He finds the frisky back half larking about in a field full of mares.

These tall and infectious tales attributed to a garrulous flesh-and-blood baron, a former cavalry officer given to hunting and entertaining at his Bodenwerder estate, were in truth the anonymous work of a versatile but insolvent assay master at a tin mine in Cornwall, Rudolf Erich Raspe. A distinguished geologist and ambitious polyglot, Raspe had been elected a fellow of the Royal Society; a literary scholar and antiquarian, he had been appointed the curator of collections belonging to the Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel. Caught embezzling from those collections to pay off creditors, Raspe had fled his native Germany for London, his ruined reputation hard on his heels. Before long the Royal Society had taken the unprecedented step of expelling the Hanoverian, who was eventually reduced to living in a remote Cornish village and rifling his old notebooks for the odd bit of material that might garner a few guineas. Enter: the baron.

The real Baron Hieronymus von Münchhausen (1720–1797) had spent twenty-odd years in the Russian service and taken part in various campaigns against the Turks, including the siege of Oczakov, before retiring at the age of forty to his country seat. An ordinary career for a German nobleman of the time was made extraordinary in the baron’s cavalier retellings at his hospitable dinner table. The guests upon one occasion, in the spring of 1773, may have included a red-haired curator named Raspe.

While Raspe’s English-language narrative ridiculing the hyperbolic baron might have gone unnoticed by him, Bürger’s more luxuriant German version could not. Overnight the real Münchhausen had become a legend in his own land, his estate deluged with gawkers whom the lone gamekeeper was powerless to keep back. The baron abandoned his storytelling. The dinner parties ceased—and their once genial host crept through his last decade a dispirited recluse.

But his sprightly namesake lived on. The mythical Munchausen’s boundless faith in his own imaginative powers, his invented worlds and impossible situations proved irresistible. Translators felt free to edit and embroider. Some of the best vignettes had been added by Bürger. In one episode Munchausen catches several dozen ducks with one very long dog leash to which he has attached a small piece of lard. The first duck swallows the slippery pork fat and passes it undigested; the second duck does the same, then the third, and so on, until they have all been strung like so many pearls. In another episode Munchausen, while at war with the Turks, leaps astride an outgoing cannonball, the better to infiltrate an unassailable fortress. Halfway there, he thinks better of this plan: “Once inside I’ll be taken for a spy and hung from the first gibbet.” Just then he sees an incoming cannonball whizzing by in the opposite direction. The baron quickly switches cannonballs—and returns to his regiment unscathed.

THE RETURN OF MUNCHAUSEN

Like Bürger, Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky has taken certain liberties with the mythical baron. As the hero of this half phantasmagoria, half roman à clef set in 1920s Berlin, London, and Moscow, Munchausen remains a dreamer and fierce champion of his own unfettered imagination. At the same time, the two-hundred-year-old baron, a self-taught philosopher who long ago joined “the struggle for nonexistence,” has emerged from his retreat on the Weser so as to take part in some real-world postwar diplomacy. In addition to the manor house at Bodenwerder, he now has a pied-à-terre in Berlin.

Krzhizhanovsky’s novella opens in March 1921 to news of the Kronstadt rebellion. Thousands of sailors at a naval bastion near Petrograd[3] have risen against the Bolsheviks in what could spell, so some Western observers thought at the time, the end of Lenin’s fledgling regime. On the other hand, The New York Times reported, “there is a great deal of fog and smoke, and it is hard to find out who is fighting whom.”[4]

Krzhizhanovsky’s Munchausen has strong opinions about both: smoke and fog—associated as they are with his phantasms. “We Germans have not learned how to deal even with smoke,” he tells the poor poet Unding. “We swallow it, like the foam from a mug, before it has done swirling and settled inside our pipe bowl. The imaginations of men with stubby cigars in their teeth are equally stunted.” Before long the baron will leave Berlin for London—to visit the fogs: “Yes, the albescent veils rising from the Thames can unshape shapes, shroud landscapes and worldviews, shade facts, and . . .”

Unding takes umbrage. Why rush away to foreign fogs when you have at hand homegrown “fictionalism”? The poet is alluding to the philosophy of “as if” advanced by Hans Vaihinger. A popular Kant scholar, he held that the human mind, in order to think and to preserve itself, constructs conscious fictions, such as God, immortality, and freedom; while it knows these faiths to be false, it may benefit by acting “as if” they were not. “The ‘As if’ world, which is formed in this manner,” wrote Vaihinger, “the world of the ‘unreal’ is just as important as the world of the so-called real or actual.”[5] If not more so, Munchausen might add.

The “exceedingly egocentric” baron cares only about his own imagination, Krzhizhanovsky remarked in an essay on countries that don’t exist. “Traveling across Germany by diligence, he looks after the tunes that have frozen up in the postilion’s horn, but is indifferent to the symphony of landscapes gliding past his eyes.” Krzhizhanovsky’s affection for his fantastical hero is palpable.