People-themes are rarer, more ascetic. They might also be rich and multivalent, but they don’t beg you to watch. What they do doesn’t matter and you won’t see it. The intensely private Krzhizhanovsky loved this type. The lives of people-themes are plotless, eventless, almost egoless, since they are all about a quest to uncover something else (“someone else’s theme”). Such people are innately “reticent, passive, part of an idea.” To exist at all they must assume a role and continually remind themselves that they are playing it. Tyd’s three variants on his story illustrate three different relationships with a “role” thus defined: folkloric-fantastic, doubled, and negatively defined, drained of all meaning.

The third Saturday is host to the novella’s dystopian horror story, narrated by redheaded Das. It is a Krzhizhanovskian nightmare in which scientists—not mad exactly, but curious, and, like most eccentrics, cruel—devise how to separate the brain’s directives from the body’s motor functions. What earlier was a question of personality and will (we assume a role in order to inhabit a consciousness or perform a service) is now reduced to anatomy. This preemptive vision of a Brave New World or Ministry of Truth has a distinctive Krzhizhanovskian feel to it. What marks it off from the later Huxley or Orwell, and even from Zamyatin’s dystopian novel from 1921, We (which Krzhizhanovsky could not have read), is its exceptional sensitivity to the integrity of an organism. Interfere beyond a certain point, and humanness disintegrates irreversibly.

What is meant by “interference in the organism”? Mechanized human beings were a common theme of the 1920s, beginning with the Čapek brothers’ robots in their play R.U.R. (1921). Krzhizhanovsky himself touched on the theme in a piece he wrote for the Moscow Chamber Theater’s in-house newspaper in 1924, “Man Against the Machine.” There he remarked that the atrocities of the recent war had turned “the human being, who by the maxims of European philosophy should be an aim in and of himself, into a target.[13]” Theaters should take care not to do the same (the implied culprit here is Vsevolod Meyerhold and his stylized biomechanics): “‘People’ under arms were called a ‘crew,’” Krzhizhanovsky writes, “and those silent and submissive ex-persons unquestioningly obeyed the hole pressed into the iron.” In these regimented military and theatrical scenarios, however, as soon as the brain is disarmed or re-attached to its own organism, the body snaps back. It remembers its prior real life, realigns itself, perhaps even develops an immunity to its own automatization. Das’s story in The Letter Killers Club takes these reflexes into account, but plays them out in a far more lethal way.

The fourth Saturday is given over to Fev’s Tale of Three Mouths, another questing tale with a carnival concept. Ing, Nig, and Gni argue over whether the mouth was created for talking, kissing, or eating. They set out to interview the world on this question, but end up in the stocks for thieving. As punishment, on pain of death, each must do without the one mouth-based activity by which he had lived. We have now moved in comic fashion around the head and face: dismembering Hamlet’s monologues, detaching the brain, taping up the polymath mouth. The fifth and final tale, told by Mov, also hovers around the teeth and lips. It concerns a tiny gift from the mouth of the deceased Roman Mark Sept, the obol (copper coin) placed there to purchase his passage across the river Acheron. The slave girl Fabia, attending the body, uses it to buy herself some sweet dates.

Like every distinctly original writer, Krzhizhanovsky has his repertory, his own grammar of images through which to express favored paradoxes and insights. This final Roman tale can be stitched to a brief story written three years later, “Bridge over the Styx.”[14] In setting and theme it is a model Krzhizhanovskian narrative. A man wakes up in his tiny room, reaches out his hand, and instead of a cold cup of tea on the bedside table he touches a clammy toad. “Excuse me, is it far from here to death?” it asks. The toad, one of those “frogs from the River Styx” that Juvenal sang about, somehow got lost in transit. It has defected from its muddy depths. Too much traffic of late, it says, mass deaths and cut-off lives silting down from Charon’s ferry. “Down they slowly sink—dissociating into days and instants—through the fissures between droplets, down to us on the bottom…. turbid and faded deposits from days, silhouettes of acts and refractions of thoughts.” It’s unlivable, says the toad.