth to capture words, images, or ideas in the form of instants echoes Tuwim’s theme in this and following passages. The image likewise recurs in fictional works by Krzhizhanovsky such as the short story, “The Bookmark,” which features an author characterized as a “hunter of themes.” Communist Youth International was established in Berlin in 1919 to organize international radical socialist youth groups in support of revolutionary action and Communist political ideology. NB: nota bene. Krzhizhanovsky, too, was a “hunter of themes” and kept extensive writer’s notebooks to store potential topics for later development into short stories or nonfiction works. Here he recursively notes his own process. See “Krzhizhanovsky’s Writer’s Notebooks.” From 1914 to the mid-1920s, the avant-garde art movement known as Russian Constructivism promoted art in service of the Revolution and attempted to express the experience of modern life. Highly geometrical and stripped of emotion, Constructivist artworks employed industrial materials—wood, metal, and glass—and rejected representative painting as an art form. рiдная хата: Krzhizhanovsky, himself a recent newcomer to Moscow from Ukraine, inserts the Ukrainian idiom meaning “my native peasant hut” directly into the text. John Stuart Mill was among the first to classify fallacies within the framework of inductive reasoning in his System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive (1843). In chapter IV: “Fallacies of Observation,” §4, he summarizes the type of fallacy in which “a generalization was too rashly adopted, on the evidence of particulars, true indeed, but insufficient to support it.” In formal logic, this type of fallacy, based on the

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Aristotelian secundum quid, is known as a hasty generalization—a logical argument draws a conclusion from a sample consisting of too few cases—or a converse fallacy of accident—an improper argument from a special case to a general rule. 6. THE POETICS OF TITLES 1. A lubok (pl. lubki) is a colorful print made from a woodcut or engraving, a form of folk art. Cheap, simple books composed mostly of lubok-style pictures were also called lubki. 2. An echo of Marx’s famous statement from the Communist Manifesto, “A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of communism.” 3. Atellan farces were a traditional form of Italian theater featuring slapstick comedy (named after the ancient Italian city Atella), not directly related to Attic comedy. It is possible that Krzhizhanovsky links them because he is thinking of a potential relationship via the ancient Greek Phlyax plays. 4. Vadim Perelmuter notes in his commentary that this is a mistake, whether on Krzhizhanovsky’s or an editor’s part, and that the name should be Mikhail Tsvetikhin (1763–?) (Vadim Perel’muter, Sobraniye sochinenii v pyati tomakh, by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovskii, vol. 4, ed. Vadim Perel’muter [Saint Petersburg: Symposium, 2006], 713). 5. Full title: A Pharmacy for the Soul, or A Systematic, Alphabetical Catalog of Books, comprising a Reading Library of the Newest Russian Literature, with a Description of the Contents of Several Works and our Critics’ Opinions on them (Kiev, 1849). 6. Full title: The Lyre, or A Collection of Various Compositions in Verse Translations from a Certain Admirer of the Muses (Saint Petersburg, 1773). 7. Full title: The Every-Day Life of my Heart, or the Poetry of Ivan Mikhaylovich Dolgoruky in Four Parts (1817). 8. Young’s original English poem, titled The Complaint: or, NightThoughts on Life, Death, & Immortality, was published in nine parts from 1742 to 1745. The English back-translation of the full Russian title is The Lament of Eduard Young, or Night Thoughts on Life, Death,

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and Immortality, Arranged in nine Nights, with an Addendum of two Poems. Translated from the German by A. M. Kutuzov (Moscow, 1785). Full title: A Dictionary, or Speechanary, of Russian Words, Alphabetically Arranged, about Various Plants; i.e. Trees, Herbs, Flowers, Seeds, Cultivated and Wild Roots, and other Grasses and Minerals; Collected and Composed by K. Kondratovich, Collegiate Assessor, Imperial Academy of Sciences (Saint Petersburg, 1780). Full title: Meteorologia, or, The true way of foreseeing and judging the inclination of the air and alteration of the weather in several regions . . . (English original by William Cock, 1671; translated by Yakov Blagodarov, Moscow, 1792). This appears to be an amalgamation of two titles written to defend the Russian Orthodox faith: The Rock of Faith (Kamen’ very), written by Stefan Yavorsky between 1713 and 1718 and published posthumously in 1728; see note 25 on Yavorsky), and Litos, or a Stone Hurled from the Sling of Truth (Lifos, ili kamen’ broshennyi s prashchi istiny), written in Polish by theologian Metropolitan Peter (Pyotr) Mogila in 1644. This is Catherine the Great’s 1770 response to a French travelogue of Russia. The title of her riposte, written in French, is Antidote, ou Examen du mauvais livre superbement imprimé intitulé “Voyage en Sibérie, fait par ordre du Roi en 1761, contenant les mœurs, les usages des Russes, & l’état actuel de cette Puissance; la description géographique & le nivellement de la route de Paris à Tobolsk; l’histoire naturelle de la même route; des observations astronomiques, & des experiences sur l’Electricité naturelle: Enrichi de Cartes Géographiques, de Plans, de Profils du terrain, de Gravures qui représentent les usages des Russes, leurs mœurs, leurs habillemens, les Divinités des Calmouks, & plusieurs morceaux d’histoire naturelle. Par M. l’Abbé Chappe d’Auteroche, de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, à Paris chez Debure pere Libraire, quai des Augustins à Saint Paul. MDCCLXVIII. avec approbation & privilege du Roi (1771). The title of the English translation is The Antidote, or, an Enquiry into the Merits of a Book, Entitled A Journey into Siberia, Made in MDCCLXI, in Obedience to an order of the French King, and Published, with approbation by the Abbe Chappe d’Auteroche,

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of the Royal Academy of Sciences. In which many Essential Errors and Misrepresentations are pointed out and confuted, and many interesting Anecdotes added, for a better Elucidation of several Matters necessarily discussed [. . .] by a Lover of Truth. Translated into English by a Lady (S. Leacroft, London, 1772). Vorwärts, founded in 1876, was the newspaper of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. Avanti!, founded in 1896, was the newspaper of the Italian Socialist Party. Both words mean “forward.” Examples of How Various Compliments are Written in the German Tongue; that is, Writings from Potentates to Potentates, of Congratulations, or Commiseration, or Otherwise; also, between Relations, and between Acquaintances. Translated from the German into Russian (1st ed. 1708, 4th ed. 1725). Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) was a German idealist philosopher and a follower of Kant (which helps contextualize Krzhizhanovsky’s interest in him). Krzhizhanovsky’s memory has altered the phrase; Fichte’s original reads, “If we give the name of People to men whose organs of speech are influenced by the same external conditions, . . . then we must say: The language of this people is necessarily just what it is, and in reality this people does not express its knowledge, but its knowledge expresses itself out of the mouth of the people” (emphasis added; quote taken from the Fourth Address, translated from the German by Reginald Foy Jones). Sasha Chorny was the pseudonym of Alexander Glikberg (1880–1932), while Andrey Bely was the pseudonym of Boris Bugayev (1880–1934). Vadim Perelmuter observed that Krzhizhanovsky saw them as the two opposite poles of Russian poetry of the early twentieth century (Perel’muter, Sobraniye sochinenii v pyati tomakh, vol. 4, 714). Multatuli was the pseudonym of Eduard Douwes Dekker (1820–1887), a writer from the Netherlands; Purr the Tom-cat was the pseudonym of Nikolay Vagner (1829–1907), a zoologist and writer; and Baron Brambeus was the pseudonym of Osip Senkovsky (1800–58), a writer and scholar of Asian languages. Here Krzhizhanovsky references A Correspondence across a Room (Perepiska iz dvukh uglov, 1920), a philosophical conversation in essays

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between literary critic Mikhail Gershenzon (1869–1925) and Symbolist poet Vyacheslav I. Ivanov (1866–1949), produced when they were put in the same room while recuperating at a Moscow sanatorium. Hegumen Juvenaly, born Ivan Voyeikov (1729–1807), came from a noble family and wrote genealogies tracing lines of descent for much of the Russian nobility. In 1699, Peter the Great required that special government-issued paper stamped with an official coat of arms must be purchased and used for all official notifications and transactions. Odds and Ends (Vsyakaya vsyachina) was a satirical weekly created by Catherine the Great that ran briefly (1769–70) in the early years of her reign. This and That (I to i syo) was a satirical weekly published by ethnographer and folklorist Mikhail Chulkov (1744–92) that ran for the entire year of 1769. Princess Yekaterina Dashkova (1743–1810) was a close friend of Catherine the Great. At Catherine’s request, Dashkova wrote a comedy, Mr. Thisandthat, or a Man of no Character (Toisyokov, ili chelovek beskharakternyi), for the Hermitage theater in 1786. Pyotr Boborykin (1836–1921) was a writer, editor, and playwright who was elected an honorary member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and was responsible for popularizing the term intelligentsia. The original titles of Sororal Bliss and The Well-to-Do Virtues are Posestriye and Solidnye dobrodeteli (both published in 1871). Dmitry Grigorovich (1822–99), a writer who became famous for his realistic portrayals of peasant life. The original titles of Gutta-Percha Boy and Acrobats of Philanthropy are Guttaperchevyi mal’chik (1883) and Akrobaty blagotvoritel’nosti (1885). Stefan Yavorsky (1658–1722) was a religious scholar and church figure during the reign of Peter the Great who wrote, among other things, The Rock of Faith (see note 11 on The Rock of Faith). Yavorsky died due to moral and physical exhaustion after years of being persecuted by Peter. Quatre Vents de l’Esprit, the title of Victor Hugo’s last book of poems. As a title, Quatre Vents de l’Esprit (“Four Winds of the Spirit”) used the sound similarity between three different things to wittily highlight their interconnectedness: (a) quatre vents, (b) quatre-vingt

