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Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, the work of two world-class writers buried in the communist archives has been resurrected.
by Bill Marx
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"7 Stories," Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky. Photo: Northwestern University Press. |
Boston, MA - May 11, 2006 -
Literary reputations slip up and down. On occasion individuals grease the pole. Poet and critic T.S. Eliot raised the stock of John Donne while trying to push John Milton off his perch. At times an author will come out of nowhere and stake a claim as a giant.
Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, the work of two world-class writers buried in the communist archives has been resurrected. Andrey Platonov (1899-1951) was known in the West, if at all, for his 1930 novel "The Foundation Pit." He ran afoul of Stalin, who was reputed to have written "scum" in the margins of a Platonov story. It was not until the '80s that other major works by Platonov were published. For poet Joseph Brodsky, Platonov's novels and short stories, many available in translation from The Harvill Press, are the work of a visionary worthy of comparison to Samuel Beckett and James Joyce. Platonov's self-conscious preoccupation with the "revolutionary eschatology" embedded in the Russian language, wrote Brodsky, carries a power of "devastation" that "far exceeds any demands of social criticism."
Glas, distributed by Northwestern University Press, now brings another astonishing Russian master, Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (1887-1950), out of the shadows with "Seven Stories," the only volume of his work available in English. Like Platonov, Krzhizhanovsky is a poker-faced surrealist whose imagination is so radical it goes beyond political lampoon into the realms of metaphysical assault. But Krzhizhanovsky's writing is more in the fantastical modernist mode of Jorge Luis Borges and Stanislaw Lem -- he works out the eccentric premises of his plot with a relentless cogency. Translator Joanne Turnbull prefaces her introduction to the collection with the writer's credo: "I am not alone. Logic is with me."
Of course, Krzhizhanovsky's dreamy dialectics satirically intersect with the illogic of Soviet reality. One of the volume's masterpieces is "Quadraturin." A man living in a cramped Moscow apartment is offered an experimental substance -- "an agent for biggerizing rooms." He spreads it on the floor and walls but hasn't enough for the ceiling. The result is a hellish portrait of vertigo squared. Another story, the prophetic "Yellow Coal," deals with a global energy crisis ("Oil wells were running dry."). The solution is a device that turns man's anger into fuel: "The slogan BE ANGRY OR GO HUNGRY floated in huge letters above every crossroad." Given how America's political parties and media feed on outrage, the story has lost none of its Swiftian sting. Krzhizhanovsky's collected works amount to over 3000 pages, including a dozen plays -- no doubt more fabulous fables are to come in translation.
The appearance of "Seven Stories" gives me a chance to plug -- and mildly chide -- the program "Reading the World." Now in its second year, American publishers and independent booksellers come together in May to publicize works in translation. A selection of books from, among others, New Directions, Ecco, Picador, Knopf, and Dalkey Archive Press are displayed in bookstores. But why aren't there more university press offerings on the list? And why publicize classics, such as Thomas Mann's "Death in Venice," when lovers of literature need to be introduced to the neglected brilliance of Krzhizhanovsky and Platonov? Major writers shouldn't be left out on the margins.
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