Countries That Don’t Exist: Selected Nonfiction

Description

Almost unknown during his lifetime, Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky is now hailed as a master of Russian prose. His short stories and novels, unpublishable under Stalinism but rediscovered long after his death, have drawn comparisons to the works of Jorge Luis Borges for their distinctive blend of metafictional play and philosophical thought experiment. Like Borges, Krzhizhanovsky also wrote dazzlingly unconventional essayistic pieces as a slippery extension of his fictional project. Countries That Don’t Exist showcases a selection of Krzhizhanovsky’s exceptional nonfiction, which spans a dizzying range of genres and voices. Playful fantasies dwelling in the borderlands between essay and fable, metaphysical conversations and probing literary criticism, philosophical essays and wartime memoirs―in all these modes Krzhizhanovsky’s writing bristles with idiosyncratic erudition and a starkly original vision of literary creation. Krzhizhanovsky comes across as a strange voice from another past, at once utterly novel yet unmistakably belonging to the high modernist 1920s and 1930s. Taken together, these works present to the English-speaking world a fresh aspect of a newly canonized author. Countries That Don’t Exist also features critical commentary that places these texts in the context of Krzhizhanovsky’s other writings and illuminates their relationship to the philosophical and aesthetic ferment of Russian and European modernism. Table of Contents Editors' Preface Introduction: Restoring the Balance 1. Love as a Method of Cognition 2. Idea and Word 3. Argo and Ergo 4. A Philosopheme of the Theater (Excerpt) 5. A Collection of Seconds 6. The Poetics of Titles 7. Countries That Don’t Exist 8. Edgar Allan Poe: Ninety Years After His Death 9. Shaw and the Bookshelf (Abridged) 10. The Dramaturgy of the Chessboard 11. Moscow in the First Years of the War: Physiological Sketches (Excerpts) 12. A History of Unwritten Literature: A Prospectus 13. A History of Hyperbole 14. Writer’s Notebooks Notes Contributors