The Letter Killers Club (2 page)

Bovshek got her stunned husband to a clinic for tests. “He could write,” she noted later, “but he could not read what he had written, and in general he could not read at all.” Page proofs of his translation of the Polish Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz lay on the table, and he could not recognize the lines of print as a language. To ascertain the extent of the brain damage, and having learned that her patient was a writer, the psychiatrist asked Krzhizhanovsky: “‘Do you love Pushkin?'” Bovshek recalls the scene. “‘I … I … [the sick man faltered] … Pushkin.' Then he burst into tears helplessly, sobbing like a child, holding nothing back and not ashamed of his tears.” In their thirty years together, she had never seen him weep. This final alexic phase in the writer's life, his taking leave of alphabets, is also pre-figured in
The Letter Killers Club
, and also at the very end.

As a frame for his Club meetings, Krzhizhanovsky—a passionate Anglophile—had a rich choice of literary models. They stretch from the late fourteenth century with Chaucer's
Canterbury Tales
(pilgrims en route to a shrine passing the time in a storytelling contest, itself based on Boccaccio's plague-ridden
Decameron
) to the late nineteenth century, the far more sober gatherings of London gentlemen in the “scientific romances” of H.G. Wells. In the Russian 1920s, Krzhizhanovsky was surrounded by several masters of phantasmagorical modernist prose: Mikhail Bulgakov, Evgeny Zamyatin, Andrei Platonov. But his sources and contexts were even more cosmopolitan. Parallels can be drawn between Krzhizhanovsky's “travelers” and the world's classic adventure and quest literature, which was hugely popular in the Soviet period. Among his favorite books was Swift's
Gulliver's Travels
(less its moral message than its play with physical scale; in 1933, he reedited
The New Gulliver
, Aleksandr Ptushko's first animated stop-motion sound film); among his favorite themes was the fantastical German eighteenth-century adventurer and fib-master in the Russian imperial service, Baron von Münchhausen (in the 1920s, Krzhizhanovsky wrote a novella called
The Return of Münchhausen
[11]
). His closest academic friends were Moscow scholars and translators of Shakespeare, Dickens, Swift, Wells, Shaw. Raised in a Symbolist milieu, Krzhizhanovsky surely also knew the French-Dutch decadent Joris Karl Huysmans as well as the Norwegian realist and chronicler of hunger Knut Hamsun.

But the “concept of a concept” as Krzhizhanovsky portrays it cannot get on a ship and sail off to exotic continents. It is landlocked, stubborn, restless, blocked by malnourishment and poverty, on the border between waking and dreaming, in a tiny cubicle. It wants to roam but everywhere it is clipped, stuck behind a wall, forced to sneak out through a fissure, chink, crack, or seam. The Letter Killers, sitting in a circle in their bare room, wander back to the French Middle Ages, forward to a bioterrorist dystopia, back to ancient Rome, only to discover in their liberation from the printed word a new and perhaps more permanent enslavement. Krzhizhanovsky moves freely through the histories, myths, and literatures of the Western world. For all the Pan-European resonance of his travels, however, a Russian edge of starvation, shabbiness, technological backwardness, Bolshevik craziness, and desperate lyricism separates him from his illustrious predecessors among the storytelling pilgrims of early England or the intellectual circles of the bourgeois West—even their most eccentric fringe. The letter-killing narratives of this spectral brotherhood are of a special sort.

First comes Rar's story—actually a play—carved out of Shakespeare's
Hamlet
. Its major concept is doubling. For Krzhizhanovsky as drama critic, this procedure lay at the heart of Shakespeare's art. In the comedies it becomes “twinning”—which, after much antic mystification, creates a healthy, fertile revitalized organism at the end (blatantly with two sets of twins in
A Comedy of Errors
, more subtly in such festive comedies as
Twelfth Night
or
As You Like It
). In the tragedies, the concept of the double is expressed as “splitting,” where one person is fatally divided into two warring parts, each paralyzing the other in irresolute “monologues” that invite the death of both—accompanied, of course, by much collateral damage.
[12]
In Rar's revisionist version of
Hamlet
, the splitting starts before rehearsals begin: Guilden and Stern are two actors competing for the role of Hamlet. The hero of the story—also its concept—is the Role, and how consciousness might successfully inhabit a role. This theme sets the tone for the following Saturday's adventure, a three-pronged excursion into medieval France related by club member Tyd.

