For although his library could not contain the high-tech innovations of his contemporaries, like Borges or Platonov or Kafka, it could still contain the fictions of Poe and Pushkin and Stevenson and Gogol—these stories where noses could detach themselves from faces, or authors could run after their own characters. And if this term fantastic seems to imply a B-movie, lurid kind of aura, a down-market mode with ghouls and ghosts, I think the reader should reconsider. Really, the fantastic was the most useful vehicle available for the most intricate philosophy.

2

Italo Calvino once compiled Fantastic Tales, an anthology of stories from European literature—from Jan Potocki to Henry James—and in his introduction offered a definition of the genre. For Calvino, it was defined not by its macabre props but by its dark preoccupation, and that preoccupation was the nature of the real:

The problem of the reality of what we see—both extraordinary things, which may be just hallucinations projected by our mind, and ordinary things, which perhaps conceal beneath the most banal appearances a second nature that is more disturbing, mysterious, terrifying—is the essence of this literature of the fantastic, whose most powerful effects lie in this hovering between irreconcilable levels of reality.[8]

The consequent ambiguity of the real is why, Calvino continued, the fantastic itself is an ambiguous genre—always hovering between two modes. There is the story that seems fantastic but is then resolved with a rational explanation. And then there is the story where no such explanation is ever offered, the pure marvelous—that “presumes acceptance of the improbable and inexplicable.”[9] But it was therefore at the end of the nineteenth century, concluded Calvino, that the endpoint of this genre was reached, when these two modes collapsed into each other. This point was the ghost tales of Henry James. “This author, who could be classified as an American, English or European writer, represents the nineteenth-century supernatural tale’s ultimate incarnation—or rather disincarnation, in that it becomes in James more impalpable and invisible than ever, a mere psychological emanation or vibration . . .” For the law of James’s fiction was “the psychic reality of experience.” And so the rational story and the marvelous story were revealed as different ways of describing the same philosophical truth—that all reality is apprehended subjectively. “It could be said, then, that at the end of the century the supernatural tale becomes once more a philosophical tale, as at the beginning of the century.”[10]

And there is, no question, a grandeur to this high-speed survey. But I also wonder if Calvino was a little abrupt in his conclusion. For of course the fantastic tale did not end with James at all. The genre continued—into even more anxious philosophical territory. The “psychic reality of experience” feels cozily mundane when compared to the labyrinths invented by the twentieth century. No, the fantastic had not exhausted its philosophy, not at all. And one of the most patient investigations of this loopy terrain was performed by Krzhizhanovsky, alone in his Moscow room.

3

For the anxiously prospective reader, it’s maybe useful to propose a miniature classification to the stories Krzhizhanovsky wrote. Roughly they can be divided into two modes. The first kind fit happily, like Lego, into the old fantastic tradition—like the early story “The Runaway Fingers,” where a pianist’s fingers detach themselves and make their escape. But in Krzhizhanovsky’s second mode the subject becomes more abstract: It is no longer a description of the fantastic but a description of how the fantastic could be described at all. And his method for this investigation is to treat language very seriously and very flatly. Perhaps, for instance, you think you can distinguish between abstract nouns and proper nouns. Krzhizhanovsky democratically erases such a distinction, so that whereas in the old tradition things were personified that could not really be personified, like noses or fingers, in these extraordinary stories much smaller elements can now take on uncanny life—like “solitudes” or literary terms. Or, as in his great novella The Letter Killers Club, it is a role in a play that somehow acquires its own existence, separate from a character and from its actor.

Krzhizhanovsky’s fiction is based on the fact that language makes things possible that are not possible in reality. If there is a word for “role” and a word for “character,” then naturally it follows, according to this method, that the two could possess separate existences. Or, to put this maybe more precisely, he investigated whether the distinction between what is possible in language and reality is even tenable at all. And so the central mechanism of this writing is metaphor (“a three-by-four-inch slip of paper torn from the notepad had miraculously turned into lodgings measuring one hundred square feet”)—the hinge between animate and inanimate objects, which allows figures of speech to acquire a strange kind of life. So that if a geography book comes up with the statistic “In the country’s northern latitudes the population per square mile is 0.6 person,” then it will not be illogical in Krzhizhanovsky’s fiction to picture this 0.6 person: “a stooped, thread-paper body bent low to the bare, ice-covered ground.” In one story his narrator laments “Every time I try to make something out of the alphabet, it collapses.” But the reader should not be convinced by the melancholy tone. Really, these linguistic ruins are where Krzhizhanovsky liked to roam—exploring cracks in reality that are not merely spatial but temporal, psychological, philosophical . . .

Because while this attention to the act of writing could I suppose be defined as metafiction, Krzhizhanovsky’s real subject is not the gap between fiction and reality so much as the gaps inside the real itself. The metafiction is really metaphysical. It should therefore be no surprise if a corpse, in “Autobiography of a Corpse,” reasons in this manner, arguing that space “is absurdly vast and has expanded—with its orbits, stars, and yawning parabolas—to infinity. But if one tucks it inside numbers and meanings, it will easily fit on two or three bookshelves.” It is just one more example of Krzhizhanovsky’s exploration of language’s tricks.

In this way, he maps one of the strangest and yet most logical topographies in literature: “I am neither ‘here’ nor ‘there’ but in a between—in a seam.” And it’s in the story called “Seams” where Krzhizhanovsky gives the most complete account of his new domain.

People whom Moscow has tried in its courts and banished from the city are said to have been sentenced to “minus 1.” No one has passed sentence on me: 0–1.