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(“eighty,” the age the poet was about to attain when he published Quatre Vents de l’Esprit), and (c) Quatre-vingt-treize (“Ninety-Three,” the title of Hugo’s earlier book about revolts in 1793 during the French Revolution). This echoes Marx’s famous line about Hegelian dialectic in which Marx remarked that Hegel’s philosophical system of dialectics was upside down, or “standing on its head,” and that the system needed to be turned right-side up or “stood on its feet.” In 1861, Russian philosopher and writer Prince Vladimir Odoyevsky (1803–69) wrote a joking April Fool’s Day story called “Zephyrots” (Zefiroty) for the Saint Petersburg newspaper The Northern Bee about these fantastical creatures, who, in his description, reproduced by kissing and could kill everyone around by shooting beams from their eyes. A number of people were apparently taken in by the spoof. Alexander Nesterov (1835–?), under the pseudonym A. Polorotov, republished Odoyevsky’s piece with his own commentary, criticizing both the prince and those readers foolish enough to believe him, under the title “Zephyrots and Idiots” (Zefiroty i zevoroty). Zevorot stems from the words for “gaping” and “mouth,” zev and rot, metonymically indicating a gaping fool; the word links back to the fanciful zefirot and to the pseudonym Polorotov. (Nesterov’s authorship is attested in a catalogue entry in the Russian State Library: https:// search.rsl.ru/ru/record/01003574860.) Krzhizhanovsky’s titles, provided in Russian, correspond to the following original French titles: L’hermite de Londres, ou Observations sur les moeurs et usages des Anglais au commencement du XIXe siècle (1820); L’hermite de la Chaussée-d’Antin, ou Observations sur les moeurs et les usages Parisiens, au commencement du XIXe siècle (1812); Guillaume le franc-parleur, ou Observations sur les moeurs et les usages Français, au commencement du XIXe siècle (1815); L’hermite de La Guiane, ou Observations sur les moeurs et les usages Français, au commencement du XIXe siècle (1816). Krzhizhanovsky has somewhat abridged the full Russian title of the book, which would translate as The Sentimental Soul’s Consolation, or the Collected Works of Mr. Arnaud, Known for Composing

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Touching and Amusing Stories, in the English Fashion. With the Addition of Engraved Pictures for Every Story. The author is French writer François-Thomas-Marie de Baculard d’Arnaud (1718–1805). The three novels of Ivan Goncharov (1812–92) that begin with “Ob-” are his most famous: Obyknovennaya istoriya (A Common Story, 1847), Oblomov (Oblomov, 1859), and Obryv (The Ravine, 1869). An Uncommon Story (Neobyknovennaya istoriya) was published posthumously in 1924; in it Goncharov, among other things, accuses Ivan Turgenev of plagiarizing his work. The English title Krzhizhanovsky gives is almost correct; the full original title is “Debates in the Senate of Magna Lilliputia,” a series of popular and fanciful “reports” on the proceedings of the British Parliament that Johnson (1709–84) published in the London monthly The Gentleman’s Magazine from 1739 to the early 1740s. The Russian version of the title, “Slovopreniya v Velikoy strane malykh” (which translates into English as “Polemics in the Great Land of the Small”), appears to be Krzhizhanovsky’s own. Philosopher of German idealism Friedrich Schelling (1775–1854) was a student of Johann Fichte (see note 15) and a contemporary of Hegel. The work in question is presumably Schelling’s never-completed magnum opus, The Ages of the World (Die Weltalter), of which fragments or drafts were published posthumously; the manuscripts themselves were destroyed by bombing in World War II. The title of De Coster’s book is given as Krzhizhanovsky wrote it, preserving Krzhizhanovsky’s emphasis and capitalization. Nikolay Leskov (1831–95) was a master prose stylist. The author of many socially engaged works criticizing the Russian Orthodox Church, his 1894 novella Hare Park (Zayachiy remiz) wasn’t published until 1917 due to its controversial portrayal of the clergy. In early Cyrillic manuscripts, the titlo is a wavy diacritic written over a group of letters indicating abbreviated words; for example, apl with a titlo abbreviates the word apostol (“apostle”). This is likely a reference to the 1914 manifesto “Made Pictures” (“Sdelannye kartinki”), written by Pavel Filonov (1883–1941) and other painters.

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38. The word précieuses in the title of Moliere’s 1659 play Les Précieuses ridicules (The Absurd Précieuses) was coined to describe women who attended a famous Parisian literary salon in the mid-seventeenth century. The Russian title Dragiye smeyanniye (The Dear Laughed-At Ladies) seems to mix up the adjective and the noun, changing the focus to “valuable, fondly loved” rather than “ridiculous.” This translation, produced in 1703 by Jan Lacosta (1665–1740), Peter the Great’s court jester, was the first rendering of Moliere’s play into Russian, but not the best: both Dmitry Merezhkovsky and Mikhail Bulgakov are known to have disparaged Lacosta’s efforts. The accepted modern Russian translation of the title is Smeshnye zhemannitsy (The Laughable Affected Ladies), which places the meaning somewhat closer to the French original. 39. The Ars moriendi (The Art of Dying) is thought to have been written by Dominicans in the first half of the fifteenth century. The original Latin title of the 1415 “long” version is Tractatus artis bene moriendi (Treatise on the Art of Dying Well). The Russian title Krzhizhanovsky gives, The Art of a Successful Death (Nauka blagopoluchno umirat’), is from the 1783 translation by Vasily Belyayev of Roberto Bellarmino’s Latin text. According to the catalog entry from the Russian State Library, 432 copies of Belyayev’s translation were confiscated from Moscow bookshops in 1787 (https://search.rsl.ru/ru /record/01003336626). 40. No French publication with the exact title Œuvres divers par A. Voltaire could be identified, although there are many different editions of Oeuvres de M. de Voltaire and Oeuvres complètes de M. de Voltaire. The Russian translation, Oddments from the Works of Mr. Voltaire (Vsyachina iz sochinenii g-na Vol’tera, a title that incidentally revisits the aforementioned satirical weekly Odds and Ends [Vsyakaya vsyachina]), was produced by N. Ye. Levitsky in 1789. 41. As Perelmuter points out, Krzhizhanovsky’s memory is patchy here (Perel’muter, Sobraniye sochinenii v pyati tomakh, vol. 4, 718). The author in question, Cornelius Nepos (110–25 B.C.), was a prolific Roman biographer. The only work of Nepos to have survived is Vitae excellentium imperatorum (Lives of the Eminent Commanders, or, in

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back-translation from the Russian, Lives of the Glorious Generals), which is part of a larger lost work called De viris illustribus (On Illustrious Men). In his version of the original Latin title of Nepos’ surviving work, Krzhizhanovsky mistakenly substitutes the lost work’s hypernym “men” (viris) for the surviving work’s hyponym “commanders /generals” (imperatorum). The Russian translation is titled Mudryy v uyedinenii, Upodoblennyy chast’yu sochineniyu Yunga, kotoroye imeyet to zhe titlo; the original French title is Le Sage dans la Solitude: imité en partie, de l’ouvrage d’Young, qui porte le même titre (1787). The Russian original’s title: Dym: Karikaturnyy roman A. Volkova i ko, zhivem vzyatyy iz khudozhestvenno-satiricheskogo romana I. S. Turgeneva. Turgenev’s 1867 novel Smoke (Dym), about an affair between two Russians taking the waters in Baden-Baden, takes satirical aim at both Slavophiles and Westernizers. Saint Petersburg artist Adrian Volkov (1827–73) drew parodies in pictures, or “graphic parodies,” of other contemporary works by Turgenev, Nikolay Nekrasov, and Vsevolod Krestovsky (https://artinvestment.ru/auctions/122530/#bio). The actual title of the parody is Count Skinny. Monday. A New Novel in Three Parts (Graf Khudoy. Ponedel’nik. Novyy roman v trekh chastyakh, Moscow, 1899–90), and the author behind the pseudonym is writer and entertainer Dmitry Anisimovich Bogemsky (1878–1931) (Perel’muter, Sobraniye sochinenii v pyati tomakh, vol. 4, 718). Krzhizhanovsky has misremembered the pseudonymous count’s name as “thin” (tonkiy) rather than “skinny” (khudoy), which might indicate the subconscious influence of Anton Chekhov’s famous 1883 short story “Fat and Thin” (“Tolstyy i tonkiy”). The Russian title: Zhizn’ i deyaniya Vseznayeva so vsemi dostopamyatnymi ego proisshestviyami, ili gore bez uma. Nravst. satir. roman A. P. The author’s name is given in library catalog entries as A. A. Pavlov. The title being snatched here is Woe from Wit (Gore bez uma), the famous comedy by poet, playwright, and diplomat Alexander Griboyedov (1795–1829). The play was written in 1823, circulated in manuscript form in 1824, published in part in 1825, published in a censored version in 1833, and published in full in 1861.

