Autobiography of a Corpse (New York Review Books Classics)

Autobiography of a Corpse (New York Review Books Classics)

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Let me be clear: This is not unique to this particular Krznizhanovsky book. The endings come abruptly, or they fizzle out. It could be frustrating and alienating. The setup is usually so incredible, we expect a grand finale. An uncomfortable thought creeps in the mind: I think the stories do come together.

I am nearly certain it is simply that my relationship with the book — with Krzhizhanovsky — is still developing.

Publisher Series: New York Review Books Classics

I hope another collection is in the works. The first story is the title story and probably still my favorite.

Well, it seems Shtamm has a stroke of luck. As he situates himself, he finds that a notebook has fallen from a crack in the door. Whoever you, the person in room 24, may be, the manuscript began, you are the only person I shall ever manage to make happy: You see, had I not vacated my hundred square feet by hanging myself from a hook in the corner by the door, you would hardly have managed to find yourself a resting place so easily.

From a fairly young age, you see, I had been visited by a strange figment: This figment arose as follows. One day, while leafing through a geography book, I came across this line: I squinted and saw a flat white field stretching away past the horizon, a field divided into right-angled square miles, snow slowly falling in large, lazy flakes.

And in every square, where the diagonals intersect, it , a stooped, thread-paper body bent low to the bare, ice-covered ground: Not just half, not half a person. Suffice it to say that this corpse accomplishes his goal — to become a figment himself:. If you are at all alive, I have already succeeded. At the best of times — like when the corpse is describing the 0. Human love is a frightened thing with half-shut eyes: He is finally able to score an apartment, and only later finds out why: A manuscript is delivered to his door.

It is three days of ruminations by the deceased leading up to his suicide and spoken to the new tenant. We learn why a funeral should never take place after sunset: It is the reward of the dead to see the sun at the hour of their burial. The fingers return, the worse for wear, but are received much like the Prodigal Son. In The Unbitten Elbow , a weekly newspaper distributed a questionnaire to its readers. To bite my own elbow.

Well, he became a media sensation, as he actually was a man who was trying, very unsuccessfully of course, to bite his own elbow.

Autobiography of a Corpse

What would the people, the philosophers, the literati, and ultimately the politicians make of him? A man is making love to a woman in In the Pupil , when he does look in her pupil. A little man is in there waving to him.

The wee chap pops out one night to chat but takes the protagonist back with him, where he meets the other, former lovers. Thirty Pieces of Silver traces what happened to the coins Caiaphas paid to Judas for his betrayal. The potter, the tavern keeper, the tax collector, the publican all must deal with the curse of the Price of Blood. The rest of the stories…. Maybe it was the Russian cold which has descended unrelentingly upon these parts this winter.

Maybe it was the translation. Hell, maybe it was the hashish. If I happened across any other book by this author, I would buy it without question. View all 24 comments. May 28, Mala rated it it was amazing Recommends it for: It's hard to choose a favourite here; almost all of them register high on the novelty meter. Krzhizhanovsky chooses unconventional subjects e. The Collector of Cracks, now who would've thought of that! Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky was one of history's deleted characters; just like the 0. But there's justice in the world even though the wheels of justice take forever to move.

This epistolary tale reference many of the ideas present in other stories here, emphasizing the autobiographical elements in K's writing. I took it as a filler read before picking up another big fat book—it turned out to be one of the reading surprises of this year!

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Such serendipities make reading an absolute joy. They are nimbler and know their business, that is, how to look at and through. And since even Not logic strictly forbids arguments in which a premise follows from a conclusion, the Nots, by inferring their existence from their thinking, forbid themselves to themselves with all the premises of their logics.

And yet, do many Nots think? Occasional thinkers, a handful of ideationists. View all 10 comments. Mar 26, Antonomasia added it Recommended to Antonomasia by: Best Translated Book Award longlist That shouldn't be too difficult a resolution to keep. Almost as much as with the volume of Kafka prefaced by Thirlwell which I read early in the year, I'm in a minority by not being terribly keen on this.

It made fascinating, sometimes prescient ideas remarkably dry. At times I wanted to argue with the illogic of the stories.

