Memories of the Future (New York Review Books Classics)

Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (1887--1950) used to say that he was `known for being unknown'. For the main part, Soviet editors rejected his work; often they dismissed it as `untimely' or `not contemporary', by which they meant: `This is not what we need during our new socialist epoch.' Curiously, one of the most startling qualities of his stories is the directness with which they address our twenty-first century concerns. It is as if the Soviet editors were right; Krzhizhanovsky now seems more our contemporary than theirs.One story, `Yellow Coal' (published not in this volume but in the earlier SEVEN STORIES), anticipates global warming. It is set in a time when we have run out of coal and oil and the sun is drying up our reserves of water. A scientist suggests harnessing the energy of human spite: 'On the long keyboard of feelings, you see, the black keys of spite have their own distinct, sharply differentiated tone.' Marriage, of course, is a good potential source of this energy: 'coldness and, wherever possible, repugnance multiplied by proximity would produce high-voltage spite...' But there are other sources: 'Mills could make do with workers' hatred alone; the workers themselves were no longer needed. Factories and mills began laying huge numbers of people off, keeping only skeleton crews to man the spite collectors.' In the end, however, it appears that even the seemingly infinite energy of spite can grant humanity only a brief respite.The pun on `spite' and `respite' is mine, but it is, I believe, in Krzhizhanovsky's spirit. He follows the play of thought and words wherever they take him. In his own words, `A thinker is not someone who thinks loyally, but someone who is loyal to his thoughts'. He also wrote, `I am not alone. Logic is with me'. This brings us to one of the finest stories, `Red Snow' (1929), the Russian text of which was discovered only a few years ago. In it a man is wandering around Moscow in search of work. Eventually he joins a line of people waiting on the street. They are hoping to obtain some logic, but they are afraid it will run out before they reach the front of the line...Another story, `Quadraturin', takes as its starting point the shortage of living space in 1920s Moscow. The narrator, like Krzhizhanovsky himself, lives in what is little more than a cupboard. A mysterious stranger brings him a tube containing `an agent for biggerizing rooms: Quadraturin'. The narrator smears this substance around the walls - and from that moment they never stop moving apart. Many writers have described the boundlessness of the steppe; many have described the suffocating quality of a Soviet communal apartment. No one else has evoked both agoraphobia and claustrophobia in a single image. I had thought I understood this story well, but a friend has just written to me, `The enlarged room is a subtle metaphor for an inner revolution. The protagonist is an inverse image of Kafka's man who turns into a cockroach. His difficulty in dealing with the world derive from the magnification of his inner world, not its shrinkage.' This startled me; I had never read the story this way. Krzhizhanovsky's work, however, is subtle enough to bear many interpretations, and I am sure he will continue to startle me. Krzhizhanovsky's work is remarkable both for its brilliance and for its breadth. The complete works - now being published in both Russian and French - amount to around 3000 pages. As well as both long and short stories, he wrote travel sketches, plays, opera librettos and essays about literature and the theatre. In the 1920s, when Meyerhold, Vakhtangov and other great directors were at the height of their fame, he criticized them for arrogating dictatorial powers; he argued that slave labour is never productive and that it is therefore a mistake to turn actors into slaves. He also wrote that the Revolution had turned the entire country into a theatre - one where improvisation was forbidden and only canonical texts could be performed. The translator, Joanne Turnbull, conveys Krzhizhanovsky's intellectual vitality. She provides neat equivalents for the puns and neologisms, and her language is idomatically and rhythmically alive. One story begins with terse onomotopeia: 'The rail joints clacketed, rapping out the staccato of the route.' 'Red Snow' begins still more arrestingly: ' Resignation to one's fate takes practice. Like any art. Or so Citizen Shushashin maintains. He begins every day - after putting on his shoes and washing his face, before throwing on his jacket - with an exercise. Again, the expression is his. This exercise works like this: he walks over to the wall, puts his back up against it and stands there in an attitude of utter resignation. For a minute or two. And that's all. The exercise is over. He can begin to live.'

Memories of the Future was my introduction to the neglected work of post-Revolutionary Russian writer, Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky. His world is one of absurdist, satirical sci-fi/fantasy, rooted firmly in Gogol, and breathing the kindred atmosphere of Kafka. The sci-fi aspect is more rooted in philosophy than the stars, and the prose ranges from the sublimely horrifying (Red Snow was so beautiful as to demand reading aloud; I was up past midnight actually recording it. Maybe I'll put it up sometime) to the maddeningly perfunctory (the eponymous Time Machine redux story, with its morose and despairing tone, and the exacting philosophic rigor of Michael Cisco was the least ingratiatingly written; very Russian, tho, right?). Ultimate respect and admiration to Krzhizhanovsky for altering his very voice to the task at hand, a sort of literary Stravninsky.The book was recommended to me by friend, Mark Z. Danielewski, whose own iconic House of Leaves finds an inception of sorts in the first story, one of inexplicably expanding internal space, Quadraturin. There are stories about writing, about Theme Catchers (subconscious muses? internal censors?), about storylines embraced and abandoned (The Bookmark). These are stories whose fantasy is founded in centrifugally strewn circumstance and serendipity, archetypal scaffolding like Nikolai Grozni's incredible Farewell, Monsieur Gaston rather than the scatological buckshot strewn randomly in Terry Gilliam films.There's not a lot of extant published work by Krzhizhanovsky, but rest assured I'll be making my ardent and arduous way through it all. Highest recommendation.