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46. The Mason Without a Mask (“Mason bez maski”) was translated by Ivan Vasilyevich Sots (?–1794) from the French original, Thomas Wilson’s 1751 exposure Le maçon démasqué, ou le vrai secret des franc maçons, Mis au jour dans toutes ses parties avec sincérité & sans dèguisement (The Mason Unmasked, or the True Secret of the French Masons, Revealed in All Particularities, Sincerely and Without Disguise), while The Pug Without a Collar (“Mops bez osheinika”) is a partial translation of abbé Gabriel-Louis Pérau’s 1742 exposure L’Ordre des francsmaçons trahi. Le Secret des Mopses révélé. Chansons de la très vénérable confrérie des francs-maçons, précédées de quelques pièces de poésie (The Order of Freemasons betrayed. The Secret of the Pugs revealed. Songs of the very venerable Brotherhood of Freemasons, preceded by a few poems). Although no translator is indicated for The Pug Without a Collar, editions of both it and The Mason Without a Mask were printed at Khristofor Genning’s typography in Saint Petersburg in 1784, making it plausible, at least, that Sots translated both works himself. Since neither original French title uses the “X without Y” formula, but both Russian translated titles do, it appears that it was the translator(s), not the original texts’ authors, who were trying to capitalize on catchy titles. 47. In Eastern Christianity, an analogion is a slanted stand or lectern on which icons or the Gospels are placed so they can be venerated or read. 48. The interwoven images and wordplay in Krzhizhanovsky’s original (“s tshchaniyem vycherchivayemye ustavy i poluustavy”—literally, “meticulously drawn/plotted rules/laws/charters/uncial script and semi-uncial script”) are based on the dual meanings of ustav as both a law and a medieval calligraphic hand. In turn, I have played on the dual images of “ruling” as both a moral regulation or guideline and a hand-drawn form of regulation (drawing the guidelines for the tightly packed calligraphic letters). 49. The stock French phrase meaning “just published,” “now available,” etc. 50. The original work by Joseph Hall (1574–1656), Occasional Meditations: Meditatiunculae Subitaneae eque re nata subortae (1630) is bilingual, with English in one column and Latin in the other column on the same page. The meditation dually entitled by Hall as “On

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the sight of a scavenger working in the kennel / Conspecto sordido quodam canalium expurgatore (On seeing a dirty cleaner of canals)” leads one to conclude that the Russian translation was based on the Latin rather than on the English text, which is confirmed by the catalog entry in the Russian State Library informing us that the volume was translated from Latin in the Tver seminary. A popular picaresque novel written by German author Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen (around 1621–76), long considered to be autobiographical. The German title is Der Abentheurliche Simplicissimus Teutsch, Das ist: Die Beschreibung deß Lebens eines seltzamen Vaganten, genant Melchior Sternfels von Fuchshaim, wo und welcher gestalt Er nemlich in diese Welt kommen, was er darinn gesehen, gelernet, erfahren, und außgestanden, auch warumb er solche wieder freywillig quittirt. Überauß lustig und männiglich nutzlich zu lesen. This text might have been on Krzhizhanovsky’s mind since in 1925, the Moscow publishing house Zemlya i fabrika released a translation by Futurist artist and writer Yelena Guro (1877–1913). It was presumably her choice to translate the German abenteurliche (“adventurous”) as chukdakovatyi (“[slightly] eccentric”), a decision that makes Krzhizhanovsky’s parallelism between Grimmelshausen’s and Bely’s “eccentrics” possible in Russian. This is Andrey Bely’s 1922 novel, Zapiski chudaka (Notes of an Eccentric), one of his three biographical or pseudo-biographical novels. It was originally published in the Berlin journal Epopeya (Epopeia), which Bely edited in the early twenties, with a prologue projecting a series of three works to be entitled Epopeya, with the last letter—“ya,” also the Russian word for “I”—bolded. German philosopher and mystic Jakob Böhme (1575–1624) really did begin as a shoemaker. He wrote Aurora in 1612 after having visions. The work was considered heretical by religious leaders, and Böhme never finished it, though this did not stop it or his ideas from being widely circulated. Krzhizhanovsky is slightly exaggerating to make his point; the full title of the doctor’s 1920 book is Vivre: étude des moyens de relever l’énergie vitale et de prolonger la vie (Life: A Study of the Means of

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Restoring Vital Energy and Prolonging Life). The therapeutic rejuvenation treatments of Serge Voronoff (1866–1951), at one time wildly popular, included “monkey-gland transplantation” (transplanting testicular tissue from monkeys into the testicles of men) and made him the inspiration for Professor Preobrazhensky from Mikhail Bulgakov’s 1925 novel, Heart of a Dog (Sobach’ye serdtse). Comparing the “scientific” doctor Voronoff with the seventeenth-century religious mystic Böhme must surely be interpreted as Krzhizhanovsky’s commentary on the former. 55. The full Russian title of Swedish doctor Johan von Hoorn’s (1662–1724) seminal midwifery manual from 1697 is perhaps the longest yet: Povival’naya babka ili Dostovernoye nastavleniye chrez voprosy i otvety: Kakim obrazom zhenshchine plodom blagoslovennoy v rodakh vspomozhenie chinit’, i ot tyazhkikh pripadkov zablagovremenno eya predosteregat’; v sluchaye zhe upushcheniya takoy predostorozhnosti, kakim posle iskusstvom ot bedstva i smertel’noy opasnosti izbavlyat’ eya nadlezhit. Sochineno po bol’shoy chasti iz sobstvennago opyta Iogannom Gornom, meditsiny doktorom, ego korolevskago velichestva shvedskago leyb-medikom, Korolevskoy meditsinskoy kollegii prezidentom i stokgolmskim shtadt-fizikom; S nemetskago zhe na rossiyskoy yazyk perevedeno byvshim Dvora eya imp. velichestva, gof. khirurgum Ivanom Pagenkamfom; Ispravleno i napechatano pri Imp. Moskovskom universitete (The Midwife, or a Reliable Instruction, through Questions and Answers, on How to afford Assistance to a Woman, Blessed by Fruit of the Womb, in giving Birth, and to protect her judiciously from terrible Paroxysms; but in the Case that such Judiciousness was neglected, by what Art she may be saved from Calamity and Threat of Death. Composed in the main from the personal experience of Johan Hoorn, doctor of medicine, personal physician to His Royal Swedish Highness, President of the Royal College of Medicine, and city physician of Stockholm. Translated from the German to the Russian by the former physician of Her Majesty’s court Ivan Pagenkampf; Corrected and printed at the Moscow Imperial University, 1764). No published English translation has been identified. 56. Tokology: A Book for Every Woman (1885) was published by obstetrician and gynecologist Alice Stockham, the fifth woman in the United

States to be a certified, practicing medical doctor. The Russian version shows interesting modifications in the title as the book grows in popularity. The first edition, published in Kiev in 1891, has the title Tokologiya, ili Nauka o detorozhdenii: Gigiyena beremennykh i novorozhdennykh. Per. s angl. po novomu, ispr. avt. izd. 1891 g. (Tokology, or the Science of Giving Birth: Hygiene for Pregnant Women and NewBorns; Translated from the new edition with the author’s corrections, 1891); subsequent editions jettison the wording about “Hygiene for Pregnant Women and New-Borns,” instead describing themselves as being “A Book for Women,” and acquire the foreword by Tolstoy, an author’s portrait, and the assurance that it was translated with the author’s permission by S. Dolgov. 57. This refers not to a typographical innovation but to the natural effect of shortening phrases to words: doing so necessarily moves the period at the end of the sentence farther to the left. 58. Irish philosopher George Berkeley (1685–1753) developed the theory of immaterialism, according to which nothing exists outside the mind, hence Krzhizhanovsky calling it a “phantasmagoria.” Berkeley also wrote about optics and mathematics, which Krzhizhanovsky combines with immaterialism’s retreat into the mind to produce the “retracting radii” image. A lot is a pre-metric measure of mass equal to 1/32 of a pound, or just under 13 grams; but the pureness of silver is also measured in lots (an item that’s 37.5 percent pure silver would be 6 lots of pure silver; 50 percent pure silver contains 8 lots of pure silver, etc.). If we consider the implications of this second meaning, it seems Krzhizhanovsky is hinting that Berkeley’s work has far less precious content than it does base alloy. 59. This appears to be a reference to the phrase “Since therefore words are so apt to impose on the understanding, [I am resolved in my inquiries to make as little use of them as possibly I can],” from paragraph 21 of his Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge. Despite Krzhizhanovsky’s claim, the bracketed phrase he emphasizes was in the first edition from 1710, not in the 1734 edition. The first Russian translation was published in 1905, but further information about that edition was not found.

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60. In typography, the hellbox or hellhole is where broken or worn type is collected to be melted down. 61. This is one of Krzhizhanovsky’s most cunning homonymic puns, based on the fact that the word topics/subjects/themes (temy) can be broken down into two words, those/they (te) and we (my): starye temy ne temy, potomu shto ne te my (“old themes aren’t themes, because we are not the same as we were/we are not the right ones”). 62. French thinker and social experimenter Étienne Cabet (1788–1856) published his utopian novel Voyage en Icarie (The Voyage to Icaria) in 1840. The unusual title page of the 1848 edition includes not so much a title as a graphic design listing his proposed utopia’s goals and values, and it does contain around one hundred words, including the publication information. French writer Auguste Chirac (1838–1910) published his Si, étude sociale d’après-demain (If: A Social Study after Tomorrow) in 1893. 63. In his Preface to the General Science (1677), German polymath Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) wrote about the characteristica universalis or “universal character,” an artificial universal language in which individual ideas would be represented by individual characters, which could then be manipulated algebraically. This is different from the idea of a new plan classification of the sciences in order to map out a new globus intellectualis, which was first posited not by Leibniz but by Francis Bacon (1561–1626) in his Instauratio Magna (“The Great Instauration,” 1620). Krzhizhanovsky appears to have conflated the two ideas both here and in “A Philosopheme for the Theater” (Filosofema o teatre, written in 1923), where he describes the globus intellectualis as “a closed-in sphere of symbolic signs that expressed the entire system of universal essences without the intermediary of words” (quoted and translated by Karen Rosenflanz in her excellent study of Krzhizhanovsky, Hunter of Themes). 64. The word “askant”—not “a+skant” but “as+kant”—reflects Krzhizhanovsky’s own sly homage to philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), whose thinking deeply influenced his work. Logicheski okantovav temu means “after logically edging/mounting/framing the theme,” but it is

