MEMORIES OF THE FUTURE
MEMORIES OF THE FUTURE
By Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky
Translated by Joanne Turnbull with Nikolai Formozov
In the 1920s, a disaffected Soviet encyclopedia editor named Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky - a man haunted by Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason” and by Communist realities - began writing a series of philosophical, allegorical, fantastical short stories. In 1976, the scholar Vadim Perelmuter discovered the Krzhizhanovsky archival stash and went on to spend decades compiling and publishing the writer’s work. Now the translators Joanne Turnbull and Nikolai Formozov introduce Krzhizhanovsky’s neologistic whimsy, feverish invention and existential angst to a wider audience.
Very tall, thin, slightly stooped, with a pale nervous face and a pince-nez, Krzhizhanovsky the man could be a character in an absurdist tale by Gogol or an allegory by Kafka. But Krzhizhanovsky the author is harder to pin down. In “The Branch Line,” a commuter ends up in a place where “nightmares are the reality, while in “Red Snow, a dejected man comes across a line for logic but doesn’t join it.
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.
“In Quadraturin, the man with the proliferspansion ointment never exits a state of benumbed grogginess. It’s an archetypal nightmare, reminiscent of Kafka.
In the most effective story, The Branch Line, the nightmare is more straightforward. Quantin’s legs “feel oddly cottony and hollow, the briefcase under his elbow soft and springy, like a pillow plumped for sleep.” In prose so melodiously somnolent that it conjures Tennyson’s “tir’d eyelids upon tir’d eyes,” Krzhizhanovsky describes how the old locomotive, trailing steam, moved through the night as though shuffling soft slippers.
In an essay justifying Shakespeare’s reliance on dreams as a device in his plays, Krzhizhanovsky wrote, “A dream is the only instance when we apprehend our thoughts as external facts.” It’s only upon waking that perception “recovers the power of reasoning.”
Borges once wrote of Kafka that he “knew he could dream only nightmares and was aware that reality is a continuous sequence of melancholy nightmares.” Kafka may have marked a difference between sleeping and waking, but did Krzhizhanovsky? “I live in such a distant future that my future seems to me past, spent and turned to dust,” he wrote. The time machine his protagonist boards in Memories of the Future allows him to look back on the Soviet 1920s from the distance of the 1950s. 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. You could heve the book here.
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