The philosophy said little that I found new or profound. Moments of satire sometimes fell flat, as in mediocre British comic novels. I found much of the book skilful yet shallowly whimsical and detached, as if it had been written by a sheltered twenty-year old Williamsburg hipster of prodigious talent and wide reading, but bugger-all life experience and feeling, never having so much as fallen in love or suffered or witnessed significant illness or poverty unlike his Romantic forebears of years earlier.

It's entirely possible that the translation, for a US market which undoubtedly includes plenty such, has produced this effect of superficiality. Neither were some of the pieces as fantastical as the write-ups implied; more often they are obviously metaphorical. A few, towards the end, are strongly reminiscent of concepts or openings for Neil Gaiman stories, but, they are, by comparison frustratingly lacking in good plots plots that from a virtuoso like NG would enhance their underlying meaning - they don't go anywhere much, tossing and turning and muttering, emitting the occasional damp-squib sound.

When I pick this book up, I understand hardcore SFF readers who scorn slipstream, magic realism and 'literary' authors' attempts at the genre. It's like bread with as much butter scraped back off as possible. Stale brown bread at that. The observations about the dark corners of city life are potentially great, but can come across with all the empathy and contextual understanding of smartarse well-off teenagers overheard on public transport, who implicitly consider the life of the street as a theatre existing for their amusement. And who will, 15 years later, most likely cringe at their future counterparts I disconnected from the book quite early on, and it never really won me back, even when trying it again, and finishing it, months later.

Still, there were a couple of exceptions to the meh: Short tale of the escaped hand of a concert pianist, reminiscent of unsettling fairy-tales for grownups by the likes of James Thurber. Whilst many of the preceding stories feel pointless to read, like ragged shadows of things done better elsewhere, there's every point to this last piece, which saves the book from the ignominous 2 stars - a realist series of letters from a Kievan writer visiting Moscow, which barely belongs with the rest of the volume.

At times the atmosphere is marred by contemporary litfic tics which add to my suspicion that it's the work of the translators I have a problem with more than Krzhizh himself. Regardless, it's full of reflections about the contemporary, i. Places whose names changed over time, different meaning but similar sounds: The author takes a greater delight in words than the average writer of history or guidebooks, making these observations all the more loveable.

This piece even made me want to look things up, not get it over and done with like the others. It also uses that archaic and pointlessly frustrating structure of having endnotes but no pointers in the text: And now I know to try and avoid NYRBs in paper form, as the print was too small and closely packed to be really comfortable. At least the cover is decent - they've used an abstract Kandinsky, not the usual dreary post-Impressionist blur, and as it's a diffuse pattern, the central placement of the title box for once doesn't ruin the picture.

Oh, never mind, you'll probably love all of it.

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View all 8 comments. Oct 19, Amorfna rated it really liked it. Jan 22, David rated it it was amazing Shelves: I've read Krzhizhanovsky before Memories of the future , and didn't care for his writing style or material in that volume. However, I can say without a doubt, this is one of my favorite collections of short stories that I have ever read. First off, I would reccomend the Kindle version, as it makes it much easier to keep track of all the various footnotes, as Krzhizhanovsky makes numerous references to philosophers, philosophical teachings, religions, latin, various Russian folklore, locations, I've read Krzhizhanovsky before Memories of the future , and didn't care for his writing style or material in that volume.

First off, I would reccomend the Kindle version, as it makes it much easier to keep track of all the various footnotes, as Krzhizhanovsky makes numerous references to philosophers, philosophical teachings, religions, latin, various Russian folklore, locations, and plays-on-words, and much more, which would have caused me a great deal of annoyance to constantly flip to the back of the book to locate. The stories in this volume are bizarre and fantastic, and also, from my outside perspective towards the Soviet Era, show the loneliness and non-person status of Krzhizhanovsky as an author, and a Soviet Citizen.

It really is hard to explain without quoting at length from the book, so I'll leave it up to you to explore and learn. Some of my favorite short stories in the collection are: It is an AMAZING collection of short stories for those who like particularly strange stories, or who have a fascination with Soviet Era fiction published, or in this case, suppressed. Dec 13, Leah rated it really liked it Shelves: The stories are quirky and imaginative, sometimes fantastical, usually satirical, and often witty; and there are common themes of individual and social identity, reality and abstraction, life and death, space and time.

