Countries That Don’t Exist
Selected Nonfiction
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- $24.99
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- $24.99
Publisher Description
Almost unknown during his lifetime, Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky is now hailed as a master of Russian prose. His short stories and novels, unpublishable under Stalinism but rediscovered long after his death, have drawn comparisons to the works of Jorge Luis Borges for their distinctive blend of metafictional play and philosophical thought experiment. Like Borges, Krzhizhanovsky also wrote dazzlingly unconventional essayistic pieces as a slippery extension of his fictional project.
Countries That Don’t Exist showcases a selection of Krzhizhanovsky’s exceptional nonfiction, which spans a dizzying range of genres and voices. Playful fantasies dwelling in the borderlands between essay and fable, metaphysical conversations and probing literary criticism, philosophical essays and wartime memoirs—in all these modes Krzhizhanovsky’s writing bristles with idiosyncratic erudition and a starkly original vision of literary creation. Krzhizhanovsky comes across as a strange voice from another past, at once utterly novel yet unmistakably belonging to the high modernist 1920s and 1930s. Taken together, these works present to the English-speaking world a fresh aspect of a newly canonized author.
Countries That Don’t Exist also features critical commentary that places these texts in the context of Krzhizhanovsky’s other writings and illuminates their relationship to the philosophical and aesthetic ferment of Russian and European modernism.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The nonfiction work of Russian writer Krzhizhanovsky (1887–1950) gets the spotlight in this thought-provoking collection. Krzhizhanovsky wrote partially during the period of Stalinist totalitarianism and was uniformly denied publication, so much so that much of his writing wasn't unearthed until the 1980s. "For Krzhizhanovsky," the volume's editors write in the introduction, "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." Krzhizhanovsky was particularly fascinated by the divisiveness of language. In "Idea and Word," he writes that "the slightest attempt to convert any meaningful idea (of one's own—this is the main thing) into words leads inevitably to the thesis: for pure thought, all human languages are foreigners." Partly because of this disjunction between thought and language, Krzhizhanovsky believed, some artists' ideas are never fully realized, and he wonders in "A History of Unwritten Literature" whether "graveyards for ideas" should be established "alongside ordinary graveyards." The title essay, meanwhile, is a literary "grand tour of imaginary lands." With a playful blend of logic and fantasy, Krzhizhanovsky's works defamiliarize everyday concepts. Readers interested in the crossover between art and philosophy will be rewarded.