also a neologism constructed in keeping with Russian morphological rules: o+kant+ovat’, meaning “to surround something with kant” or “to make something fully kant.” 7. COUNTRIES THAT DON ’T E XIST 1. In ancient Greek mythology, Tartarus was the region of the underworld reserved for the worst criminals and enemies of the Olympian gods. 2. Voyage autour de ma chambre (1794) by Xavier de Maistre (1763–1852) was translated into Russian as Puteshestvie domoseda in 1804 and into English as A Journey Round My Room by “H. P.” in 1871. Written when the author, the younger brother of Joseph de Maistre, the noted reactionary Catholic political thinker and Savoyard ambassador to the Russian court from 1803 to 1817, was himself confined to prison for forty-two days for dueling, the novel described in the style of Laurence Sterne the imaginary travels of a hero similarly confined to one room of a prison. 3. Although they fell into disfavor during the Stalinist years, the novels and stories of Alexander Grin (1880–1932) have always been popular with young readers in Russia. 4. Krzhizhanovsky’s main source on Russian folklore comes from the Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language by Vladimir Dal, which has been an invaluable reference book for writers, scholars, and readers since its first publication in 1880. 5. Like Islam and Judaism, traditional Russian Orthodoxy saw a shaved face as an obscenity and rejection of a divine commandment. One of the most controversial elements of Peter the Great’s plan to modernize Russia was, in fact, his campaign against wearing beards. See Lindsey Hughes, Russia in the Age of Peter the Great (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 280–88. 6. Part 1 of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, first published in 1726, is called “A Voyage to Lilliput.” 7. Krzhizhanovsky is contrasting chudakí, that is, quirky eccentrics, with chudáki, which I am translating as “the quirk.”

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8. Commanding fewer than a thousand Cossacks, Yermak Timofeevich spearheaded the Muscovite conquest of Siberia for Ivan the Terrible in the fifteenth century. 9. Writing in 1927, Andrei Viktorovich Shmidt (1894–1935), a Russian archeologist and specialist on the indigenous people of Siberia, described this legend as “well-known to every inhabitant of the Urals region” (https://uraloved.ru/ludi-urala/chud, accessed May 24, 2021). 10. Although Krzhizhanovsky is clearly referring to The Republic, the following metaphor of the ideal state’s organization by analogy with the human body does not actually appear in Plato’s text. 11. Utopia: Discourses of Raphael Hythloday, of the Best State of a Commonwealth. 12. Based on popular jokes and sayings that supposedly date to the twelfth century and first published as The Merie Tales of the Mad Men of Gotan in 1565 by “A. B. of Phisicke Doctor,” these tales of “wise fools” have been adapted by numerous writers in English, from Washington Irving to James Baldwin. 13. Although paradoxical stories of “wise fools” are common in the traditional cultures and religions of Asia and the Middle East, as well as in Russian folklore (e.g., Ivan the Fool) and literature (e.g., the urodyvyj, or “Fool in Christ”), I have been unable to verify the existence of any cycle of tales about “foolish Brahmins” in Hindu folk literature. 14. One rupee consists of 100 paise (sg. paisa). 15. I have been unable to authenticate this folktale. 16. François Rabelais (1494?–1553), French Renaissance writer, author of Gargantua and Pentagruel in five books, first published between 1532 and 1562. 17. The giants who live in the kingdom of Brobdingnag. See book 2 of Gulliver’s Travels, “A Voyage to Brobdingnag.” 18. Published between 1741 and 1744 in The Gentleman’s Magazine, often considered the first modern magazine, under the title “Debates in the Senate of Magna Lilliputia.” 19. Here Krzhizhanovsky clearly has in mind the “Maginot Line,” a complicated system of fortifications built by the French in the 1930s to defend against future German attack.

20. In The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung’s Ring (1898), Shaw interpreted Wagner’s Ring Cycle as an allegory of the collapse of capitalism. 21. Subtitled “A Metabiological Pentateuch,” Back to Methusealah (published in 1921) consists of five plays: In the Beginning, B.C. 4004 B.C; The Gospel of the Brothers Barnabas, Present Day; The Thing Happens, A.D. 2170; Tragedy of an Elderly Gentleman, A.D. 3000; and As Far as Thought Can Reach, A.D. 31,920. 22. Following the publication of Baron Munchausen’s Narrative of his Marvelous Travels and Campaigns in Russia (1785) by Rudolf Erich Raspe, the fabulous storyteller and fantasist instantly became an international sensation. Even before the end of the eighteenth century, it had been translated into all the major European languages, and writers and filmmakers continue to add to the Munchausen mythology. Krzhizhanovsky’s own contribution to the genre, “The Return of Munchausen” (1927–28), is now available in an excellent translation by Joann Turnbull and Nikolai Formozov in Sigismund Krzhizhanovsky, The Return of Munchausen (New York: New York Review of Books Classics, 2016). 23. Raspe supposedly based his fictional character on Hieronymus Karl Friedrich, Freiherr von Munchhausen, a German aristocrat who fought in the Russian army during the reign of Catherine the Great. 24. Most scholars today think of Perogrullo as a product of the popular imagination (https://www.abc.es/historia/20141008/abci-verdades -perogrullo-profecia-evangelista-201410071159.html, accessed May 24, 2021). 25. According to Vadim Perelmuter, the editor of Krzhizhanovsky’s collected works, the writer probably had in mind the fantastic play Krasnyj kabachok (The Little Red Inn, 1911) by Yury Dmitrievich Beliaev (1876–1917), which was produced once by Meyerhold in 1911. 26. Perogrullada can be defined as an unintentionally humorous truism. 27. Georgian-Soviet modernist author of realistic, satirical, and fantastic novels, none of which has yet been translated into English. 28. The most famous mentions of perrogrullada in classic Spanish literature are in chapter LXII of Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1610) and Francisco de Quevado’s 1622 “Los sueños.”

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29. Krzhizhanovsky might be hinting at the “general line”—that is, the political course—of the ruling Communist Party. 30. For more on the folkloric roots of Topsy-turvy, see Jacqueline Simpson, “The World Upside Down Shall Be: A Note on the Folklore of Doomsday,” Journal of American Folklore, 91, no. 359 (1978): 559–67. 31. Bruegel, The Land of Cockaigne (Het Luillekkerland, 1597) is located in Munich’s Alte Pinakothek. The identity of the first painting is unclear. 32. The hobo’s vision of paradise in the folk song “The Big Rock Candy Mountain” (first recorded in 1958 by Harry McClintock) provides a modern American version of this eternal dream. 33. Despite Krzhizhanovsky’s undeniable erudition, his descriptions of Topsy-turvy and the Land of Cockaigne, like his earlier discussion of the Foolish Brahmins, suggest at best a partial knowledge of English and Indian folklore. 34. In Greek mythology, lotus-eaters were a race living in a state of perpetual apathy due to the narcotic effect of eating the fruit of the Lotus (Homer’s Odyssey, book IX). Krzhizhanovsky was probably thinking of Tennyson’s 1832 poem “The Lotos-eaters,” which contributed to the secondary meaning of lotus-eater in English as “a person who leads a life of idle contentment or luxury, untroubled by the working world or by practical concerns; an indolent person addicted to carefree pleasures” (Oxford English Dictionary) or, simply, a “hedonist.” 35. The idiomatic phrase used by Krzhizhanovsky here—“rivers of milk and banks of kissel”—is the equivalent of the biblical “land flowing with milk and honey.” Kissel is a traditional Russian dessert made of mashed berries slightly thickened with potato starch that can be served hot or cold. 36. Although Cosmas Indicopleustes (i.e., “Cosmas the Indian voyager”) was one of the first Europeans to travel to India and author of the influential Kosmographia (Christian Topography), a major source of information about the geographical knowledge and symbolic worldview of Byzantium in the sixth century, the Itanesiesy do not appear in it. 37. Compare the thousands of caricatures of writers, artists, politicians, and others by David Levine published in The New York Review of Books.

38. The Azbukovnik (Abecedary) was a manuscript compilation of various materials translated from the Greek that was widely used in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Russia to teach reading, geography, history, etc. 39. In a short sketch written in 1922 and called “The Itanesiesy,” Krzhizhanovsky described them as nomads who perished while searching for a promised land, where the sounds of everyday life would no longer assault their extraordinarily sensitive auditory organs (Sobraniye sochinenii v 6-i tomakh, vol. 1, 203–5). 40. Krzhizhanovsky seems to be conflating the Itanesiesy with another imaginary race, the Panotti, who, according to Pliny the Elder, “have ears of such extraordinary size as to cover the rest of the body, which is otherwise left naked” (The Natural History, book IV, chap. 27, “The Islands of the Euxine. The Islands of the Northern Ocean”). 41. In The Natural History (book VII, chap. 2, “The Wonderful Forms of Different Nations”), Pliny the Elder describes a “race of men, who are known as Monocoli, who have only one leg, but are able to leap with surprising agility. The same people are also called Sciapodae because they are in the habit of lying on their backs during the time of the extreme heat and protecting themselves from the sun by the shade of their feet.” According to Pliny, the Monocoli or Sciapodae live in India, not Africa. 42. For example, Russian Fairy Tales Collected by Aleksandr Afanasyev, trans. Norbert Guterman (New York: Random House, 1975), 375–87. 43. A prolific author of poems, plays, essays, history, and memoir, Holberg (1684–1754) is often considered one of the founders of modern Danish and Norwegian literature. 44. According to Rabelais, Ennasin “derives from a Latin word meaning ‘to cut off the nose.’  ” Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. Jacques Le Clercq (New York: Modern Library, n.d.), book 4, chap. IX, 529. 45. Gargantua and Pantagruel, book 4, chap. IX. 46. “Les Chicquanous,” that is, “those who engage in chicanery,” “chicaneurs” (Gargantua and Pantagruel, book 4, chaps. VII–XVI). 47. Gargantua and Pantagruel, book 5, chap. IX. 48. Gargantua and Pantagruel, book 5, chap. XX.

