There’s too much matter to wade through. Let’s build a bridge over the river and have excavators dredge up the Stygian ooze with “all of the world’s sunken memories, all of the centuries passed into oblivion … We’ll drain oblivion to the bottom. Death will deal out all its riches to the poor—obols and lives—and we shall see how you contrive to remain alive amid all those raised-up deaths.”

“Bridge over the Styx” could have been delivered at a Saturday Club meeting, as a variation on Mark Sept and Fabia. It too is a meditation on life becoming death (or on life’s obligation to the dead) shared by many Russian writers of fiction during those harrowing years. It is also an epitaph to the entire Letter Killers project. For that final challenge was another paradoxical task facing the members of this fantastical Club: how to keep their own ideas alive amid all the raised-up deaths that are the world of letters, literature.

—CARYL EMERSON

[1] Savl Vlob, literally “Saul Straight-at-your-forehead” (or, straight between the eyes). The story is included in Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Memories of the Future, translated by Joanne Turnbull (NYRB, 2009), 53–85.

[2] S.D. Krzhizhanovsky, “Argo i Ergo” (1918), edited and with an introduction by Vadim Perelmuter, Toronto Slavic Quarterly 21 (Summer 2007): 1–8.

[3] Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, “Shekspir i piatiklassnik,” in “Fragmenty o Shekspire,” Sobranie sochinenii (Collected Works), edited by Vadim Perelmuter (St. Petersburg: Symposium, 2001–2010), Vol. IV, 350–84, esp. 383–84.

[4] “Shtempel’: Moskva” (1925), in Sobranie sochinenii, Vol. I, 511–549.

[5] For a brief (and to date the only) overview of the writer in English, see the excellent monograph by Karen Link Rosenflanz, Hunter of Themes: The Interplay of Word and Thing in the Works of Sigizmund KrŽiŽanovskij (New York: Peter Lang, 2005), biography on 1–21.

[6] See the text of Gorky’s letter and outraged commentary on it in the editor’s preface to the Collected Works, “Posle katastrofy,” in Sobranie sochinenii, Vol. I, 25–31.

[7] Remark by V.M. Vol’kenshtein on February 13, 1939, at a meeting of the Dramaturgs’ Section of the Soviet Writers Union of the USSR; see “Stenogramma Rasshirennogo zasedaniia Byuro sektsii dramaturgov ot 13–ogo fevralia 1939,” g., RGALI f. 631 (Soyuz pisatelei), op. 2, ed. khr. 355, 48.

[8] “Zaiavlenie S. D. Krzhizhanovskogo na imia zaveduiushchego Glavnym upravleniem po delam literatury i izdatel’stv P.I. Lebedeva-Polyanskogo o peresmotre knig ‘Klub ubiits bukv’ i ‘Sobiratel’ shchelei,’ 28 September 1928,” RGALI f. 341 (Nikitina E. F.), op. 1, ed. khr. 261.

[9] Anna Bovshek, “Vospominaniia o Krzhizhanovskom: Glazami druga,” in Velikoe kul’turnoe protivostoianie: Kniga ob Anne Gavrilovne Bovshek, edited by A. Leontiev (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2009), 10–66, esp. 60. Bovshek’s memoirs, written fifteen years after her husband’s death, are discreet, sentimental, and intensely loyal.

[10] In 2010, Oliver Sacks described the effect of such stroke-induced alexia (a “special form of visual agnosia”) on a creative writer in his essay “A Man of Letters: A Neurologist’s Notebook,” The New Yorker (June 28, 2010): 22–26. The afflicted subject could still write, and fluently, only he could not decipher what he had written.