Memories of the Future

By Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky
Translated from the Russian and with an introduction by Joanne Turnbull

Written in Soviet Moscow in the 1920s—but considered too subversive even to show to a publisher—the seven tales included here attest to Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky's boundless imagination, black humor, and breathtaking irony: a man loses his way in the vast black waste of his own small room; the Eiffel Tower runs amok; a kind soul dreams of selling "everything you need for suicide"; an absentminded passenger boards the wrong train, winding up in a place where night is day, nightmares are the reality, and the backs of all facts have been broken; a man out looking for work comes across a line for logic but doesn't join it as there's no guarantee the logic will last; a sociable corpse misses his own funeral; an inventor gets a glimpse of the far-from-radiant communist future.

Reviews

Nightmarish visions and philosophical conundrums explored in highly entertaining, fleet-footed prose.
— Oliver Ready, The Times Literary Supplement

Fantastically imaginative, darkly ironic and marvelously crafted, these seven tales written in the 1920s were unpublished during Krzhizhanovsky's lifetime. Set mostly in Moscow, where the toilsome workdays sap spiritual strength, the stories are about the strange, wondrous and alarming things that can result from a chance encounter...Turnbull’s translation reads wonderfully, capturing the isolation and strangeness of Krzhizhanovsky's startling stories.
— Publishers Weekly

Delightful to read, humorous, sad and meaningful... the flavor and personality of Krzhizhanovsky's writing is all his own.
— John Bayley, The Spectator

One of the most startling qualities of [Krzhizhanovsky's] work is the directness with which it addresses our 21st-century concerns... His stories, like those of Jorge Luis Borges, are closer to poetry and philosophy than to the realistic novel...It is now clear that Krzhizhanovsky is one of the greatest Russian writers of the last century.
— Robert Chandler, Financial Times

Krzhizhanovsky is a poker-faced surrealist whose imagination is so radical it goes beyond political lampoon into the realms of metaphysical assault. His writing is in the fantastical modernist mode of Jorge Luis Borges and Stanislaw Lem—he works out the eccentric premises of his plot with a relentless cogency.
— Bill Marx, WBUR

A writer visionary, an unsung genius.
— Georgy Shengeli

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