{"product_id":"autobiography-of-a-corpse-isbn-9781590176702","title":"Autobiography of a Corpse","description":"An NYRB Classics Original\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWinner of the  2014 PEN Translation Prize \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWinner of the 2014 Read Russia Prize\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe stakes are wildly high in Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s fantastic and blackly comic philosophical fables, which abound in nested narratives and wild paradoxes. This new collection of eleven mind-bending and spellbinding tales includes some of Krzhizhanovsky’s most dazzling conceits: a provincial journalist who moves to Moscow finds his existence consumed by the autobiography of his room’s previous occupant; the fingers of a celebrated pianist’s right hand run away to spend a night alone on the city streets; a man’s lifelong quest to bite his own elbow inspires both a hugely popular circus act and a new refutation of Kant. Ordinary reality cracks open before our eyes in the pages of \u003ci\u003eAutobiography of a Corpse\u003c\/i\u003e, and the extraordinary spills out.“Sly,  vibrant, and often very funny, Krzhizhanovsky’s stories, originally  written in the 1920s and ’30s (though virtually unpublished during the  author’s lifetime), are a joy… Full of precise detail, this book will  instruct, delight, and then leave the reader pondering long after the  reading is finished.” —\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"The stories in  this collection by the early Soviet writer Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky are  nearly as fantastic as the crashing combination of consonants at the  beginning of his surname.\"  —\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“As  to the question of why he still deserves to be read, these stories  represent strong entries in two different traditions of Russian  literature: firstly, the unhinged, feverishly experimental universe, in  which a pianist’s fingers can detach themselves from his hand and flee  down the aisle of the concert hall, or where a cold man on the streets  of Moscow can remove a strip of paper from a notepad and jot something  down, transmogrifying the paper into ‘lodgings measuring one hundred  square feet.’ Secondly, the grand woe of Dostoyevsky, in which is  expressed the physic trauma of a frozen country so frequently torn  asunder by ideology.” —The Daily Beast \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Sly, vibrant, and often very funny, Krzhizhanovsky’s stories, originally written in the 1920s and ’30s (though virtually unpublished during the author’s lifetime), are a joy…Full of precise detail, this book will instruct, delight, and then leave the reader pondering long after the reading is finished.” —\u003ci\u003eHuffington Post\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“In Thirlwell’s thoughtful introduction, the British novelist declares that Krzhizhanovsky’s mode is ‘the most useful vehicle available for the most intricate philosophy.’ This vehicle is also among the most palatable: If Krzhizhanovsky’s stories are intricately philosophic, they’re delivered in such an entertaining manner that the medicine goes down quite pleasantly indeed.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Boston Globe\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Krzhizhanovsky is one of the greatest Russian writers of the last century.” —Robert Chandler, \u003ci\u003eFinancial Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Krzhizhanovsky’s   morbidly satiric imagination forms the wild (missing) link between the   futuristic dream tales of Edgar Allan Poe and the postwar scientific   nightmares of Stanislaw Lem . . . an impish master of the fatalistically   fantastic.” —Bill Marx, \u003ci\u003eThe World\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Krzhizhanovsky is   often compared to Borges, Swift, Poe, Gogol, Kafka, and Beckett, yet his   fiction relies on its own special mixture of heresy and logic.”   —Natasha Randall, \u003ci\u003eBookforum\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“There is no blackness in this   author’s humour, not even in such a story as ‘Autobiography of a   Corpse,’ which in its mild and amiable way, gives the impression of   being what the title says it is. For a writer Krzhizhanovsky himself   sounds an unusually nice man. His work, subtly subversive, as his editor   rightly calls it, only started to be published as a whole in 1989,  when  what might be described as all the usual suspects, Kafka and  Borges,  Swift, Gogol and of course Samuel Beckett, were promptly  trotted out by  way of comparison. Krzhizhanovsky has certainly much in  common with  them, but the flavour and personality of his writing is all  his own, as  if it were a subdued and friendly personal conversation.  His method, as  he put it, was not to borrow from reality, but to ‘ask  reality for  permission to use his own imagination.’ ” —\u003ci\u003eThe Spectator \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “Krzhizhanovsky wanted to perform imaginary experiments with the nature   of time and space. Outside, in the streets, the Communist state was   busy performing such experiments for real. In response, Krzhizhanovsky’s   prose has a recklessly unstable tone in which delighted examination of   impossible worlds can slip into ferocious political sarcasm.... It is a   method for investigating how much unreality reality can bear.” —Adam   Thirlwell, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Krzhizhanovsky’s stories are more like dream diaries than fiction.   Quite intentionally, he blurs the line between sleep and waking, real   and unreal, life and death. While his translators admirably convey the   whirligigging quality of his narratives, Krzhizhanovsky’s peregrinations   demand unstinting focus and frequent compass checks. His characters   often seem half, or wholly, asleep.... In Krzhizhanovsky’s tales, relics   of a future past, he transports readers back to the present he   renounced, to a life that’s ‘not-life, a gap in existence’—a place from   which he sought refuge in fiction and dreams.” —Liesl Schillinger, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “There was probably no worse time and place to be a postmodernist sage   than in 1920s Russia. Still, bibliophiles like to believe that genius   makes itself known, regardless of social pressures, and in the case of   Ukraine-born Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, they may have a point—only it   took about six decades for anyone else to catch on.... For all the   cemetery...Krzhizhanovsky is also hilarious, and one wonders whether   that might have troubled the Bolsheviks as much as anything in his work.   Krzhizhanovsky understood the potency of juxtaposing wit with terror   and the sacred with the profane.” —\u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Krzhizhanovsky is not interested in picking apart the sense-making   mechanisms of language that readers take for granted. Instead he is   feeling out ways of conveying both the quotidian dreariness and the   horrifying threat of violence of 1920s Soviet life.... Turnbull writes   in the introduction that a Soviet editor dismissed Krzhizhanovsky’s work   as “untimely,” a common shorthand for fiction that was not politically   correct. But of course Krzhizhanovsky’s stories are exactly and   deliberately timely: they observe the follies and cruelties of early   Soviet life.” —Elaine Blair, \u003ci\u003eThe Nation\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “[A]n   awareness has grown that Krzhizhanovsky belongs with the best of the   Russian prose writers who came to maturity in the post-Revolutionary   decade. Like them, he sought and developed a new aesthetic in an altered   world; and like them, he was soon thrown back on himself.” —Oliver   Ready, \u003ci\u003eTimes Literary Supplement\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eSigizmund Krzhizhanovsky\u003c\/b\u003e (1887-1950), the Ukrainian-born son of Polish emigrants, studied law and classical philology at Kiev University. After graduation and two summers spent exploring Europe, he was obliged to clerk for an attorney. A sinecure, the job allowed him to devote most of his time to literature and his own writing. In 1920, he began lecturing in Kiev on theater and music. The lectures continued in Moscow, where he moved in 1922, by then well known in literary circles. Lodged in a cell-like room on the Arbat, Krzhizhanovsky wrote steadily for close to two decades. His philosophical and phantasmagorical fictions ignored injunctions to portray the Soviet state in a positive light. Three separate efforts to print collections were quashed by the censors, a fourth by World War II. Not until 1989 could his work begin to be published. Like Poe, Krzhizhanovsky takes us to the edge of the abyss and forces us to look into it. “I am interested,” he said, “not in the arithmetic, but in the algebra of life.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eJoanne Turnbull\u003c\/b\u003e’s translations from Russian in collaboration with Nikolai Formozov include Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s \u003ci\u003eMemories of the Future \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eThe Letter Killers Club\u003c\/i\u003e (both NYRB Classics). \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAdam Thirlwell\u003c\/b\u003e is the author of two novels, \u003ci\u003ePolitics \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eThe Escape\u003c\/i\u003e; a novella, \u003ci\u003eKapow!\u003c\/i\u003e; an essay-book, \u003ci\u003eThe Delighted States\u003c\/i\u003e, winner of a Somerset Maugham Award; and a compendium of translations edited for \u003ci\u003eMcSweeney’s\u003c\/i\u003e. He has twice been selected as one of \u003ci\u003eGranta\u003c\/i\u003e’s Best of Young British Novelists.","brand":"NYRB Classics","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46300122874085,"sku":"NP9781590176702","price":19.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781590176702.jpg?v=1767721974","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/autobiography-of-a-corpse-isbn-9781590176702","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}