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49. Gargantua and Pantagruel, book 5, chap. XXVIII. 50. Gargantua and Pantagruel, book 5, chap. XLIV. 51. Throughout the essay, Krzhizhanovsky’s reliance on his memory results in small inaccuracies. For example, although Rabelais’ hometown of Chinon is discussed in Gargantua and Pantagruel, the episode of “The Oracle of the Bottle” actually takes place on an unnamed island (book 5, chap. XXXIV, 806). 52. The hare is indeed a popular figure in African folklore, as well as the source of the popular African American tales about Br’er Rabbit. 53. Russian Fairy Tales Collected by Aleksandr Afanasyev, 119–23. 54. Krzhizhanovsky does not seem to understand that Shakespeare is, in fact, simply giving a proper name (“Anthropophagi”) as a gloss of the phrase “cannibals that eat each other.” 8. EDG AR ALL AN POE: NINET Y YE AR S AFTER HIS DE ATH 1. Subtitled “An Extravaganza.” This angel is “the genius who presides over the contretemps of mankind, and whose business it is to bring about the odd accidents which are continually astonishing the skeptic.” 2. A man gets away with murder and for years revels in his impunity— until it becomes unbearable; he confesses and is condemned to death. 3. Qui n’a plus un moment à vivre n’a plus rien à dissimuler. From Quinault’s libretto for Lully’s Atys (1676). Used as the epigraph for “MS. Found in a Bottle.” 4. In “Diddling.” 5. In Das Capital I, chap. XXIV, sect. 5. 6. In “The Philosophy of Furniture”: “We have no aristocracy of blood, and having, therefore, as a natural and, indeed, as an inevitable thing, fashioned for ourselves an aristocracy of dollars, the display of wealth has here to take the place, and perform the office, of the heraldic display in monarchical countries.” 7. The French poet and writer (1823–1891) was Poe’s junior by fourteen years. 8. “Le Saut du tremplin.”

9. SHAW AND THE BOOK SHELF (ABRIDGED) 1. Sobraniye sochinenii v pyati tomakh, by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, vol. 4, ed. Vadim Perel’muter (Saint Petersburg: Symposium, 2006), 546–68. 2. From the opening stage direction of Man and Superman (1903). Krzhizhanovsky omits half a sentence. Except for that cut, the translation restores Shaw’s original English. 3. “Press Cuttings (A Topical Sketch compiled from the editorial and correspondence columns of the daily papers during the Woman’s War in 1909)” (1909), a spoof on militant suffragettes in London. 4. The Devil’s Disciple. A Melodrama in Three Acts (1897). Set in New Hampshire, 1777, during the American Revolution. 5. Krzhizhanovsky mimics the formula of Yuri Levitan (1914–1983), Stalin’s handpicked radio anchorman and a beloved trusted voice during World War II, who opened every broadcast with his trademark “Attention, this is Moscow speaking.” 6. 10 Adelphi Terrace, London: the residence of Shaw and his wife, the fellow Fabian Charlotte Payne-Townshend, from their marriage in 1898 until 1927. 7. De Profundis: a prose letter by Wilde to Lord Alfred Douglas, composed in the cell of Reading Gaol prison in 1897. Krzhizhanovsky’s linking of Mozart’s Requiem with Wilde’s prison memoir might have been motivated by Wilde’s rueful comment in his letter that while free, he had kept to the “sunlit side of the garden, and shunned the other side for its shadow.” De Profundis is also mentioned favorably by Shaw as a tough-minded, laughing work in his preface to “The Dark Lady of the Sonnets,” discussed in a later note. 8. Krzhizhanovsky refers to The Glimpse of Reality. A Tragedietta (1909, premiered 1927), set in fifteenth-century Italy. He overstates here: other noncomedic plays by Shaw include The Doctor’s Dilemma. A Tragedy (1906), as well as Saint Joan. A Chronicle Play (1923) and mock tragedies such as Passion, Poison, and Petrifaction. A Brief Tragedy (1905). 9. Krzhizhanovsky quotes from The Complete Plays of Bernard Shaw (London: Odham, 1934). Shaw prefaces this passage with the phrase

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“Aims of the Playwright”; the translation into Russian by Krzhizhanovsky opens with “My profession [as a classic writer of comedies  .  .  .].” With the exception of this substitution of “profession” for Shaw’s “business”—a word with a more ominous resonance in Stalinist Russia—Krzhizhanovsky’s Russian version is accurate. Near the end of Shaw’s The Perfect Wagnerite (1898), a philosophical explication of Der Ring des Nibelungen as an allegory on the collapse of capitalism, a section titled “The Old and the New Music” distinguishes between the old “decorative” (or “wallpaper”) music composed according to a set metrical pattern, and the newer Wagnerian “dramatic” music, keyed to events and persons. William Archer (1856–1924), Scottish drama critic, was a poet, translator, and close friend of Shaw’s. Archer’s sighting of the young bearded Shaw juxtaposing Marx’s Das Capital (in French translation) and Wagner’s Ring in the British Museum is a well-known anecdote of Wagnerian leftism, but it is usually ascribed to 1883, the year of Wagner’s death. Archer had proposed to end their joint Rhinegold with a politically provocative gesture that would bring Wagner’s plot up to date: the hero, having married the daughter of a slum landlord, throws the tainted family gold into the Rhine. Shaw eventually decided on a darker ending to his Widowers’ Houses (1892): the hero marries, consolidates the landlords’ wealth, and the poor get poorer. Krzhizhanovsky then discusses The Perfect Wagnerite as a political allegory, introducing the revolutionist views of John Tanner. John Tanner is the Don Juan figure in Man and Superman; Captain Bluntschli, a Swiss mercenary in the Serbian army in Arms and the Man (1894); Sir Andrew Underschaft, the millionaire in Major Barbara (1905). In this preface Shaw rails against the “Bardolaters”—and also against humorless critics who conceive of Shakespeare as “a broken-hearted, melancholy, enormously sentimental person, whereas”—Shaw writes—“I am convinced that he was very like myself.” Krzhizhanovsky cites an exchange early in the playlet between the Beefeater (the sentry) and the note-taking Cloaked Man (Shakespeare), when the former produces a “good cadence.”

17. A hopeful etymology on Krzhizhanovsky’s part. The Russian word genial’nyi (given by Krzhizhanovsky as one equivalent of “genial,” but closer to “ingenious”) recalls the Russian word genii (“genius“/”guardian spirit”), also from Latin. The English “genial” (from L. genialis, “pleasant, festive”) once had an elevated connotation but lost its aura of genius by the mid-eighteenth century and now merely denotes “friendly” or “easy to take.” 18. Krzhizhanovsky’s wordplay here is with the Russian root for “health,” zdorov’ye/zdravyi. “Common sense” is zdravyi smysl, “healthy sense,” which not everyone has; but genius, Krzhizhanovsky insists on Shaw’s behalf, is always zdorovennyi, healthy in the sense of robust, not squeamish or prone to illness. 19. Krzhizhanovsky refers to Shaw’s battle against Bardolatry (liking Shakespeare for sentimental, sensationalist, or intellectual reasons) and to Shaw’s lifelong competition with his Elizabethan predecessor. The preface to Dark Lady of the Sonnets presents Shakespeare as ironic, impatient with self-pity, able to laugh at misfortune, and democratic, far more honest and appreciative of the lower classes than he is of perverse kings. 20. Here Krzhizhanovsky paraphrases sentiments of Shaw’s that appear not in “Shakespeare’s Pessimism” but two sections later, in “Jupiter and Semele.” Translation has been adjusted to match Shaw’s English. 21. The quotation is from Cymbeline, act II, scene 3, 998–99. 22. Two pages of the typescript are missing. 23. Richard Réti (1889–1929), Hungarian-Czech grandmaster, proponent of hypermodernism in chess and author of Modern Ideas in Chess (1923). Krzhizhanovsky used chess moves to explicate dramatic devices in both Shakespeare and Shaw. 24. Protagonist of Ibsen’s 1865 verse tragedy Brand; Dr. Stockmann, of Ibsen’s 1882 play An Enemy of the People. 25. A paraphrase from the end of Shaw’s “Obituary Article on Ibsen” in The Clarion, June 1, 1906. The original is more judgmental: “The logic by which Gregers Werle persuades Hedvig to kill the wild duck in order that she may be provided with a pistol to kill herself, strains my credulity severely.”

