As usual, I don't have a deep enough knowledge of Russian literature to understand the nuances to these short stories. I found them delightful, however, and list this as "didn't finish" only because I skipped two of the stories due to my own ignorance. His stories are delightfully bizarre, though, and told with such a unique voice that I will hopefully pull this back off the shelf when I have more time to sit the more heavily allusive stories down with Wikipedia.

He draws heavily from themes of space, distance, solitude, and the love affair one can have with one's city. Light wit and equally light use of despair makes his prose, even in translation, delicious and dry and surreal. ( )

This is good stuff. Extremely subversive, fantastically realist writing. Several great stories, with a couple of softer ones. ( )

In each of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky's seven stories that are found in Memories of the Future, a character takes to the streets of Moscow to reflect on the central focus of the narrative. There's Sutulin, restlessly pacing back and forth, too afraid to enter his ever-expanding apartment. There's the "theme catcher" from The Bookmark, lamenting on the lack of artistry in contemporary Soviet Literature while making up incredible new stories just by observing his surroundings. There's the gravedigger from The Thirteenth Category of Reason, riding a tram with a dead man who was too late to go to his own funeral. And there's Max Shterer, sitting on a park bench with nowhere to stay now that he's back from the future. The characters' understanding of where they are and why they are there is central to the work of Krzhizhanovsky, a man who seems to have loved where he was without necessarily loving when he was.

The stories were very hit-or miss for me. I loved Quadraturin and The Bookmark, liked Someone Else's Theme and The Thirteenth Category of Reason, had mixed feelings about Memories of the Future, and couldn't get into the others at all.

Because of the limited amount of space an author has in a short story, creating a sense of place is crucial if the reader stands any chance of connecting with the narrative. If it takes too long for the reader to find his/her footing on whatever/wherever the literary terra firma of the piece may be, there just isn't enough time left to say anything interesting. Krzhizhanovsky deals with some lofty, abstract concepts, and I thought in The Branch Line and Red Snow, both of them heavy critiques of the Soviet Union, he didn't give himself room to flesh those out.

When Krzhizhanovky's on the ball, though, he's a funny and incisive critic of the world around him. The Bookmark in particular stuck out to me in this regard. Centered around a narrator who is interacting with a brilliant, unpublished writer (which parallels Krzhizhanovsky himself, as none of the stories in this book were published in his lifetime), we get a great feel for the limitations on artistic expression in Russia, even before Stalin's Great Purges.

While not one to be overly bitter about things, Krzhizhanovsky writes like a man who knows he was born at the wrong time to be successful. He was gracious enough, however, to not hold that against the city he inhabited. Moscow comes to life in these stories as a city filled with buildings that have given up and people who haven't. I'm far more familiar with literature based in Saint Petersburg, so I really enjoyed the opportunity to explore a new city through a contemporary author's eyes.

In Joanne Turnbull's introduction to the book, she includes a quote from Krzhizhanovsky about why Shakespeare's work was so inundated with dreams:

"The answer is plain. A dream is the only instance when we apprehend our thoughts as external facts."

Krzhizhanovsky wrote the way he dreamed, imagining new ways to evaluate life, death, time, and creativity while he wandered through a park in Moscow. ( )

A philosophy of life is more terrible than syphilis and people - you have to give them credit - take every precaution not to become infected. Especially by a philosophy of life.

Obscure authors are only exhumed with praise, not sober reflections on potential inclusion in the canon. No, hysterics and mashed analogies are required; its as if ______ had a baby who grew addicted to mescaline and rewrote _____. Rebirth also requires nudges and casual mention. I suppose that was Goodreads has become a nudging machine for the authors without bodies. Can you feel the tension between the molecular and molar now? I thought you could.

http://www.nybooks.com/books/authors/sigizmund-krzhizhanovsky/

This collection is astounding. These are stories of the highest order. These pieces are in the ball park with Borges and Kis.: I mean that. That said, they remain unusually foreign and unique. This isn't as if anyone went drinking with anyone else as interpreted by Ozu or Bresson; such be Rhizomic. These are dreamy portraits which ponder the possible and deflate in the face of the horrific

Everyone needs to read these, quickly now.

( )

This is a collection of weirdly imaginative, usually surreal, and always interesting tales. Written in the 1920s by a slightly subversive author whose stories couldn’t be published until after his death, these tales are darkly whimsical reflections on Soviet society: Existential despair in a room that gets bigger on the inside, everyday Literary Criticism on a city bench, a vagrant table-to-table philosopher who sells aphorisms and totally original systems of thought for a living, a Time Traveller struggling to build and rebuild his machine after the war.

Several of these are very entertaining in an off-beat, slighly unusual kind of way, as though they were written in a culture with perceptibly different standards, tropes and expectations. Some would do very well in collections of Early Science Fiction. Most of these tales would appeal to those with an academic interest in Literature or Criticism, because they are explicitly about writing, reading, engaging with literature, and confronting themes with Theories. This is why I’d recommend spacing these stories out a bit: they’re very different tales, but the approach gets a bit samey after three or four in quick succession.

If you’d like your Borges with more black humour and set in Moscow, less everything-and-the-kitchen-sink and more focused, then give Krzhizhanovsky a try. ( )