“Suddenly my heart gave a jolt, I raised my eyes, and he was sitting there with a pale, frozen, frightened face. ‘What’s the matter?’ ‘I don’t understand [he said] … I can’t read anything … a black raven, black raven …’” A stroke affecting the visual portions of the left side of the brain had deprived him of the ability to recognize letters.[10]

Bovshek got her stunned husband to a clinic for tests. “He could write,” she noted later, “but he could not read what he had written, and in general he could not read at all.” Page proofs of his translation of the Polish Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz lay on the table, and he could not recognize the lines of print as a language. To ascertain the extent of the brain damage, and having learned that her patient was a writer, the psychiatrist asked Krzhizhanovsky: “‘Do you love Pushkin?’” Bovshek recalls the scene. “‘I … I … [the sick man faltered] … Pushkin.’ Then he burst into tears helplessly, sobbing like a child, holding nothing back and not ashamed of his tears.” In their thirty years together, she had never seen him weep. This final alexic phase in the writer’s life, his taking leave of alphabets, is also pre-figured in The Letter Killers Club, and also at the very end.

RELEASING IDEAS BY STRIPPING BACK WORDS:
THE FIVE SATURDAY EVENINGS

As a frame for his Club meetings, Krzhizhanovsky—a passionate Anglophile—had a rich choice of literary models. They stretch from the late fourteenth century with Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (pilgrims en route to a shrine passing the time in a storytelling contest, itself based on Boccaccio’s plague-ridden Decameron) to the late nineteenth century, the far more sober gatherings of London gentlemen in the “scientific romances” of H.G. Wells. In the Russian 1920s, Krzhizhanovsky was surrounded by several masters of phantasmagorical modernist prose: Mikhail Bulgakov, Evgeny Zamyatin, Andrei Platonov. But his sources and contexts were even more cosmopolitan. Parallels can be drawn between Krzhizhanovsky’s “travelers” and the world’s classic adventure and quest literature, which was hugely popular in the Soviet period. Among his favorite books was Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (less its moral message than its play with physical scale; in 1933, he reedited The New Gulliver, Aleksandr Ptushko’s first animated stop-motion sound film); among his favorite themes was the fantastical German eighteenth-century adventurer and fib-master in the Russian imperial service, Baron von Münchhausen (in the 1920s, Krzhizhanovsky wrote a novella called The Return of Münchhausen[11]). His closest academic friends were Moscow scholars and translators of Shakespeare, Dickens, Swift, Wells, Shaw. Raised in a Symbolist milieu, Krzhizhanovsky surely also knew the French-Dutch decadent Joris Karl Huysmans as well as the Norwegian realist and chronicler of hunger Knut Hamsun.

But the “concept of a concept” as Krzhizhanovsky portrays it cannot get on a ship and sail off to exotic continents. It is landlocked, stubborn, restless, blocked by malnourishment and poverty, on the border between waking and dreaming, in a tiny cubicle. It wants to roam but everywhere it is clipped, stuck behind a wall, forced to sneak out through a fissure, chink, crack, or seam. The Letter Killers, sitting in a circle in their bare room, wander back to the French Middle Ages, forward to a bioterrorist dystopia, back to ancient Rome, only to discover in their liberation from the printed word a new and perhaps more permanent enslavement. Krzhizhanovsky moves freely through the histories, myths, and literatures of the Western world. For all the Pan-European resonance of his travels, however, a Russian edge of starvation, shabbiness, technological backwardness, Bolshevik craziness, and desperate lyricism separates him from his illustrious predecessors among the storytelling pilgrims of early England or the intellectual circles of the bourgeois West—even their most eccentric fringe. The letter-killing narratives of this spectral brotherhood are of a special sort.

First comes Rar’s story—actually a play—carved out of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Its major concept is doubling. For Krzhizhanovsky as drama critic, this procedure lay at the heart of Shakespeare’s art. In the comedies it becomes “twinning”—which, after much antic mystification, creates a healthy, fertile revitalized organism at the end (blatantly with two sets of twins in A Comedy of Errors, more subtly in such festive comedies as Twelfth Night or As You Like It). In the tragedies, the concept of the double is expressed as “splitting,” where one person is fatally divided into two warring parts, each paralyzing the other in irresolute “monologues” that invite the death of both—accompanied, of course, by much collateral damage.[12] In Rar’s revisionist version of Hamlet, the splitting starts before rehearsals begin: Guilden and Stern are two actors competing for the role of Hamlet. The hero of the story—also its concept—is the Role, and how consciousness might successfully inhabit a role. This theme sets the tone for the following Saturday’s adventure, a three-pronged excursion into medieval France related by club member Tyd.

It is easy to view Tyd’s contribution through Bakhtin’s ever-popular concept of the carnivalesque—for ribald inversions, a Festival of the Ass, and nonstop blasphemies abound in it. But Krzhizhanovsky’s interest probably lay elsewhere. A single concept drives Tyd’s story, related to the anxiety about inhabiting a role that Stern ex-perienced seeking Hamlet. The world contains people-plots and people-themes, Tyd tells the Club. People-plots are more common and more pleasurable because they acknowledge the complexity of the individual and beg you to gaze at it: here am I, in all my fascinating contradictions, an endpoint worthy of your interest.