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26. The quote is from Seagull, act two. Here Krzhizhanovsky contrasts Shaw’s assessment of Ibsen—plays that are “a slap in the face to a smug middle class”—with his reading of the world-weary Chekhov, who delivers only the “pinpricks of life.” Special attention is paid to that staple of the Russian Shaw industry, the 1920 play Heartbreak House. A Fantasia in the Russian Manner on English Themes. In its preface, Shaw describes its setting as “cultured, leisured Europe before the war,” noting that a “Russian playwright, Tchekov, had produced four fascinating studies of Heartbreak House.” 27. Another free paraphrase from Shaw’s 1906 obituary article on Ibsen (see note 25). Shaw’s original reads, “It has always seemed to me that the catastrophes in Ibsen’s plays are forced—occasionally so forced that not even their magic can compel their unconscious acceptance.” Shaw develops the idea that pure accidents and catastrophes are “not dramatic, only “anecdotic,” in his 1913 addendum (“The Technical Novelty in Ibsen’s Plays”) to his Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891). 28. Auguste Rodin (1840–1917), French sculptor based in Paris, warmly appreciated in England in the early twentieth century; James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903), American artist based largely in England who lived briefly in St. Petersburg in the 1840s, Paris in the 1850s, and thereafter primarily in London. Similar to Shaw, both were “naturalistic” rebels against decorative and formulaic artistic schools. 29. Archibald Henderson (1877–1963), American mathematician and Shaw enthusiast, who became a close friend of the playwright and wrote five books on him. Krzhizhanovsky is translating loosely from chapter LX, “Personalities and Reminiscences,” of Henderson’s authorized biography, Bernard Shaw: Playboy and Prophet (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1932), 738. For context, the preceding sentence is supplied in the text in brackets. Chapter LX opens on a description of Shaw’s study, a “cramped cubby-hole on the fourth floor,” with the detail, “Book shelves line the walls, and pictures cover the remaining wall spaces and lie about” (736). 30. The quote is from Shaw’s “A Degenerate’s View of Nordau,” a lengthy open letter to the editor of Liberty (New York City), July 27, 1895,

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later expanded into a booklet titled The Sanity of Art (1908), criticizing Max Nordau’s best-selling text Degeneration. With the exception of one phrase, marked in brackets in the text, the translation is accurate. Shaw’s original English has been restored in the translation. The Russian term for “immaculate” as it refers to the virgin birth in Christian tradition is less religiously marked: neporochnyi, “without sin.” Shaw answers: “I consider all conceptions to be without sin.” John Stewart Collis (1900–84), Irish biographer and rural writer, published his biography Shaw in 1925. It was his first book. He went on to write the lives of Strindberg and Tolstoy, among others. The teeth anecdote comes farther down in “A Degenerate’s View of Nordau” (see note 30). Krzhizhanovsky in part cites Shaw, in part paraphrases him. Translation is adjusted to incorporate maximally Shaw’s actual text, placed in quotes. Carl Immanuel Gerhardt (1816–99), German historian of mathematics, who prepared the first full edition of Leibniz’s works. Archer translated Ibsen into English and arranged for Shaw’s plays to be translated into German. Kuno Fischer (1824–1907), German historian of philosophy, best known for his six-volume History of Modern Philosophy, published between 1854 and 1901. Widowers’ Houses (1892), Shaw’s first staged work and later one of his three Plays Unpleasant (1898). Harry Trench, a young doctor, reconciles with his estranged fiancée, Blanche, after both realize that their sources of livelihood are dependent upon real estate exploitation of the poor. Frank Wedekind (1864–1918), expressionist German playwright and cabaret artist, most famous today as author of the Lulu plays, wrote his Hidalla oder Sein und Haben (Hidalla, or Being and Having) in 1905. Nikolai Gogol (1809–52) burned the second unfinished part of his prose epic Dead Souls in 1852, persuaded that it was demonically inspired. Krzhizhanovsky discusses several more plays—Man and Superman, and the brief fantastical farce Passion, Poison, and Petrifaction, or the

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Fatale Gazogene (1905), as well as Shaw’s obsession with books from the age of five. 41. Captain Shotover, the eccentric inventor from Shaw’s 1919 “Chekhovian” play Heartbreak House. 10. DR AMATURGY OF THE CHESSBOARD 1. Bauer: Peasant or pawn (German); here Krzhizhanovsky plays on the double meaning of the word to tie the hierarchies of the chessboard to those of the larger world, contrasting the German peasant with “Kaiser” (here the king chess piece.) These hierarchies of class, and especially in their overturning here, would seem to echo Engels’s history of a sixteenth-century peasant rebellion in Der Deutsche Bauernkrieg; this theme of peasant rebellion is repeated farther into the essay. 2. Ivan-da-Marya (Melampyrum nemorosum), a flowering plant that has both blue and yellow blossoms, hence the paired male and female names of the plant’s name. 3. When two pawns of the same color end up on the same file—one effectively blocking the other—they are known as “doubled pawns.” 4. At first glance, it might appear that Krzhizhanovsky confuses Hamlet with Macbeth and its famous “out, damned spot,” though the error would be a surprising one. More likely, he refers to a passage in act I, scene IV of Hamlet in its Russian translation, where the word “dram” is been rendered in the Russian as piatno, or “spot”: “the stamp of one defect . . . Shall in the general censure take corruption / From that particular fault: the dram [piatno] of evil / Doth all the noble substance of a doubt / To his own scandal.” 5. Krzhizhanovsky is using concise reversible notation, in which the colon indicates capture of a piece. 6. Carlo Goldoni (1707–93), an Italian playwright known for comedies that portrayed the lives of the nascent middle class in Italy. 7. A play by Hungarian writer Gábor Drégely (performed in Hungarian in 1908 as A Szerencse Fia), later adapted into the 1931 American film A Tailor-Made Man. In Russia, the play was popular in the second decade of the twentieth century.

8. A passed pawn is a piece that has no other pawns opposing it in its march to the eighth rank. 9. Krzhizhanovsky’s word here is prokhodimets (villain, con man, rogue), derived from the verb prokhodit, or “to pass through” (likely because such shady types were unlikely to stay long in one place)—thus, literally, “a passer-through.” The word resonates with chess pieces and their movements, of course, a fact that Krzhizhanovsky plays with here. 10. Krzhizhanovsky is referring to The Prince and the Pauper, or, rather, its Soviet theatrical adaptation. 11. Characters from Mozart’s opera The Marriage of Figaro; Figaro is a servant and the conniving Count Almaviva is his master. 12. François-André Danican Philidor (1726–95) was both a composer of operas and famed chess player who wrote a theoretical tract on the game that became a standard manual for decades. Two chess combinations are named after him. 13. The five-year period prior to the writing of this essay would encompass World War II and its immediate aftermath, a reference underscored by “rank-and-file heroes” alluded to here. 14. Russian chess has had not one but two famous Smyslovs: père Vasily Osipovich Smyslov (1881–1943) and—most likely being referred to here—his son, Soviet grand master Vasily Vasilyevich Smyslov (1921–2010), who would still have been in his early twenties when Krzhizhanovsky wrote this work. 15. An Italian play (Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore) written by Luigi Pirandello, first performed in 1921. 16. The bishop on the chessboard is called slon, or elephant, in Russian. 17. Here Krzhizhanovsky is playfully intermingling chess players with playwrights; Mikhail Ivanovich Chigorin (1850–1908) was known for his “romantic” chess style. 18. Alexander Ostrovsky, the famous Russian playwright of the nineteenth century (although by mixing up the chess players with the playwrights in this sentence, he also might be winking at chess player Pavel Ostrovsky). 19. Mikhail Botvinnik (1911–95), Soviet Grand Master and World Chess Champion.

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20. Alexander Sukhovo-Kobylin (1817–1903), satirical Russian playwright. 21. Paul Charles Morphy (1837–1884), American chess player and prodigy. 22. Pavel Ostrovsky (1909–29), a promising Russian chess player who tragically drowned at the age of twenty. 23. Romain Rolland (1866–1944), the French author and Nobel laureate whose novel, Colas Breugnon, was made into a Russian-language opera in 1938 for which Krzhizhanovsky wrote the libretto. 24. Wolfish characters from Ostrovsky’s plays The Storm, Hangover at Someone Else’s Feast, and Poverty Is No Vice; the exception here is “Januaries,” a name that does not seem to appear in Ostrovsky’s plays. Krzhizhanovsky might have been thinking of an unscrupulous merchant named Istukarii from Not a Single Cent and Suddenly a Dollar (Ne bylo ni grosha, da vdrug altyn). 25. An inversion of the Russian expression “the wolves are full and the sheep are whole,” used to indicate outcomes in which both sides can win. In chess, such an outcome is impossible, unless (as Krzhizhanovsky playfully suggests earlier) one side is playing to win; the other, to lose. 26. Play by Ostrovsky. 27. Krzhizhanovsky here erroneously identifies Zeus’s mother as Gaia (in fact, Rhea). 28. A reference to writer and critic Nikolai Dobroliubov’s famous essay, “A Ray of Light in a Dark Kingdom,” on Ostrovsky’s play The Storm, which found a figure of hope for Russia’s future in its heroine, Katerina Kabanova. 29. A trilogy of plays by Ostrovsky about a family with the name Balzaminov. 30. Krzhizhanovsky is borrowing this idea, almost word for word, from his own earlier novella Memories of the Future. 31. As Krzhizhanovsky notes in his footnote from 1948, in chess competitions, the use of seconds, analogous to those in duels, comes into use in the 1940s. 32. J. B. Priestley (1894–1984), English playwright, novelist, and critic. 33. Wilhelm Steinitz (1836–1900), the first official World Chess Champion and chess theoretician and innovator of the “positional” playing style.

