1
As chronology would have it, Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky remained in Moscow during World War II. It was a bleak time on the ground. While fellow Russians navigated the scarcity and destruction of war, Krzhizhanovsky attempted to document the city in a series of what he called “physiological sketches” reminiscent of the forms employed by Belinsky and Turgenev in the 1840s. He planned to collect the sketches in a book titled Wounded Moscow, but the war’s developments snuffed out this plan as he was sent on various assignments to cover the battles. By the time K. was ready to publish the book, the publishers had adjusted themselves to the needs of the year, 1949, in which the only stories told about the war were to be heroic.
In one of these “physiological sketches,” Krzhizhanovsky introduces Moscow’s windows as characters, residents of the city. “Let the street lead on,” he writes, “And let the window speak.” The sketch becomes an ode to fenestrology, noting that the city’s windows were the first to be “on the lookout for war.” Tailors were brought to dress the windows. “Since the day of the war's arrival, all manner of what if’s have sprinkled upon us out of the clear blue sky. Chiromancy has been with us since once upon a time, since the ancient Greeks— and let it stay, if only as pure supposition, and fenestrology too.” Cluelessly gathering sun, the geraniums and butter cups don’t know that war is happening: “They bloom, as though nothing were wrong.” Nor do they know that they are consigned to a particular place and time, “merely annuals,” blessed to lack knowledge of duration.
2
No one refers to themselves as a chiromantic, or a fan of chiromancy. At least not in my recent readings, where people "who have fifty cars" strike Edward Said as incomprehensible. Addressing two interlocuters in conversation, Said tells them that "identity is a set of currents, flowing currents, rather than a fixed place or a stable set of objects," as mentioned in his memoir.
3
In a different sketch, Krzhizhanovsky recounts a series of conversations involving the girls who have gone to fetch water. There is a store, dark as in a painting by the Old Dutch Masters with gestures frozen in various stages of light, illuminated only an oil lamp. It is noted that water is present but not “light.” It is noted that the store is closed. A customer demands to know why the clerk is reading by the light if there is no light. A few faces later, a customer asks the darkness if there is water. And the darkness replies that there is. And the lamp is burned out by "the kerosene."
Egon Schiele, Stylized Flowers in Front of a Decorative Background (1908)
4
In conversation with Daniel Barenboim, Edward Said said:
from Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society, edited by Ara Guzelimian
To live with the history that we are part of, one must begin somewhere close to the ground. From where I type, this ground colder than it has been in Birmingham, Alabama since temperature records for coldness were last broken. Colder than ever, they say, as if time can be reconsidered by backshadowing.
Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky addressed the sketch titled "The July Baby" to the babies born during the July bombs and epidemics— “Incomprehension is your chance at life. Take it. But understanding is your debt.”