But shadows shorn of things—everyday life (byt) shorn of existence (bytiye)—are powerless and illusory. Then again, if things must be shorn of their shadows, bytiye of byt, one mustn’t stop halfway; one must take byt and lop off that obtuse “t”: by (“as if”) is pure subjunctivity, a fusion of the free phantasms beloved by Alexander Grin. This is the first way out of the world of shadows to the world of fanciful romanticism; bytiye (“existence”)—of which one syllable, one ingredient, is byt (“everyday life”)—is the second way out of the “dwelling place of shadows” . . .

In this way, the genre of the fantastic acquires its melancholy new development.

And of course that such an experiment was almost erased by the pressure of Stalinist history is only a proof of the principle that Krzhizhanovsky himself investigated: Everything that exists is always vulnerable to the total law of deletion. Everything that exists is pregnant with its nonexistence; the real exists on the cusp on unreality. And once again, I don’t think it’s entirely wrong to note how Krzhizhanovsky has his international avant-garde companions. In 1961, Robert Rauschenberg, with Duchamp, took part in the Symposium on the Art of Assemblage at MoMA. Something he was exercised by was the constant flow of time, of “what should be done to prevent the loss of this moment, to keep this moment from being realized.”[13] And the beauty is all in the smuggled definition Rauschenberg constructs with his two clauses: that loss is the same as realization. The only way to prevent the loss of something, as Krzhizhanovsky also knew, is to maintain it in a state of non-existence.

And yet, in the end, here these stories are. For just because the real can disintegrate, or disappear, doesn’t mean a reader can’t sometimes also be hopeful.

—ADAM THIRLWELL

1. David Nice, Prokofiev: From Russia to the West (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 321.

2. Problems of Soviet Literature: Reports and Speeches at the First Soviet Writers’ Congress, by S. Zhdanov, Maxim Gorky, N. Bukharin, K. Radek, A. Stetsky, edited by H.G. Scott (Moscow and Leningrad: The Co-Operative Society of Foreign Workers in the USSR, 1935).

3. Ibid., 150–51.

4. Ibid., 154–55.

5. Ibid., 154.

6. Ibid., 178.

7. Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Memories of the Future, translated by Joanne Turnbull with Nikolai Formozov (New York: New York Review Books, 2009), 126.

8. Italo Calvino, Fantastic Tales (London: Penguin, 2001), vii.

9. Ibid., viii.

10. Ibid., xvi–xvii.

11. Marcel Duchamp, The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, edited by Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 194.

12. Walter Benjamin, “Moscow,” in Selected Writings, Volume 2: 1927–1934, translated by Rodney Livingstone et al., edited by Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999), 31, 32

13. Joseph Ruzicka, ed., “The Art of Assemblage: A Symposium (1961),” in Essays on Assemblage, Studies in Modern Art 2 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1992), 137.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A CORPSE

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A CORPSE

JOURNALIST Shtamm, whose “Letters from the Provinces” were signed “Etal,” among other pseudonyms, had decided to set out—on the heels of his letters—for Moscow.

Shtamm believed in his elbows and in the ability of Etal to swap drops of ink for rubles, but the question of living space worried him. He knew that on the metropolitan chessboard, squares had not been set aside for all of the chessmen. People who had been to Moscow scared you; the buildings are all packed to the rafters. You have to camp in vestibules, on backstairs, on boulevard benches, in asphalt cauldrons, and in dustbins.

That is why Shtamm, as soon as he stepped off the train onto the Moscow station platform, began repeating into dead and living, human and telephonic ears one and the same words: a room . . .

But the black telephonic ear, having heard him out, hung indifferently on its steel hook. The human ears hid under fur and astrakhan collars—the frost that day crackled underfoot—while the words, as though blanketed by layer upon layer of carbon paper, grew fainter with each repetition and broke up into softly knocking letters.

Citizen Shtamm was very nervous and impressionable; that evening when, spun out like a top on a string, he lay down on three hard chairs bent on forcing him to the floor with their backs, he clearly saw in his mind’s eye the specter of the dustbin, its wooden lid thrown hospitably open.

But there’s truth to the old adage: Morning is wiser than evening.