I had surreal dreams the night after I read Krzhizhanovsky's story "Quadraturin" ~ the first story in this collection.I loved "The Bookmark" with the image of the Eiffel Tower getting bored and taking a stroll! Each story is a fascinating, orignal tale~ very brave messages and haunting images. "...they were always having to quickly forget one past and learnanother, while memorizing the present according to the latest editions of the papers." A courageous Russian writer!

Bought this on a lark - I'm not a particular fan of this writer or Russian literature in general. This is a book of short stories, with an eponymous novella at the end. Most of the stories center around some kind of writer (figures) in Moscow (figures) in the 20's or 30's. There's some strange throwback fiction (time travel and the like), and in general it's a window into some of the privations of Muscovites in these times. I soldiered through the whole thing; I don't expect to read it again but it was somewhat horizon-broadening.

Arrived in time and in good conditionContentwise a four star. Some pieces are of an outstanding content and style, providing an in-depth and highly original view of the Soviet society under NEP. At the same level as Bulgakov's best, beating other, similar writers from the same period like Sologub, Samjatin and Ehrenburg, However occassionally Krzhizhanovsky gets caught in his own excellence as a spinner of tales and gets somewhat longwinding and convoluted.

The new book is in good quality. I received a bookmark as a small gift as well. Thank you.

Great book

This book takes its title, ‘Memories of the Future’ from very much the longest of the seven stories it contains. That story, has something in the region of 29,000 words and extends over 81 pages. Thus it can be fairly described as a novella, especially as it describes all that we may consider important in the life of Maximillian Shterer, a gifted young man of a scientific bent born into a well-heeled, though not aristocratic, Russian family in the last years of the 19th century.Shterer is fascinated by time. As quite a small boy he secretly investigates the workings of his family’s grandfather clock. At boarding school and later, living in Moscow in scholarly poverty, he develops experiments that seek to overcome time – and to develop what we (with a nod to H G Wells) would call a time machine.‘People move about in space. From any point to any point. They ought also to move through time: from any point to any point.’The machine is still not perfected when the Bolshevik revolution comes along. Thus author Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky creates for himself a situation in which he is able to report and comment on several points in time: the period of the revolution itself; the decades before when life was more stable for all, and very much better for the well-off; and on the years to 1928 (the year before completion of the novella), by which time Muscovites were looking to the future, wanting to know if their lives would get better, and if – perhaps by 1957 – communism might be overthrown.In 1928, Shterer’s autobiography is rejected by the publisher who commissioned it – in anticipation of the censor’s rejection. Krzhizhanovsky didn’t need an intermediary to tell him that his story would be rejected; ‘Memories of the Future’ was written ‘for the drawer’, as was the great majority of Krzhizhanovsky’s very considerable output between about 1920 and 1939, and only saw the light of publication after 1976, when it was rediscovered, 26 years after his death.The first story in this book, ‘Quadraturin’, was perhaps the first to be published in English – in Robert Chandler’s 2005  Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida . ‘Quadraturin’ was excellently translated by Joanne Turnbull, as are all the stories in this volume.‘Quadraturin’ has in common with ‘Memories of the Future’, and several other stories in this collection, descriptions of city living under Soviet rule that are far from attractive. We learn of rules limiting individual living space, the Remeasuring Commission, House Committees, communal kitchens, bathrooms and lavatories, and of course bare floorboards, minimal furnishings and lack of light and heat.‘The Thirteenth Category of Reason’ is memorable for its graveyard humour. A corpse, having slipped out of his coffin, tarries too long in his ‘last light’ and arrives too late for his burial: ‘By the time I got there they were smoothing my grave over with their shovels.’ He strikes up something of a relationship with the gravedigger – very reluctant on the gravediggers’ part. The two of them travel together, on a tram, back to the corpse’s apartment, and we thereby see yet more Soviet city life. The observation, early in the story, that around a certain date crosses and stone angels in the cemetery gave way to ‘red metal stars on thin wire stems’ is also worth noting.Humour is found in public notices too: ‘Canteen closed for lunch’; and a notice specifying the number of rings on a doorbell that should be made for various named persons, but for M.E. (whoever he or she may be) ‘No rings’! Those are both seen in ‘Red Snow’.Krzhizhanovsky impresses with his descriptive passages – there is beauty in the tyre-marks in a first covering of snow, and yet more as the continuing snowfall covers them – and several stories have the characteristics of a Kafkaesque Bloomsday. What really sets Krzhizhanovsky apart from most other writers, though, is his own deep thought about logic and philosophy. In the story ‘Memories of the Future’, whilst we can safely assume that Krzhizhanovsky did not so much as attempt to build a time machine, it would seem that he did go through all the deep thought attributed to Shterer with respect to time and space. Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida

I found this book a bit of a disappointment, wanting more and feeling slightly let down. The stories are Surrealist and the intellectual paradigm in which they are made seems to be an analysis of the times in which they were written, i.e the oppression of the Soviet Union. The first story is a good example. A man coats his bedroom in a special paint, and over weeks sees the room enlarge until it has virtually become a wilderness in which he finds himself quite lost. The writing is at times beautiful and there is a questioning and philosophising that at times promises to open up the book into a wonderful dialogue with the reader, but Krzhizhanovsky somehow keeps forgetting the reader, disappearing into tedious and not really relevant monologues that are a persistent feature of the stories presented.The language is somehow heavy and makes onerous reading at times without always being rich in content. Allegory is out, and if surrealism is in, it is at times quite baffling!