Meanwhile, he wrote novellas and stories, which were never published—either due to economic problems (bankrupt publishers) or political problems (Soviet censors). Twenty years passed in this way until, in 1941, with Krzhizhanovsky now fifty-four, a collection of stories was finally scheduled for publication—but then the Second World War intervened, preventing even that collection from appearing. In May 1950 he suffered a stroke and lost the ability to read. He died at the end of the year. (His works—almost all of them unpublished—were stored by his lifelong companion, Anna Bovshek, in her apartment: in her clothes chest, under some brocade.)

But of course, the real is a mobile category—this is one truth that the totalitarian twentieth century has proved—and one way of altering the real is to erase various facts from history. Krzhizhanovsky’s life, it might have seemed, would be one more element in history’s sequence of deletions. Almost no one, after all, knew that he was writing fiction, since the state never allowed its publication. They knew him in other guises—as a lecturer on theater, or an essayist, or an occasional playwright. In 1939 Krzhizhanovsky, despite his restricted publication history, was nevertheless elected to the Writers’ Union—which meant that posthumously he was eligible for the process of “immortalization.” In 1953 Stalin died, and three years later Khrushchev’s secret speech to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party instituted a revisionist anti-Stalinist thaw. In 1957—the same year as Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago—a commission was set up to examine Krzhizhanovsky’s literary legacy. It lasted two years and was then disbanded, having drafted a publishing plan that was never implemented. Then, in 1976, Vadim Perelmuter, a poet, literary historian, and essayist, discovered Krzhizhanovsky’s archive. He had to wait until 1988 and the full thaw of perestroika before he could publish one of Krzhizhanovsky’s stories. Between 2001 and 2010, Perelmuter finally edited a handsome five-volume edition of Krzhizhanovsky’s works.

The twentieth century, of course, had other totalitarian tricks as well. It could act horizontally, as well as vertically. On November 16, 1934, the Soviet newspaper Izvestiya recorded the anxieties of the composer Sergei Prokofiev, newly returned to Russia from a prolonged European exile: “The danger of becoming provincial is unfortunately a very real one for modern Soviet composers.”[1] But it was not just the Soviet composer who was endangered; the Soviet writer was, too. In the same year as Prokofiev’s return, the writer Karl Radek addressed the Soviet Writers’ Congress. His theme was “Contemporary World Literature and the Tasks of Proletarian Art.”[2] The situation, he argued, was problematic. “Our writers are not sufficiently well acquainted with foreign literature. Very many of our writers, when they hear of some novelty abroad, ask with morbid interest: ‘Does not this contain the great key to art?’ ”[3] And yet, he then continued, in a perverse logical pirouette, the solution was not therefore to read world literature but in fact to forget that world literature existed. His central example was James Joyce’s Ulysses—which had appeared a decade earlier, in 1922.

Just because he is almost untranslated and unknown in our country, Joyce arouses a morbid interest among a section of our writers. Is there not some hidden meaning lurking in the eight hundred pages of his Ulysses—which cannot be read without special dictionaries, for Joyce attempts to create a language of his own in order to express the thoughts and feelings which he lacks?

This interest in Joyce is an unconscious expression of the leanings of Right-wing authors, who have adapted themselves to revolution, but who in reality do not understand its greatness. They want to get away from Magnitogorsk, from Kuznetskstroy, to get away from the great deeds of our country to “great art,” which depicts the small deeds of small people.[4]

Joyce’s method was perhaps “a suitable one for describing petty, insignificant, trivial people, their actions, thoughts and feelings,” but “it is perfectly clear that this method would prove utterly worthless if the author were to approach with his movie camera the great events of the class struggle, the titanic clashes of the modern world.”[5] And so, argued Radek, it turned out that there was no need for the Soviet writer to consider Joyce’s novel at all. The morbid desire to read it should be happily abandoned. From his own inaccurate description of Ulysses—“a book of eight hundred pages without stops or commas”[6]—it seems that he followed his own advice. But then, why not? The ideal Soviet writer was to be grandly isolated from reactionary influences: The only comrades a writer required were the revolutionary Soviet masses.

And Krzhizhanovsky . . . Krzhizhanovsky, alone in the cube of his room, wrote stories where people invent time machines, or drift onto a branch line to a republic of dreams. In other words, the fantastic is the genre in which Krzhizhanovsky worked. (In a story written in 1927, he mentions in passing his general scheme—a “projected cycle of ‘fantastic’ stories.”[7]) This was not, perhaps, so eccentric. Like the Soviet state, he liked to play with the nature of the real.