Some of the stories are quite clearly political, concerning the submergence and alienation of the individual under Soviet rule — soul seepage, as he terms it. By morning many-hued military flags were hanging over building entrances and gateways. Men with newspapers held up to their eyes were walking down the sidewalks; men with rifles on their shoulders were walking down the roadways.

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Thus from the very first day newspapers and rifles divided us all into those who would die and those for whom they would die. Like most collections, this one is variable — some of the stories are interesting and enjoyable, while in others Krzhizhanovsky lets his philosophising tendencies run away with him, making them overly wordy while not being quite as profound he presumably intended them to be.

However, none of them are less than thought-provoking and they give an insight into the difficulties of plain-speaking in a time of censorship and worse. There are 11 stories in the collection, plus a short introduction by Adam Thirlwell, giving brief biographical details of the author.

There are fairly extensive notes at the back, and in some of the stories these are quite important as the people and institutions the author refers to are often no longer household names — at least, not in my household. The next story takes us straight to the fantastical as a man becomes fascinated by his own image reflected back to him from the eye of his lover — until one day the reflection disappears.

Humorous and quirky, but still with the theme of identity at the fore, we begin to get a feel for how Krzhizhanovsky uses the fantastic as a vehicle for philosophising and satire. It turned out that the energy of a potential fistfight, if sucked promptly into the pores of a street absorberator, could heat an entire floor for twelve hours. Overall I enjoyed most of the stories enough that they made up for the over-stuffed ones.

I think my favourite is Yellow Coal — a satire based on the idea that sources of energy are running out and, in response to a competition, an inventor suggests powering things with human spite — bile, known as yellow coal. This works amazingly well as supplies are inexhaustible, until gradually everyone becomes contented and well-fed… Unfortunately the last story, Postmark: Moscow , was the most incomprehensible to me, since it relied to some extent on the reader getting references to the ideas of many philosophers who were no more than names to me, if that.

A thought-provoking collection where the best of the stories are highly entertaining and the worst are still quite readable — recommended. Dec 10, Chuck LoPresti rated it really liked it. Not to be read prior to Memories of the Future or Letter Killers Club, this collection of short works does the same as NYRB's previous two editions of K's short stories; it shows the fusion of engineering and literature in short outbursts of Soviet-era stories. Think something like Zoschenko's social satire meets Verne's love of machination and you've arrived at this point.

Grin's dreamy adventure lit is also a salient point of comparison and K. I must admit th Not to be read prior to Memories of the Future or Letter Killers Club, this collection of short works does the same as NYRB's previous two editions of K's short stories; it shows the fusion of engineering and literature in short outbursts of Soviet-era stories.

I must admit that the first group of stories bogged a bit but The Unbitten Elbow had a Voinovich-like abundance of humor that reeled me back in. But humor aside - it might be the mediation on death in the Bridge This is an important writer that pales in comparison to most of those I've mentioned above, and in no way is as important as Platonov if you're cruising the NYRB Russians - but he's great, fun, witty and should please most readers.

It reads easy and the length will intimidate no serious scholar. This is a book I'd find easy to suggest to even the most casual reader. Though Krzhizhanovsky wrote these stories in the s and s they weren't actually published until the Soviet Union was on its last legs.

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It's no wonder then that he is not a well-known writer in the west. I hadn't heard of him until a few months ago. The stories in this volume are surreal, fantastic tales; they remind me of E. Hoffmann and Franz Kafka as well as others - at times he's like Samuel Beckett.

But Krzhizhanovsky has his own very distinctive style; he's obsessed with topics su Though Krzhizhanovsky wrote these stories in the s and s they weren't actually published until the Soviet Union was on its last legs. But Krzhizhanovsky has his own very distinctive style; he's obsessed with topics such as identity, especially with how it changes over time but also what it means when we say 'I' - in short I guess we can say he's an 'existentialist'.

He's also interested in scientific topics in particular psychology and some of the stories are like science-fiction. Will they inform on him? Upon returning from his job later that day, Sutulin is disturbed to find the Quadraturin is still, ironically, at work and distorting the dimensions of his room beyond expectation.

The darkness behind his eyelids becomes the darkness that now obscures the corners of his room, which the light no longer reaches. Sutulin extinguishes the remaining light and tries to hide the cavernous, growing anomaly behind him from the authorities. In these inner tales, specifics are purposely annihilated and replaced with archetypes and forms, which are then abstracted even further.

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