The Return of Munchausen
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 The Letter Killers Club (winner of the AATSEEL Award for Best Literary Translation into English) and Autobiography of a Corpse (winner of the PEN Translation Prize).
OTHER BOOKS BY SIGIZMUND KRZHIZHANOVSKY PUBLISHED BY NYRB CLASSICS
Autobiography of a Corpse
Translated by Joanne Turnbull with Nikolai Formozov
Introduction by Adam Thirlwell
The Letter Killers Club
Translated by Joanne Turnbull with Nikolai Formozov
Introduction by Caryl Emerson
Memories of the Future
Translated by Joanne Turnbull with Nikolai Formozov
Introduction by Joanne Turnbull
THE RETURN OF MUNCHAUSEN
SIGIZMUND KRZHIZHANOVSKY
Translated from the Russian by
JOANNE TURNBULL with
NIKOLAI FORMOZOV
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
New York
THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK
PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
www.nyrb.com
Copyright © 2002 by Éditions Verdier
Translation and introduction copyright © 2016 by Joanne Turnbull
All rights reserved.
Published with the support of the Institute for Literary Translation, Russia
Cover image: Yury Annenkov, Adam and Eve (detail), 1918; Tretyakov
Gallery, Moscow
Cover design: Katy Homans
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Krzhizhanovskiĭ, Sigizmund, 1887–1950, author. | Turnbull, Joanne, translator, writer of preface.
Title: The return of Munchausen / by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky ; translated and with an introduction by Joanne Turnbull.
Other titles: Vozvrashchenie Miunkhgauzena. English | New York Review Books classics.
Description: New York : New York Review Books, 2017. | Series: New York Review Books classics | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016026846 (print) | LCCN 2016028315 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681370286 (alk. paper) | ISBN 9781681370293 (epub)
Classification: LCC PG3476.K782 V6913 2017 (print) | LCC PG3476.K782 (ebook) | DDC 891.73/42–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016026846
ISBN 978-1-68137-029-3
v1.0
For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to: Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
CONTENTS
Biographical Notes
Title Page
Copyright and More Information
Introduction
THE RETURN OF MUNCHAUSEN
1. Every Baron Has His Flights of Fancy
2. Smoke That Roars
3. Kant’s Coeval
4. In Partes Infidelium
5. The Devil in a Droshky
6. The Theory of Improbability
7. The Hermit of Bodenwerder
8. The Truth That Dodged the Man
Notes
Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION
BARON Munchausen’s hold on the European imagination dates back to the late eighteenth century when that resourceful raconteur first pulled himself (and his horse) out of a swamp by his own upturned pigtail. The year was 1786 and Gottfried August Bürger had turned his impecunious hand to a German translation of Baron Munchausen’s Narrative of his Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia. With embellishments of his own, however anonymous. The lyric poet did not want his name attached to this racy récit printed scant months before at Oxford and already in its third edition. French and Russian translations followed soon after.
The mythical Munchausen’s monologue begins with him riding through deep snow in Russia. Overcome by night and sleep, he ties his horse to a tree stump poking up out of the snow. He wakes to find himself lying in a village graveyard, his horse dangling from the church steeple, the snow having melted. He is astonished, but then: “I took one of my pistols, shot off the halter, brought down the horse and proceeded on my journey.”[1] Before we know it, the baron is fighting the Turks and telling us what Nabokov called “Munchausen’s horse-decorpitation story.” With the enemy put to flight, the baron races into a walled town and stops at a fountain to let his Lithuanian drink: “He drunk uncommonly—with an eagerness not to be satisfied, but natural enough, for when I looked round for my men, what should I see, gentlemen? The hind part of the poor creature, croup and legs were missing, as if he had been cut in two, and the water run out as it came in.”[2] The mystified baron goes back to the town gate and puts two and two together: the portcullis had been dropped on his horse (“unperceived by me”) as he came rushing in.
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