Eighteen strange, whimsical, and philosophical tales by the Russian master of the weird, all now in English for the very first time.
When Comrade Punt does not wake up one Moscow morning--he has died--his pants dash off to work without him. The ambitious pants soon have their own office and secretary. So begins the first of eighteen superb examples of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky's philosophical and phantasmagorical stories. Where the stories included in two earlier NYRB collections (Memories of the Future and Autobiography of a Corpse) are denser and darker, the creations in Unwitting Street are on the lighter side: an ancient goblet brimful of self-replenishing wine drives its owner into the drink; a hypnotist's attempt to turn a fly into an elephant backfires; a philosopher's free-floating thought struggles against being "enlettered" in type and entombed in a book; the soul of a politician turned chess master winds up in one of his pawns; an unsentimental parrot journeys from prewar Austria to Soviet Russia.
Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (1887—1950) was an ethnically Polish Ukrainian-born short-story writer whose work was largely unpublished, though he was active among Moscow’s literati in the 1920s.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.