Unwitting Street
Stories
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- € 11,99
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- € 11,99
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Eighteen strange, whimsical, and philosophical tales by the Russian master of the weird, all now in English for the very first time.
When Comrade Punt does not wake up one Moscow morning--he has died--his pants dash off to work without him. The ambitious pants soon have their own office and secretary. So begins the first of eighteen superb examples of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky's philosophical and phantasmagorical stories. Where the stories included in two earlier NYRB collections (Memories of the Future and Autobiography of a Corpse) are denser and darker, the creations in Unwitting Street are on the lighter side: an ancient goblet brimful of self-replenishing wine drives its owner into the drink; a hypnotist's attempt to turn a fly into an elephant backfires; a philosopher's free-floating thought struggles against being "enlettered" in type and entombed in a book; the soul of a politician turned chess master winds up in one of his pawns; an unsentimental parrot journeys from prewar Austria to Soviet Russia.
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This collection by Polish-Russian-Soviet writer Krzhizhanovsky (1887 1950, The Return of Munchausen) mixes playful and morose tones in stories of the kooky and the condemned. At his most frolicsome, Krzhizhanovsky endows all things with consciousness, from a pair of pants in the amusing "Comrade Punt" to books and letters in "Paper Loses Patience," in which all the world's paper goes on strike, demanding that only the truth be printed. But many of these stories are darker, obliquely or directly addressing the changes wrought by the Russian Revolution, including the fates of people considered "superfluous" under the new regime. The newly retired bank cashier in the bittersweet "The Window" turns his apartment window into a replica of his old station at the bank, but the drunk, solitary letter writer in "Unwitting Street" is more fatalistic: "logic demands that I be got rid of." Even at his gloomiest, Krzhizhanovsky is clever and satirical in his descriptions, writing that "the standard of living has gone up to such an extent, it's almost at our throats." Indeed, Krzhizhanovsky is at his best when finding levity in grave revelations; compared to his lively past work in translation, this shows a more somber side. The writer posthumously enjoys quite a few recent converts, and some will appreciate this darker turn.