It is easy to view Tyd's contribution through Bakhtin's ever-popular concept of the carnivalesque—for ribald inversions, a Festival of the Ass, and nonstop blasphemies abound in it. But Krzhizhanovsky's interest probably lay elsewhere. A single concept drives Tyd's story, related to the anxiety about inhabiting a role that Stern ex-perienced seeking Hamlet. The world contains people-plots and people-themes, Tyd tells the Club. People-plots are more common and more pleasurable because they acknowledge the complexity of the individual and beg you to gaze at it: here am
I
, in all my fascinating contradictions, an endpoint worthy of your interest. People-
themes
are rarer, more ascetic. They might also be rich and multivalent, but they don't beg you to watch. What they do doesn't matter and you won't see it. The intensely private Krzhizhanovsky loved this type. The lives of people-themes are plotless, eventless, almost egoless, since they are all about a quest to uncover something else (“someone else's theme”). Such people are innately “reticent, passive, part of an idea.” To exist at all they must assume a role and continually remind themselves that they are playing it. Tyd's three variants on his story illustrate three different relationships with a “role” thus defined: folkloric-fantastic, doubled, and negatively defined, drained of all meaning.

The third Saturday is host to the novella's dystopian horror story, narrated by redheaded Das. It is a Krzhizhanovskian nightmare in which scientists—not mad exactly, but curious, and, like most eccentrics, cruel—devise how to separate the brain's directives from the body's motor functions. What earlier was a question of personality and will (we assume a role in order to inhabit a consciousness or perform a service) is now reduced to anatomy. This preemptive vision of a Brave New World or Ministry of Truth has a distinctive Krzhizhanovskian feel to it. What marks it off from the later Huxley or Orwell, and even from Zamyatin's dystopian novel from 1921,
We
(which Krzhizhanovsky could not have read), is its exceptional sensitivity to the integrity of an organism. Interfere beyond a certain point, and humanness disintegrates irreversibly.

What is meant by “interference in the organism”? Mechanized human beings were a common theme of the 1920s, beginning with the Čapek brothers' robots in their play
R.U.R.
(1921). Krzhizhanovsky himself touched on the theme in a piece he wrote for the Moscow Chamber Theater's in-house newspaper in 1924, “Man Against the Machine.” There he remarked that the atrocities of the recent war had turned “the human being, who by the maxims of European philosophy should be an aim in and of himself, into a
target.
[13]
” Theaters should take care not to do the same (the implied culprit here is Vsevolod Meyerhold and his stylized biomechanics): “‘People' under arms were called a ‘crew,'” Krzhizhanovsky writes, “and those silent and submissive
ex
-persons unquestioningly obeyed the hole pressed into the iron.” In these regimented military and theatrical scenarios, however, as soon as the brain is disarmed or re-attached to its own organism, the body snaps back. It remembers its prior real life, realigns itself, perhaps even develops an immunity to its own automatization. Das's story in
The Letter Killers Club
takes these reflexes into account, but plays them out in a far more lethal way.

The fourth Saturday is given over to Fev's
Tale of Three Mouths
, another questing tale with a carnival concept. Ing, Nig, and Gni argue over whether the mouth was created for talking, kissing, or eating. They set out to interview the world on this question, but end up in the stocks for thieving. As punishment, on pain of death, each must do without the one mouth-based activity by which he had lived. We have now moved in comic fashion around the head and face: dismembering Hamlet's monologues, detaching the brain, taping up the polymath mouth. The fifth and final tale, told by Mov, also hovers around the teeth and lips. It concerns a tiny gift from the mouth of the deceased Roman Mark Sept, the obol (copper coin) placed there to purchase his passage across the river Acheron. The slave girl Fabia, attending the body, uses it to buy herself some sweet dates.

Like every distinctly original writer, Krzhizhanovsky has his repertory, his own grammar of images through which to express favored paradoxes and insights. This final Roman tale can be stitched to a brief story written three years later, “Bridge over the Styx.”
[14]
In setting and theme it is a model Krzhizhanovskian narrative. A man wakes up in his tiny room, reaches out his hand, and instead of a cold cup of tea on the bedside table he touches a clammy toad. “Excuse me, is it far from here to death?” it asks. The toad, one of those “frogs from the River Styx” that Juvenal sang about, somehow got lost in transit. It has defected from its muddy depths. Too much traffic of late, it says, mass deaths and cut-off lives silting down from Charon's ferry. “Down they slowly sink—dissociating into days and instants—through the fissures between droplets, down to us on the bottom…. turbid and faded deposits from days, silhouettes of acts and refractions of thoughts.” It's unlivable, says the toad. There's too much matter to wade through. Let's build a bridge over the river and have excavators dredge up the Stygian ooze with “all of the world's sunken memories, all of the centuries passed into oblivion … We'll drain oblivion to the bottom. Death will deal out all its riches to the poor—obols and lives—and we shall see how you contrive to remain alive amid all those raised-up deaths.”