34. Adolf Anderssen (1818–79), German chess master and leading player of the mid-nineteenth century, known for sacrificial attacks. 35. Lionel Kieseritzky (1806–53), a Baltic German chess master who, as Krzhizhanovsky alludes to earlier, is known not so much for his wins but for his loss in the so-called Immortal Game of 1851 against the aforementioned Anderssen, who sacrificed all but three minor pieces in order to checkmate his opponent. 36. Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1949), the Belgian playwright and critic who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1911. 37. The author is referring here to Chekhov’s play The Cherry Orchard, in which the starry-eyed landowner Gaev rhapsodizes about his bookshelf by addressing it directly in respectful and high-flown language—a passage that has since become a sort of ironic shorthand for pompous rhetoric. 38. Vasily Zhukovsky (1783–1852), a leading poet in Russia in the first decades of the nineteenth century. 39. In Zhukovsky’s poem, the servant drowns as a result of donning the stolen armor from his dead master, underscoring the notion of poetic or divine justice. 40. Clifford Odets (1906–63), an American playwright. 41. A reference to the nineteenth-century Russian poet Fyodor Tyutchev’s short poem, “Nature Is a Sphinx,” in which the poet likens the world to the Sphinx’s test, though without an actual riddle or solution. 42. Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751–1816), an Irish playwright. 43. Thomas Moore, Memoirs of the Life of the Right Honourable Richard Brinsley Sheridan, vol. 2 (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1825), 349. 12. A HISTORY OF UNWRITTEN LITER ATURE: A PROSPECTUS 1. The cheval de frise (Russian rogatka) is an anti-cavalry fortification, a precursor of barbed wire, made of spikes set into a frame. 2. In a contribution to the Dictionary of Literary Terms, Krzhizhanovsky defines “Aesopian language” as having two meanings. “One—its

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surface meaning—is turned to the rulers, the other—concealed—to the ruled; the ‘letter’ is turned to the censor, the ‘spirit’ to the reader.” Krzhizhanovsky’s concluding example is an 1870 satirical chronicle by Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin (1826–89), The History of a Town. This whole paragraph is an elaborate conceit on the repayment of a debt, and the words translated here as “ought” (dolzhnyi) and “obligation” (dolg) contain the Russian root for “debt” (dolg). Krzhizhanovsky probably means “the former,” as the most plausible interpretation is that he is referring to a responsibility incumbent upon the living to fulfill plans left unfinished by dead writers. Vasily Zhukovsky (1783–1852) was a poet and translator who helped introduce Romanticism into Russian letters. He gave the bilingual title Für Wenige / Dlia nemnogikh (For the Few) to the 1818 collection of Western verse with parallel translations that he compiled while a tutor to the imperial family, which was printed for circulation at the court. “Blessed is he who silent was a poet” [“Blazhen, kto molcha byl poet”] is a line from Alexander Pushkin’s “Conversation Between a Bookseller and a Poet,” which first appeared in 1824 as the introduction to the first chapter of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. Krzhizhanovsky adapted the poem as the opening scene of his 1936 dramatization of Eugene Onegin. The metaphysical odes and elegies of Gavriil Derzhavin (1743–1816) are among the highest achievements of eighteenth-century Russian verse. The polemical writings of Vasily Trediakovsky (1703–69) and Mikhail Lomonosov (1711–65) prescribed syllabotonic verse forms after Western models, which they attempted to exemplify in their own poems. Nikolai Karamzin (1766–1826) wrote poetry but is better remembered for his monumental history of Russia, travel writings, and sentimental tales. The “Pushkin Pleiades” is a conventional epithet for the circle of poets associated with Alexander Pushkin, of whom Krzhizhanovsky in this piece mentions the poets Petr Viazemsky (1792–1878), Anton Delvig (1798–1831), and Nikolai Iazykov (1803–46); Petr Chaadaev (1794–1856), whose Philosophical Letters castigate Russia for

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backwardness; Alexander Griboedov (1795–1829), who might have found in Chaadaev the inspiration for the iconoclastic protagonist of his 1823 verse comedy Woe from Wit; and Pavel Nashchokin (1801–54), the godfather of Pushkin’s eldest son. Pushkin’s scholarly History of the Pugachev Rebellion and his historical novel The Captain’s Daughter both treat the Pugachev rebellion. His “The Blackamoor of Peter the Great” and “History of Peter the Great” would have accomplished a similarly parallel treatment of another episode in Russian history had Pushkin completed them. By the bequest of an unrealized idea Krzhizhanovsky probably has in mind Pushkin’s fragmentary story “Egyptian Nights,” one thread of which Krzhizhanovsky undertook to complete (in a dramatic mode) in his 1937 play That Third Guy, which incorporates elements of his unfinished novel by the same name. Mikhail Lermontov (1814–41) achieved notoriety with an 1837 poem on Pushkin’s death and was commonly acknowledged thereafter as the heir to Pushkin’s legacy. These major works by Nikolai Gogol (1809–52)—and also his short story “The Overcoat”—apparently grew out of anecdotes related to him by Pushkin. Vadim Perelmuter suggests, in his notes to the Russian edition, that Krzhizhanovsky has in mind Viazemsky’s Old Notebook [Staraia zapisnaia knizhka], which, when published in 1929, was taken as an artifact of Viazemsky’s writing process rather than (as is likely) an intentional Romantic fragment. Gogol published several critical and theoretical sketches in the 1830s. Gogol’s Dead Souls was apparently planned as a triptych after the model of Dante’s Divine Comedy. The first volume, published in 1842, centered on a diabolical trade in “dead souls” (that is, the title to deceased slaves still recorded as living in the census) and was to pave the way for a portrayal of Russia’s spiritual regeneration and a culminating vision of its holy destiny in subsequent installments. Gogol got as far as a full draft of the second volume but destroyed it in manuscript form before starving himself to death in a fit of religious mania.

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18. Nikolai Nekrasov (1821–78) was a major poet, radical intellectual, and editor of the literary journals The Contemporary and Notes of the Fatherland. 19. According to Perelmuter’s notes, this title was used for a multivolume anthology of satirical poets of the 1860s edited by A. V. Amfiteatrov (whom Krzhizhanovsky mentions elsewhere in his writings) and published in 1914–17. 20. Nikolai Dobroliubov (1836–61) was a radical critic associated with Nekrasov’s Contemporary. Perelmuter suggests that Krzhizhanovsky has in mind Dobroliubov’s abortive forays into belles-lettres: “satirical verses, feuilletons, verse parodies.” 21. Krzhizhanovsky refers to two politically radical poets whose work, set to popular melodies, was circulated widely: French poet and songwriter Pierre-Jean de Béranger (1780–1857) and the German Heinrich Heine (1797–1856), whose lyric verses were set to music by composers including Robert Schumann and Franz Schubert. 22. Dostoevsky’s third novel, Netochka Nezvanova, was interrupted by the author’s exile to Siberia in 1849. Other incomplete works include A Russian Candide, Envy, A Murder, A Writer’s Romance, The Emperor, The Life of a Great Sinner, Murder in Tobolsk, and The Fortieth Day After Death (the last three of which were absorbed into The Brothers Karamazov). 23. Tolstoy’s early experimental diary entry “History of the Day Before” (1851) is a Sternean effort to recount the entirety of a single day, which Tolstoy abandoned after writing twenty-five pages explaining why he had gone to bed late the night before the day he hoped to describe. 24. Perelmuter notes Krzhizhanovsky’s studied acquaintance with Chekhov’s notebooks. 25. Ivan Rukavishnikov (1877–1930) was a poet, novelist, and translator associated with symbolism. 26. Krzhizhanovsky presumably has in mind the following anecdote, related by Gregory Chulkov in his memoirs of Blok: “One fine day he announced that an idea for a dramatic work had arisen in his soul. To the question ‘What is the idea?’ Blok answered very seriously: ‘A stork on a roof and twilight [Aist na kryshe i zaria].’ In response to the quizzical observation that this was pretty thin material for a

27. 28.

29.

30.

tragedy, Blok assured us that while he had nothing else in mind, ‘twilight and a stork’ was entirely sufficient for a play. However, nothing ever came of this ‘stork.’ ” Andrei Bely (1880–1934) was an outstanding poet, novelist, and theorist of symbolism. Lev Lunts (1901–24) was a playwright and critic associated with the Serapion Brotherhood, a prominent literary circle in Leningrad in the 1920s. Maxim Gorky (1868–1936) was an internationally known leftist writer and the lion of early Soviet letters. Krzhizhanovsky has in mind his stories “More About the Devil” (1899) and “A Novel” (1896). Krzhizhanovsky presumably intends to use these authors, like their successor Gorky, to demonstrate the fantastic imagination’s presence, however stifled, within tendentious realism. He might have had in mind the utopian “Dream of Vera Pavlova” interpolated into Chernyshevky’s 1863 novel What Is To Be Done? and the relish with which Turgenev recounts peasant superstitions and ghost tales in his 1852 Sportsman’s Sketches, a quasi-ethnographic collection sympathetic to the hardships of the serfs. The writers are often paired because of the intertwined origins of their most famous works: Nikolai Chernyshevky’s 1863 novel What Is To Be Done? was written as a polemical response to Ivan Turgenev’s 1862 Fathers and Sons. 13. A HISTORY OF H YPERBOLE

1. Vadim Perelmuter notes that Krzhizhanovsky is mistaken here: he is thinking of the javelin, not the sling, in the first book of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura. 2. The apical meristem (in Russian the more intuitively comprehensible tochka rosta, or “growth point”) is a botanical stem cell capable of developing into any part of the plant: it differentiates into primary and secondary meristems, which grow, respectively, vertically and laterally. 3. The elevated, grave, and sometimes stilted style of acting in ancient tragedies.

13. A History of Hyperbole

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4. Luis de Góngora y Argote was a Spanish Baroque lyric poet known for his convoluted style (Gongorismo). 5. Loose translation from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night: “shall we rouse the night-owl in a catch that will draw three souls out of one weaver?” 6. From Shakespeare’s Richard III: “I think there be six Richmonds in the field; Five have I slain today instead of him.” 7. From Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. 8. Source unidentified. 9. Loose translation from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet: “That ‘banishèd,’ that one word ‘banishèd,’ Hath slain ten thousand Tybalts.” 10. From Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “Forty thousand brothers could not with all their quantity of love make up my sum.” 11. The hierophant, or displayer of holy things, brings religious congregants into the presence of sacred or holy objects. 12. Perelmuter points out that two separate legends have fused here: first, that Pythagoras discovered the foundations of musical tuning, and second, Cicero’s theory in De re publica that the notes of the eightfold octachord correspond to celestial bodies and planets. 13. Zeno of Elea, creator of a number of logical paradoxes, argued that at every instant of an arrow’s flight there is, in fact, no motion occurring. 14. The Iliad, book 5. 15. Ornate, bombastic, extravagant style that originated with the seventeenth-century Italian poet Giambattista Marino. 16. From the Greek Euphues (witty, graceful). A mannered and artificial style of English prose, used in the works of John Lyly and fashionable in the sixteenth century. 17. Baron Munchausen, an archetypal fictional character loosely based on Karl Friedrich Hieronymus, Freiherr von Münchhausen, is a sportsman, soldier, and traveler who tells absurd and often inconsistent tales of his adventures. 14. WRITER’S NOTEBOOK S 1. The original juxtaposes the words trubochist (chimney sweep) and chistka (political purge) for the same punning effect.

