charlesdee
11/8/2015
These intellectual fantastic tales can be heavy going, as they should be coming from an author whose name is so exquisitely unpronounceable. Krzhizhanovsky came to Moscow in the 1920'a from Kiev via a European tour that introduced him to the avant garde movements of the day. He worked in the theater and became a member of the writers' union, but his fiction was unpublishable under the reign of Soviet censorship. His stories first met the public in 1989.
His work reminds me most of Edgar Allan Poe, but the not the scary Poe we learned about through Roger Corman films in the 1960's. Think of Poe in the darkly playful mood of "Descent into the Maelstrom," "The Man in the Crowd," or "The Imp of the Perverse." Krzh...takes an idea and spins it out to either its inevitable or a surprising conclusion. Footnotes in this current edition help you with Moscow geography and the philosophical and scientific references, but some stories left me ungrounded and slightly bored. Then there were those that were brilliant, funny, and in ways horrifying.
A man becomes a celebrity when he states his desire to bite his own elbow, then feels a horrible need to satisfy his audience. The simmering anger of city dwellers proves to be a new source of cheap energy. A master pianist's right hand tires of performing and runs off to find a life of its own. A man who treasures his reflection in his lover's eyes one night sees the little fellow turn and run away.
When I feel up for more, I look forward to the other Krzh... titles NYRB has brought into print.