{"id":298896,"date":"2014-08-08T16:00:00","date_gmt":"2014-08-08T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2014\/08\/08\/autobiography-of-a-corpse\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T15:12:35","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T15:12:35","slug":"autobiography-of-a-corpse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2014\/08\/08\/autobiography-of-a-corpse\/","title":{"rendered":"Autobiography of a Corpse"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the greatest services\u2014or disservices, depending on your viewpoint\u2014Bertrand Russell ever performed for popular philosophy was humanizing its biggest thinkers in his History<\/em>. No longer were they Platonic ideals, the clean-shaven exemplars of the kind of homely truisms that might\u2019ve been found in commonplace books: they had become eccentrics, weirdos, freaks. This was a transformation Russell\u2019s readers might have felt privileged to witness. Then again, they might have been horrified.<\/p>\n

Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky has done something similar with ideas<\/em>, both those belonging to Russell\u2019s eccentrics and those roaming about in other fields. Written between 1922 and 1939, the short stories collected in Autobiography of a Corpse<\/em> wriggle into the liminal spaces between fiction, reality, and the world of ideas: in fact, there\u2019s even a story called \u201cThe Collector of Cracks.\u201d <\/p>\n

Krzhizhanovsky is fundamentally concerned with how fiction and reality influence each other, and even though his work might reference a who\u2019s who of modern and classical philosophy\u2014Kant, Leibniz, Descartes, Hegel, Spinoza, Fichte, Berkeley\u2014he\u2019s anything but convinced of their ideas\u2019 verity. Indeed, this is the only work of fiction I\u2019ve ever read which plays with the possibilities inherent in Leibniz\u2019s utterly crazy idea of \u201cwindowless monads\u201d:<\/p>\n

\n

Leibniz . . . could see only a world of discrete monads, of ontological solitudes, none of which has windows. If one tries to be more optimistic than the optimist and avow that souls have windows and the ability to open them, then those windows and that ability will turn out to be nailed shut and boarded up, as in an abandoned house. People-monads, too, have a bad name: They are full of ghosts. The most frightening of these is man.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u201cPeople-monads\u201d! As any reader of this blog would know, Russian literature is thick with them. Krzhizhanovsky won\u2019t be outdone in the alienation\/existential horror department, either:<\/p>\n

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Man is to man a wolf. No, that\u2019s not true, that\u2019s sentimental, lighthearted. No, man is to man a ghost. Only. That\u2019s more exact. To sink one\u2019s teeth into another man\u2019s throat is at least to believe, and that\u2019s what counts, in another man\u2019s blood.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Thankfully, though, even when he confronts us with these unpalatable truths Krzhizhanovsky doesn\u2019t go for the arid humourlessness of a Sartre or a Nietzsche. There\u2019s a dry comedy running through his work, a sensibility which dares to mock not only Soviet shibboleths, but bureaucracy, religion, and the art world. Another story traces the media frenzy and subsequent national preoccupation which develops, almost by chance, around a man attempting to bite his own elbow.<\/p>\n

At times, Krzhizhanovsky\u2019s foresight is chilling. \u201cYellow Coal,\u201d the bitterest of the stories, and the last to be written, in 1939, depicts a society engineered to sustain itself on spite alone. This is a world in which an earnest ethnographer publishes a \u201cClassification of Interethnic Hatreds, a two-volume work asserting that humanity should be split into the smallest possible ethnicities so as to produce the maximum \u2018kinetic spite\u2019\u201d: a confection so eerily prescient that it\u2019s hard to find it funny.<\/p>\n

Krzhizhanovsky\u2019s commentary on the Russian Orthodox Church, too, is a little more serious\u2014even while he explores elsewhere what might\u2019ve happened to Judas\u2019s thirty pieces of silver after they left his hands:<\/p>\n

\n

Through the centuries, without respite, the kopeck candle did its work: A fire would begin to smolder in some small chapel, by an icon stand, then creep down passages, up into rafters, from shed to shed, hurling firebrands from roof to roof; its flaming tongues would leap over the Kremlin\u2019s stone walls, slither up to the tent roofs of towers and belfries, and send bells crashing down amid the growing clamor of crowds and tocsins. And then cooling ashes and another ant-like building frenzy for five or six years. Because in five or six years the kopeck candle would again set to work. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It would be a mistake, though, to read this collection as just a set of reflections on a particular period in Russian history, or a tongue-in-cheek exploration of some arcane philosophies, or an indictment of the church. It\u2019s first and foremost a fictional exercise of the highest order: one just as real, and just as delightful, as the best of Borges.<\/p>\n

In true Borgesian fashion, when the stock of philosophy starts to thin, Krzhizhanovsky adds a few lashings of folk tales: a set of fingers which detach themselves from their pianist and spend a day wandering the streets of Moscow, or a conversation between a woman\u2019s lovers\u2019 Lilliputian counterparts about the form to be filled out by new arrivals\u2014all of whom live together inside her eye.<\/p>\n

This lunatic mode wouldn\u2019t work nearly so well without Joanne Turnbull and Nikolai Formozov\u2019s supple translation, which manages to convey a vivid sense of Krzhizhanovsky\u2019s subtle wordplay without undue contortion in the English. Take this passage, a parody of Plato\u2019s allegory of the cave:<\/p>\n

\n

True, the Nots teach their notkins that shadows are cast by things, but if one thinks about this sensibly, then one cannot know exactly if shadows are cast by things or things by shadows, and if one oughtn\u2019t to cast aside, as pure ostensibilities, Not things, Not shadows, and the Nots themselves with their notional notions. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Funnily enough, ostensibilities abound in the collection\u2019s final story, \u201cPostmark: Moscow.\u201d It\u2019s an odd addition to the collection: whereas every other story is shorn almost entirely of obvious referents, \u201cPostmark: Moscow\u201d bristles with historical figures, Moscow localities\u2014many of them burnt down or demolished since\u2014and obscure artistic movements. In a way, then, Krzhizhanovsky is doing exactly that which his narrator derides: casting a thing (art) with a shadow (life). And what a thing it is!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the greatest services\u2014or disservices, depending on your viewpoint\u2014Bertrand Russell ever performed for popular philosophy was humanizing its biggest thinkers in his History. No longer were they Platonic ideals, the clean-shaven exemplars of the kind of homely truisms that might\u2019ve been found in commonplace books: they had become eccentrics, weirdos, freaks. This was a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":166,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[30376,1796,57306,4636,30366,57296],"class_list":["post-298896","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-joanne-turnbull","tag-new-york-review-books","tag-nikolai-formozov","tag-russian-literature","tag-sigizmund-krzhizhanovsky","tag-simon-collinson"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298896","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/166"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=298896"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298896\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":337426,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298896\/revisions\/337426"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=298896"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=298896"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=298896"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}