Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

Autobiography of a Corpse

By Brendan Byrne.

The opening and titular story of the NYRB’s second collection of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s short fiction Autobiography of Corpse features a typical (for the time) protagonist, a journalist from the provinces with a typical (for the time) quest, the search for a room in newly Soviet Moscow which is accomplished in a deeply atypical (for any time) manner. Housing is a theme which crops up repeatedly in Russian fiction from the 1920s, most notably in Zamyatin’s story ‘The Cave’ and Serge’s novel City Under Siege. What makes Krzhizhanovsky’s fiction stand out is not its unacceptability to the Soviet state’s nascent notions of socialist realism (both Zamyatin, Serge, and host of other writers were censored, exiled, ignored, and/or shot) but its combination of post-Gogolian fantastical grotesque and perverse Cartesian metaphysics with explicit Kantian overtones. Krzhizhanovsky isn’t just weird for Moscow in 1925, he’s weird for anywhere and everytime.

Language tricks

Adam Thirlwell on Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky.

Krzhizhanovsky’s fiction is based on the fact that language makes things possible that are not possible in reality. If there is a word for “role” and a word for “character,” then naturally, it follows, according to this method, that the two could possess separate existences. Or, to put this maybe more precisely, he investigated whether the distinction between what is possible in language and reality is even tenable at all. And so the central mechanism of this writing is metaphor (“a three-by-four-inch slip of paper torn out of the notebook had miraculously turned into lodgings measuring one hundred square feet”) — the hinge between animate and inanimate objects, which allows figures of speech to acquire a strange kind of life.

While this attention to the act of writing could, I suppose, be defined as metafiction, Krzhizhanovsky’s real subject is not the gap between fiction and reality so much as the gaps inside the real itself. The metafiction is really metaphysical. So that it should be no surprise if a corpse, in “Autobiography of a Corpse,” reasons in this manner, arguing that space “is absurdly vast and has expanded — with its orbits, stars and yawning parabolas — to infinity. But if one tucks it inside numbers and meanings, it will easily fit on two or three bookshelves.” It is just one more example of Krzhizhanovsky’s exploration of language’s tricks.