Writers are “professional word tamers.” A bookcase full of pinned-down words spells the end of the imagination. Thus do the seven Club members—who call themselves not writers or readers but conceivers—commit to pre-literature, delivering elaborate emancipatory improvisations to one another on Saturday evenings, without paper or publisher in sight. To these separatists from writerdom and converts to booklessness, even the spectacle of a public performance is suspect. “To dramatize is to vulgarize,” says President Zez. The free word must fly direct from the speaker’s mouth to the listener’s imagination with no intermediaries, no footlights. But as we discover, a concept with all its letters killed—grown up in the dark, not tested by the sun—can also lead to disaster. A pure conceiver is matterphobic. To be communicated at all, a thought must retain a recognizable contour; it must have somewhere to go in real space and leave a palpable trace.

In his own maturation as a thinker, Krzhizhanovsky had passed through a similar disorienting moment, a choice between the work of the isolated clarifying brain and the products of the motley embodied world. It was a struggle, in his words, between “Kant and Shakespeare.” As an adolescent he had been jolted by the Kantian model of cognition, its blurring of the line between “I” and “not-I,” subject and object. Only the chance arrival of a volume of Shakespeare’s plays, with their vibrant Hamlets, Rosalinds, and fully embodied Falstaffs, saved him from this “metaphysical delusion.” [3] The craft of the stage would eventually confirm reality as it is seen and touched. The actor is the first deliberately conscious matterphile.

KRZHIZHANOVSKY, QUASI-PERSON

The Letter Killers Club is storytelling on the metaphysical brink. It contains some half-hallucinatory autobiographical motifs. Freshly arrived in Moscow from post–Civil War Kiev in 1922, age thirty-five, without work and often without food, Krzhizhanovsky found living quarters in a tiny, closet-like room in a former private mansion (Arbat 44, Apt. 5). It seems he sold off his books to finance a trip home to Kiev for his mother’s funeral (this episode enters the novella). Upon his return he did not restock his library, relying instead on his excellent memory and imaginative gift. Walking the streets looking for a job, he fell in love with the capital. His ritual was to set out every morning at 9:45 on what he called “wanderings in search of the meanings of Moscow.” From time to time he received writing commissions. One was for a guidebook to the city, which gave rise to an epistolary narrative “Postmark: Moscow,”[4] a tribute to the shapeless, cluttered, flammable, walled-in, labyrinthine and unmappable urban environment that is the backdrop for so many of his stories.

Even in the relatively pluralistic 1920s, however, Krzhizhanovsky’s attempts to publish his work were dogged by a mix of bad luck, bad timing, and lack of influential patrons.[5] He was known as a “Kantian thinker”—which in Soviet parlance meant an “idealist” rather than the approved dialectical materialist. In 1932, Maxim Gorky casually assessed several of his stories and found them too intellectual, “more suited to the late nineteenth century” than to the Soviet present and unnecessary to the tasks of the working class.[6] This verdict stuck to the author up to and beyond his death. When, in 1939, he was finally voted into the Soviet Writers Union, one of his sponsors explained the embarrassing delay by noting that Comrade Krzhizhanovsky, an erudite polyglot and drama critic, was “very modest and impractical, unable to do anything for himself.”[7] More precisely, he was unwilling to revise on command, either for censors or for well-meaning collaborators and editors. He did try to do things for himself—although high-mindedly, rarely in a “practical” or politically savvy way. Having heard the verdict on his Letter Killers Club, in September 1928 he wrote Pavel Lebedev-Polyansky, chief censor at Glavlit (the central state agency for surveillance of printed materials) that “in view of the fact that Glavlit rejected for publication my books Letter Killers Club and Collector of Cracks for reasons that are contradictory and mutually exclusive, I consider the decision incorrect and request that you, Pavel Ivanovich, read them personally.”[8] The negative decision was not reversed.

As Nazi troops approached Moscow, Krzhizhanovsky refused to be evacuated from his city. Similar to other marginalized writers, he even experienced some modest increase in visibility under conditions of total war. His libretto Suvorov, for example, was set to music in 1943 and performed to patriotic acclaim. But then the postwar repressions began. No collection of his prose ever made it through to print (only nine stories were published during his lifetime) nor any of his original plays to opening night.

By the end of the war, Krzhizhanovsky had ceased all creative writing. He withdrew from literary society, feeling himself (in the words of his longtime companion, the theater pedagogue Anna Bovshek) a “played-out player, a loser, ashamed of his role but at the same time not ceasing to believe in his creative gifts and the usefulness of his work.”[9] He succumbed to drink. When asked by friends what had driven him to it, he appears to have answered, in a line taken from his own (never staged) comedy-farce The Priest and the Lieutenant: “A sober attitude toward reality.” Bovshek ends her memoir about Krzhizhanovsky in May 1949, on an event that resonates grimly with the book-and-alphabet-banishing activity of The Letter Killers Club two decades earlier. She remembers her husband “sitting in an armchair at the table, looking through a journal.” She was on the couch nearby.