I am still here, in the hodgepodge and hubbub of the capital. Yet I am fully and firmly aware: I have been banished forever and irrevocably from all things, from all joys, from all truths. Though I walk, look, and listen beside others settled in this city, I know: They are in Moscow and I am in minus-Moscow. I am permitted only the shadows of things . . .

In this inverted world, everything that seemed marginal is in fact revealed as central—the crack, the seam, the dream, the reflection, the shadow:

It will do me no good, you see, no good at all to repeat after others: Things cast shadows. No, in my minus-city, in my ghostly, minusy little world, only minus-truths make sense—only facts that have fallen on their heads. Therefore, shadows cast things.

It is a fiction, therefore, devoted to what is most miniature and evanescent. (A philosophy that comes with its own inverted poetics, where everything that seems peripheral to a literary work—details, titles, epigraphs, stage directions—is what Krzhizhanovsky most likes to examine.)

And so, to perform a trick of retrospective history for a moment, it’s perhaps not outlandish to notice how Krzhizhanovsky can sometimes recall the writings of Marcel Duchamp—and in particular Duchamp’s idea of the inframince. Duchamp’s list of what he wanted to express by this idea of the infrathin—the way the smell of tobacco smoke combines with the smell of the mouth that exhales it; the sound corduroy trousers make as one walks; the distance between the front and back of a thin sheet of paper—seems strangely reminiscent of Krzhizhanovsky’s oblique obsessions, always trying to track the gaps in one’s field of vision, or one’s momentary self-reflections in other people’s pupils.[11] His stories are explorations of infrathin edges that are usually ignored. “A thought thought either no further than ‘I’ or no closer than the ‘cosmos.’ On reaching the ‘threshold of consciousness,’ the line between ‘I’ and ‘we,’ it would stop and either turn back or take a monstrous leap into ‘the starry beyond’—the transcendent—‘other worlds.’”

4

There it is, then—the real as redefined by Krzhizhanovsky. And I suppose one question that still needs to be put is how these new definitions invented in the solitude of Krzhizhanovsky’s room related to the Soviet definitions that were being broadcast out in the streets. On the one hand, in its metaphysical preoccupations, his writing seems to represent a sustained refusal to engage with the usual Soviet definitions. And yet maybe the historical reader should also consider the kind of rhetoric that the Communist state specialized in—its new physics to match its new society—and then consider how far this kind of rhetoric was in some way being tested in the supercollider of Krzhizhanovsky’s fiction.

Walter Benjamin, for instance, was in Moscow in the winter of 1926–27. Everyday life, he observed, was a giant experiment in changing one’s idea of time; the inhabitants of Moscow, he wrote, were drunk with time. “They fritter everything away. (One is tempted to say that minutes are a cheap liquor of which they can never get enough, that they are tipsy with time.)” And Benjamin, the precise Berliner, continued his notations of the effects—the consequent “time catastrophes” and “time collisions”: “They make each hour superabundant, each day exhausting, each life a moment.”[12]

Everyday life was a constant philosophical problem. It was, in Krzhizhanovsky’s own description, a “hive”: a web of constricted movement and floating thinking, where time ebbed and flowed. In this context, the preoccupations of Krzhizhanovsky’s fiction begin to seem more intimately engaged with the Soviet state than they might at first appear. The streets were an experiment in changing what was accepted to be real. So one form of resistance would be to submit those streets’ rhetoric to the private pressure of a style, to trace all its fantastical implications. If the Communist self were new, and if time and space had been renovated, then Krzhizhanovsky would investigate what this would really mean. It would not be utopia at all. This new reality was obsessive, fractured, indigent: a minus-space, where words and objects could swap places with terrible fluidity.

5

“Every morning at nine forty-five, having buttoned myself into my coat, I set forth in quest of Moscow.” This is how the narrator describes his average day, in the story “Postmark: Moscow”—a story that’s a kind of emblem or distillation of Krzhizhanovsky’s inventions in the realm of the fantastic. In this new world, “caught up inside a chaotic whirl of words,” the usual edges between things have disappeared. There is no outside possible.

But I can never leave my theme: I live inside it. The windows of the buildings I walk past stare with a particular expression; every morning, my eyes barely open, I see the red brick of the house opposite: must be Moscow. And so the thought: Moscow. My problem materialized, crowded round me with a thousand stone boxes, branched out beneath my feet in a thousand crooked and broken streets—and I, odd fellow that I am, exploring my where, walked right into it, like a mouse into a mousetrap.

And so there is no gap between thinking and objects, between the city and the self: “To protect the life hidden between your temples from the life swirling about you, to muse down a street without seeing that street, is impossible. Try as I did to concentrate my images, to shield my thoughts from the jostlings, it was unthinkable. The street always intruded . . .” And the effect is that Moscow is in fact a place not of meaning, of harmonies and similarities, but of infinite indefinable extension: “Moscow is a mishmash of utterly unrelated (logically and optically) building ensembles, of large and small houses crammed from cellar to eaves with utterly unrelated offices, apartments, people living apart, at odds, past one another, yet separated by only thin walls . . .” It is a language without any referent. Which is one way of explaining why it is also a place where word games will represent sincere attempts at doing philosophy—as his narrator tries to move up and down the escalator separating by, as if; byt, everyday life; and bytiye, existence:

Oh, now I understood the little white book in my palms: It, and really all of them, can only try to trace moving shadows.