Memories Of The Future
  • Published: 15 February 2010
  • ISBN: 9781590173190
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 256
  • RRP: $37.99

Memories Of The Future

Buy from…
Amazon Booktopia Dymocks QBD Readings Find local retailers Find local retailers Abbeys Angus & Robertson Boomerang Collins Fishpond Gleebooks Harry Hartog Kinokuniya Robinsons The Nile Your Bookstore

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.
  • Published: 15 February 2010
  • ISBN: 9781590173190
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 256
  • RRP: $37.99
Categories:
Share…

About the author

Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (1887—1950) was an ethnically Polish Ukrainian-born short-story writer whose work was largely unpublished, though he was active among Moscow’s literati in the 1920s. He died in Moscow but his burial site is unknown.

Joanne Turnbull has translated a number of books from Russian, including Andrei Sinyavsky’s Soviet Civilization and Ivan the Fool, Asar Eppel’s The Grassy Street, and Andrei Sergeyev’s Stamp Album. She lives in Moscow.

Also by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

Unwitting Street
The Return of Munchausen
Autobiography of a Corpse
The Letter Killers Club
See all

Praise for Memories Of The Future

  • "A writer visionary, an unsung genius." --Geroge Shengeli
  • "Like Platonov, Krzhizhanovsky is a poker-faced surrealist whose imagination is so radical it goes beyond political lampoon into the realms of metaphysical assault. But Krzhizhanovsky's writing is more 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.fm
  • "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...phantasmagoric." --Natasha Randall, Bookforum
  • "He writes stories with a surreal feel...[he] gives new life to animistic Russian storytelling... What's this writer about, and does he live up to comparisons with Kafka, Borges and Beckett ? Yes and no. He would need to have written more, but he's certainly worth taking in." -Independent
  • "A sense of discovery and displacement is a motif of several stories, and the newness of Krzhizhanovsky's surroundings appears to have reinforced his literary preference for the defamiliarizing perspective (a preference fully shared by one of his most important tutors, Swift)" --TLS