2. Krzhizhanovsky was so amused by the Russian idiom, “Your elbow is close, yet you can’t bite it” (equivalent to the English expression, “So near and yet so far”) that in 1927, he wrote an ironic tale, translated by Joanne Turnbull as “The Unbitten Elbow,” about the new sport of (attempted) elbow-biting and the neo-Kantian philosophy of “elbowism.” 3. The “general line” indicated the political standards required by Stalinist orthodoxy from the 1920s. 4. This Moscow house, where political radical Alexander Herzen was born in 1812, became one of the most important Soviet literary institutes for training politically conformist writers in the twentieth century. 5. This is a free adaptation of Krzhizhanovsky’s pun on the words vina (“guilt”) and vino (“wine”), which could be translated literally: “Without wine, I am guilty.” 6. This is a riff on the biblical injunction, “Judge not, that ye be not judged. [. . .] And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?” (Matthew 7: 1–3). 7. This is a play on the surnames of the writers Maxim Gorky (Maxim “Bitter”) and Damian Bednyi (Damian “Poor”)—both pseudonyms. 8. This is a play on the Russian proverb, “These are only flowers; berries will come soon,” which equates roughly to “You ain’t seen nothing yet.” 9. Razlukoved: See Joanne Turnbull’s translation of razlukovedenie as “separationism” in “Someone Else’s Theme,” 69. 10. A pun on the play The Days of the Turbins (1926) by Krzhizhanovsky’s contemporary Mikhail Bulgakov, which was immensely popular with Joseph Stalin and Soviet audiences. 11. The proverb “Water doesn’t flow under a resting stone” is the (inverted) Russian equivalent of “A rolling stone gathers no moss.”

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CONTRIBUTORS

Anthony Anemone is a literary historian, film critic, and translator who specializes in modern Russian literature and cinema. Educated at Columbia University and the University of California at Berkeley, he has taught at Colby College, The College of William and Mary, and, since 2006, at The New School in New York City. The editor of Just Assassins: The Culture of Terrorism in Russia (Northwestern University Press, 2010), the coeditor and translator of “I Am a Phenomenon Quite Out of the Ordinary”: The Notebooks, Diaries, and Letters of Daniil Kharms (Academic Studies Press, 2013), he is at work on the first English-language monograph devoted to the life and career of Soviet-Georgian filmmaker Mikhail Kalatozov. Caryl Emerson is A. Watson Armour III University Professor Emeritus of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University. Her work has focused on the Russian classics (Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky), Mikhail Bakhtin, and Russian music and theater. Recent interests include Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky and allegorical-historical novelist Vladimir Sharov. Jacob Emery teaches Slavic and comparative literature at Indiana University. He has written numerous scholarly works on

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Russian literature and aesthetic theory, including Alternative Kinships (Northern Illinois University Press, 2017), and is coeditor of The Svetlana Boym Reader (Bloomsbury, 2018). With his sister, under the name J. S. Emery, he is the coauthor of the novel A Clockwork River (Head of Zeus, 2021). Anne O. Fisher has translated novels by Ilf and Petrov and Ksenia Buksha; fiction by Andrey Filimonov; fiction and drama by Julia Lukshina; and, with cotranslator Derek Mong, poetry by Maxim Amelin. In 2020, Fisher and cotranslator Alex Karsavin were awarded a RusTrans grant to support their work on Ilya Danishevsky’s 2018 novel Mannelig v tsepyakh (Mannelig in Chains). Read more at https://anneofisher.com. Elizabeth F. Geballe is an assistant professor at Indiana University, Bloomington, in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures. She is the author of several articles that track the translation of nineteenth-century Russian literature into English, including “Literary Disorders and Translation Treatment: Curing Chekhov’s ‘The Black Monk’ ” in Literature and Medicine and “Remains To Be Seen: Constance Garnett and the English Afterlife of Dostoevsky’s Corpses” in Russian Review. She is working on a book that considers the role of translation in Tolstoy’s oeuvre. Reed Johnson is a lecturer in Russian at Bowdoin College. He received an MFA in creative writing and an MA/PhD in Slavic languages and literatures at the University of Virginia, where he wrote his dissertation on philosophical and ideological conceptions of time in the work of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky. Tim Langen teaches Russian language, literature, and cultural history at the University of Missouri-Columbia. In addition to

research on Krzhizhanovsky, his interests include the writings of Nikolai Gogol and Andrey Bely and the intellectual history of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russia. He is the author of The Stony Dance: Unity and Gesture in Andrey Bely’s “Petersburg” and coeditor and cotranslator, with Justin Weir, of Eight Twentieth-Century Russian Plays. Alisa Ballard Lin is an assistant professor in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures at Ohio State University. She is the translator and editor of That Third Guy: A Comedy from the Stalinist 1930s with Essays on Theater by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (University of Wisconsin Press, 2018). She researches Russian theater, film, and culture of the twentieth century, with a special emphasis on the philosophy of performance. Muireann Maguire is an academic and translator based at the University of Exeter, UK. She has previously translated Krzhizhanovsky’s story “The Phantom” for her collection of Russian Gothic tales, Red Spectres (Overlook Press, 2013). Her essay on the “little man” character archetype in Krzhizhanovsky’s and Gogol’s fiction appeared in Russian Writers and the Fin de Siècle: The Twilight of Realism, edited by K. Bowers and A. Kokobobo (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Benjamin Paloff is the author of Lost in the Shadow of the Word: Space, Time, and Freedom in Interwar Eastern Europe and of the poetry collections And His Orchestra (2015) and The Politics (2011). He has translated nearly a dozen books, most recently Yuri Lotman’s Culture and Communication: Signs in Flux, and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, U.S. Fulbright Programs, Stanford Humanities Contributors

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Center, and PEN/Heim Translation Fund, among others. He is professor of Slavic languages and literatures and of comparative literature at the University of Michigan, where he is also director of the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies. Karen Link Rosenflanz is associate professor of global, cultural, and language studies at the College of St. Scholastica in Duluth, Minnesota, where she teaches Russian and German language and literature and contemporary European affairs. She pursued graduate studies at the University of Michigan as a Jacob K. Javits Fellow and received a PhD in Slavic languages and literatures. In 2005, she published Hunter of Themes, the first scholarly monograph devoted to the work of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky. Alexander Spektor is a writer, scholar, and translator who teaches at the University of Georgia. He has published a number of works on Russian literature and literary theory. He is also a cofounder of Chicago Translator Workshop, which specializes in collaborative translations of Russian contemporary poetry. His recent study, Reader as Accomplice: Narrative Ethics in Dostoevsky and Nabokov, was published with Northwestern University Press in 2020. In his spare time he picks mushrooms in nearby forests. Joanne Turnbull is a translator who is best known for her translations of Krzhizhanovsky prose. Her translations of his fiction include Memories of the Future, The Letter Killers Club, Autobiography of a Corpse, The Return of Munchausen, Unwitting Street (all New York Review of Books Classics) and, forthcoming from Columbia, Stravaging “Strange.”

RUSSIAN LIBRARY Between Dog and Wolf by Sasha Sokolov, translated by Alexander Boguslawski Strolls with Pushkin by Andrei Sinyavsky, translated by Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy and Slava I. Yastremski Fourteen Little Red Huts and Other Plays by Andrei Platonov, translated by Robert Chandler, Jesse Irwin, and Susan Larsen Rapture: A Novel by Iliazd, translated by Thomas J. Kitson City Folk and Country Folk by Sofia Khvoshchinskaya, translated by Nora Seligman Favorov Writings from the Golden Age of Russian Poetry by Konstantin Batyushkov, presented and translated by Peter France Found Life: Poems, Stories, Comics, a Play, and an Interview by Linor Goralik, edited by Ainsley Morse, Maria Vassileva, and Maya Vinokur Sisters of the Cross by Alexei Remizov, translated by Roger John Keys and Brian Murphy Sentimental Tales by Mikhail Zoshchenko, translated by Boris Dralyuk Redemption by Friedrich Gorenstein, translated by Andrew Bromfield The Man Who Couldn’t Die: The Tale of an Authentic Human Being by Olga Slavnikova, translated by Marian Schwartz Necropolis by Vladislav Khodasevich, translated by Sarah Vitali Nikolai Nikolaevich and Camouflage: Two Novellas by Yuz Aleshkovsky, translated by Duffield White, edited by Susanne Fusso New Russian Drama: An Anthology, edited by Maksim Hanukai and Susanna Weygandt A Double Life by Karolina Pavlova, translated and with an introduction by Barbara Heldt Klotsvog by Margarita Khemlin, translated by Lisa Hayden Fandango and Other Stories by Alexander Grin, translated by Bryan Karetnyk Woe from Wit: A Verse Comedy in Four Acts by Alexander Griboedov, translated by Betsy Hulick The Nose and Other Stories by Nikolai Gogol, translated by Susanne Fusso Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow by Alexander Radishchev, translated by Andrew Kahn and Irina Reyfman

The Little Devil and Other Stories by Alexei Remizov, translated by Antonina W. Bouis The Death of Vazir-Muktar by Yury Tynyanov, translated by Anna Kurkina Rush and Christopher Rush The Life Written by Himself by Archpriest Avvakum, translated by Kenneth N. Brostrom The Voice Over: Poems and Essays by Maria Stepanova, edited by Irina Shevelenko The Symphonies by Andrei Bely, translated by Jonathan Stone