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Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky melted and soldered every mold he touched. Genre, syntax, realism, ontology, esoterica—all were defamiliarized by his strange textual juxtapositions and alchemical grammar. He is uniquely formidable. In fact, I cannot think of another writer who rattled the sanctified conventions of text in as many ways and with as much commitment as K.

“Though Krzhizhanovsky wrote for some twenty years, Soviet censorship and World War II conspired against him, and none of his fiction was published in his lifetime,” writes Kevin Huizenga, who resurrected K’s novel,The Return of Münchausen (NYRB Classics) as a comic for The Paris Review. Notably, in a play on the game of playing, Huizenga tucks a tiny “NYRB Classix” label at the bottom of the square.

Joanne Turnbull and Nikolai Formozov translated K’s travelogue-cum-travel-rogue, The Return of Münchausen, a novella that plays with the legendary character known as Baron Munchausen. As NYRB’s website summarizes:

Baron Munchausen’s hold on the European imagination dates back to the late eighteenth century when he first pulled himself (and his horse) out of a swamp by his own upturned pigtail. Inspired by the extravagant yarns of a straight-faced former cavalry officer, Hieronymus von Münchhausen, the best-selling legend quickly eclipsed the real-life baron who helped the Russians fight the Turks. Galloping across continents and centuries, the mythical Munchausen’s Travels went through hundreds of editions of increasing length and luxuriance.

Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, the Russian modernist master of the unsettling and the uncanny, also took certain liberties with the mythical baron. In this phantasmagoric roman à clef set in 1920s Berlin, London, and Moscow, Munchausen dauntlessly upholds his old motto “Truth in lies,” while remaining a fierce champion of his own imagination. At the same time, the two-hundred-year-old baron and self-taught philosopher has agreed to return to Russia, Lenin’s Russia, undercover. This reluctant secret agent has come out of retirement to engage with the real world.

Truth in lies is a sharp way of describing the challenges of craft in literature. Whether fiction, poetry, or theatre, one hopes that the chemistry of words makes something gold like truth from the cheap metal of lies.

Joanne Turnbull and Nikolai Formozov also translated K. for Columbia University Press’ publication of Stravaging “Strange”, a hodge-podge of Krzhizhanovskian forms including several short fictions, excerpts from his notebooks—aphoristic glimpses of his worldview, moods, humor, and writing methods—and reminiscences of Krzhizhanovsky by his lifelong companion, Anna Bovshek, beginning with their first meeting in Kiev in 1920 and ending with his death in Moscow in 1950.

Caryl Emerson’s fastidious “Introduction” is a labor of love and profound scholarship that also paints a portrait of Krzhizhanovsky’s nonconformist, polymathic spirit. He was restless, curious, eager to ramble. Although determined to travel the world, K. lacked the money or status to do more than wander around Moscow. As Soviet censorship and passport regimes limited his movement, he took to the page to create fantastic, uncanny worlds. Like many, he traveled by writing. The books title— Stravaging “Strange”— is built from this very tension: “stravage” is an old Irish/Scottish word for wandering aimlessly about.

Per writing process, “a fantastical plot is my method,” K wrote, “First you borrow from reality, you ask reality for permission to use your imagination, to deviate from actual fact; later you repay your debt to your creditor with nature, with a profoundly realistic investigation of the facts and an exact logic of conclusions.”

To offer a small sample from Stravaging Strange, “Material for a Life of Gorgis Katafalaki,” set in Berlin, Paris, London, and Moscow, inventories the inane travels and trials of a nationless outsider trying to establish himself in a career of some sort. Though low on money, Gorgis is rich in imagination and absurdity.

An excerpt from "Material for a Life of Gorgis Katafalaki" by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky:

Metafiction seems a flimsy, tourist-style designation for the sort of metaphysics imbricated in Krzhizhanovsky’s narrations.

“Krzhizhanovsky’s real subject is not the gap between fiction and reality so much as the gaps inside the real itself,” Adam Thirlwell writes:

The metafiction is really metaphysical. So that it should be no surprise if a corpse, in “Autobiography of a Corpse,” reasons in this manner, arguing that space “is absurdly vast and has expanded—with its orbits, stars and yawning parabolas—to infinity. But if one tucks it inside numbers and meanings, it will easily fit on two or three bookshelves.” It is just one more example of Krzhizhanovsky’s exploration of language’s tricks.

Read this book. And read Thirlwell’s brilliant criticism. And please excuse me while I go and declare myself a state before the teens come home and annoy me with their energetic democratic commitments.