Countries That Don’t Exist

Almost unknown during his lifetime, Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky is now hailed as a master of Russian prose. His short stories and novels, unpublishable under Stalinism but rediscovered long after his death, have drawn comparisons to the works of Jorge Luis Borges for their distinctive blend of metafictional play and philosophical thought experiment. Like Borges, Krzhizhanovsky also wrote dazzlingly unconventional essayistic pieces as a slippery extension of his fictional project.Countries That Don’t Exist showcases a selection of Krzhizhanovsky’s exceptional nonfiction, which spans a dizzying range of genres and voices. Playful fantasies dwelling in the borderlands between essay and fable, metaphysical conversations and probing literary criticism, philosophical essays and wartime memoirs—in all these modes Krzhizhanovsky’s writing bristles with idiosyncratic erudition and a starkly original vision of literary creation. Krzhizhanovsky comes across as a strange voice from another past, at once utterly novel yet unmistakably belonging to the high modernist 1920s and 1930s. Taken together, these works present to the English-speaking world a fresh aspect of a newly canonized author.Countries That Don’t Exist also features critical commentary that places these texts in the context of Krzhizhanovsky’s other writings and illuminates their relationship to the philosophical and aesthetic ferment of Russian and European modernism.

[A] thought-provoking collection. . . . With a playful blend of logic and fantasy, Krzhizhanovsky’s works defamiliarize everyday concepts. Readers interested in the crossover between art and philosophy will be rewarded., The book gives a fair sampling of Krzhizhanovsky’s unique approach to literature, which is fractional, hyperbolic, and dramatically metaphysical . . . [These essays] exhibit an intelligence rarely seen in the history of Russian literature, as Krzhizhanovsky seems to be addressing the future generation rather than his Soviet contemporaries. We’re lucky to have intercepted this signal one hundred years later., One more bit of evidence that the Russian Library is one of the best innovations in the publishing world in recent years., Intriguing variety from a fascinating writer., The amount of care which has gone into the presentation of the book is impressive, with a marvellous array of translators featured . . . This volume is a real triumph.

Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (1887–1950) was born in Kiev and moved to Moscow shortly after the revolution, where he joined the experimental art and theater worlds. Though known in literary circles, he published little during his lifetime, as his phantasmagoric and metafictional texts met the disapproval of Soviet censors. His books in English translation include Memories of the Future, The Letter Killers Club, and The Return of Munchausen.Jacob Emery is associate professor in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures at Indiana University.Alexander Spektor is associate professor of Russian in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies at the University of Georgia.With translations by: Anthony Anemone, Caryl Emerson, Jacob Emery, Anne O. Fisher, Elizabeth F. Geballe, Reed Johnson, Tim Langen, Alisa Ballard Lin, Muireann Maguire, Benjamin Paloff, Karen Link Rosenflanz, Alexander Spektor, and Joanne Turnbull.