The Letter Killers Club

SIGIZMUND KRZHIZHANOVSKY (1887–1950), the Ukrainian-born son of Polish emigrants, studied law and classical philology at Kiev University. After graduation and two summers spent exploring Europe, he was obliged to clerk for an attorney. A sinecure, the job allowed him to devote most of his time to literature and his own writing. In 1920, he began lecturing in Kiev on theater and music. The lectures continued in Moscow, where he moved in 1922, by then well known in literary circles. Lodged in a cell-like room on the Arbat, Krzhizhanovsky wrote steadily for close to two decades. His philosophical and phantasmagorical fictions ignored injunctions to portray the Soviet state in a positive light. Three separate efforts to print collections were quashed by the censors, a fourth by World War II. Not until 1989 could his work begin to be published. Like Poe, Krzhizhanovsky takes us to the edge of the abyss and forces us to look into it. “I am interested,” he said, “not in the arithmetic, but in the algebra of life.”

JOANNE TURNBULL’s translations from Russian in collaboration with Nikolai Formozov include Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s Memories of the Future (NYRB Classics), short-listed for the Best Translated Book Award.

CARYL EMERSON is the A. Watson Armour III University Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University.

THE LETTER KILLERS CLUB

SIGIZMUND KRZHIZHANOVSKY

Introduction by

CARYL EMERSON

Translated from the Russian by

JOANNE TURNBULL

with NIKOLAI FORMOZOV

NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

New York

CONTENTS

Cover

Biographical Notes

Title Page

Introduction

The Letter Killers Club

Translators’ Note

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Notes

Copyright and More Information

INTRODUCTION

When the Thinker placed a clean sheet of paper before the Thought, it jumped back: “I won’t be put into letters!” But the old man went about his business. The struggle was brief, albeit hard-fought.

“The Life and Opinions of a Thought” (1922)

THE RUSSIAN modernist Sigizmund Dominikovich Krzhizhanovsky was born into a Polish-speaking Catholic family near Kiev in 1887. He died in his adopted city of Moscow in 1950, largely unpublished and unperformed. Over a period of twenty-five years, while working in editorial offices and freelancing at various jobs (lecturer in the Acting Studio of the Moscow Chamber Theater, proofreader for the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, research assistant for radio broadcasts, translator and stage adaptor), he wrote a dozen plays, provocative essays on Shakespeare and on the philosophy of theater, and some hundred and fifty experimental prose works ranging in length from novellas to one-paragraph miniatures, usually organized in cycles.

Krzhizhanovsky’s hero everywhere is the idea or concept (mysl’, zamysel) trapped in the brain. His recurring plot: how to release an inner thought into the outer space of the world at the right time with enough nourishment so it will survive, make contact, explore —without being freighted down or fused with anything else. This idea needs space to test itself and must remain separate from what surrounds it. Traps and obstacles to this process exist both inside the brain and beyond it, but they are more metaphysical than political. Although Krzhizhanovsky’s unhappy fate encouraged his early Russian rediscoverers to seek anti-Stalinist subtexts everywhere, at stake in his writings is something more fundamental than the Gulag, the Bolshevik housing shortage, or even freedom to talk and move. In his 1929 tale “Someone Else’s Theme,” Krzhizhanovsky lays out this concept in the eccentric person of Saul Straight.[1] The stars are bright in the sky because of their “eternal separateness.” Music, like happiness, succeeds only if it knows moments of silence or pause. And people, most of the time, “are too close together to be close to one another.” We perish not because of loneliness but because of entrapment and over-embracement.

Thus the enormous value, in art and in life, of the journey and the dream. In an early article, “Argo and Ergo” (1918), Krzhizhanovsky remarks on the difference between the route of the poet—the Greek galley Argo, sailing away into a land of myths—and the realm of the scientist, whose duty it is to bring a thing ever closer to its explanation (“ergo”: the result of a cause or a because).[2] No matter how precisely a physical thing, whether human body or artifact, might be measurable from the outside, there is always a “spiral of distance” trapped within it, which the artist is obliged to protect. The contents of this spiral are so fragile and individuation is such delicate work that the artist must strive tirelessly to remain unencumbered, with eyes that see in all directions. The people with the best ideas travel light. Usually these people are failures. The Letter Killers Club (Klub ubiits bukv) is Krzhizhanovsky’s most ambitious fictional variant on this theme.

The novella was written during an intensely creative patch, between 1925 and 1927. Although Krzhizhanovsky read selections of it aloud to enthusiastic friends and fellow poets, the text was rejected for publication in 1928. It did touch upon politically sensitive topics, to be sure, but the philosophy of the whole did not depend on them. Why kill letters of the alphabet? Krzhizhanovsky pitches his argument here higher and deeper than the concerns of secret police or censor. According to the Club’s president, a thought or conception, in its quest for creative life, must separate itself from the written word, which traps it like a zoological specimen on the printed page.