“Bridge over the Styx” could have been delivered at a Saturday Club meeting, as a variation on Mark Sept and Fabia. It too is a meditation on life becoming death (or on life's obligation to the dead) shared by many Russian writers of fiction during those harrowing years. It is also an epitaph to the entire Letter Killers project. For that final challenge was another paradoxical task facing the members of this fantastical Club: how to keep their own ideas alive amid all the raised-up deaths that are the world of letters, literature.

—C
ARYL
E
MERSON

[1]
Savl Vlob, literally “Saul Straight-at-your-forehead” (or, straight between the eyes). The story is included in Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky,
Memories of the Future
, translated by Joanne Turnbull (NYRB, 2009), 53–85.

[2]
S.D. Krzhizhanovsky, “Argo i Ergo” (1918), edited and with an introduction by Vadim Perelmuter,
Toronto Slavic Quarterly
21 (Summer 2007): 1–8.

[3]
Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, “Shekspir i piatiklassnik,” in “Fragmenty o Shekspire,”
Sobranie sochinenii
(Collected Works), edited by Vadim Perelmuter (St. Petersburg: Symposium, 2001–2010), Vol. IV, 350–84, esp. 383–84.

[4]
“Shtempel': Moskva” (1925), in
Sobranie sochinenii
, Vol. I, 511–549.

[5]
For a brief (and to date the only) overview of the writer in English, see the excellent monograph by Karen Link Rosenflanz,
Hunter of Themes: The Interplay of Word and Thing in the Works of Sigizmund KrŽiŽanovskij
(New York: Peter Lang, 2005), biography on 1–21.

[6]
See the text of Gorky's letter and outraged commentary on it in the editor's preface to the Collected Works, “Posle katastrofy,” in
Sobranie sochinenii
, Vol. I, 25–31.

[7]
Remark by V.M. Vol'kenshtein on February 13, 1939, at a meeting of the Dramaturgs' Section of the Soviet Writers Union of the USSR; see “Stenogramma Rasshirennogo zasedaniia Byuro sektsii dramaturgov ot 13–ogo fevralia 1939,” g., RGALI f. 631 (Soyuz pisatelei), op. 2, ed. khr. 355, 48.

[8]
“Zaiavlenie S. D. Krzhizhanovskogo na imia zaveduiushchego Glavnym upravleniem po delam literatury i izdatel'stv P.I. Lebedeva-Polyanskogo o peresmotre knig ‘Klub ubiits bukv' i ‘Sobiratel' shchelei,' 28 September 1928,” RGALI f. 341 (Nikitina E. F.), op. 1, ed. khr. 261.

[9]
Anna Bovshek, “Vospominaniia o Krzhizhanovskom: Glazami druga,” in
Velikoe kul'turnoe protivostoianie: Kniga ob Anne Gavrilovne Bovshek
, edited by A. Leontiev (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2009), 10–66, esp. 60. Bovshek's memoirs, written fifteen years after her husband's death, are discreet, sentimental, and intensely loyal.

[10]
In 2010, Oliver Sacks described the effect of such stroke-induced alexia (a “special form of visual agnosia”) on a creative writer in his essay “A Man of Letters: A Neurologist's Notebook,”
The New Yorker
(June 28, 2010): 22–26. The afflicted subject could still write, and fluently, only he could not decipher what he had written. “We think of reading as a seamless and indivisible act,” Sacks notes, “and as we read we attend to the meaning—and, perhaps, the beauty—of written language, unconscious of the many processes that make this possible.”

[11]
Vozvrashchenie Myunkhgauzena
(1927–28), in
Sobranie sochinenii
, Vol. II, 135–262.

[12]
These ideas are discussed in three of Krzhizhanovsky's nine essays on Shakespeare. “Twinning” and “splitting” as two Shakespearean aspects of the doubles problem that figures into the
Hamlet
episode in
The Letter Killers Club
is discussed in one of the first Ph.D. dissertations devoted to Krzhizhanovsky: Ioanna Borisovna Delektorskaya, “Esteticheskie vozzreniia Sigizmunda Krzhizhanovskogo (ot shekspirovedeniia k filosofii iskusstva)” (Moscow: Rossiisskii gosudarstvennyi gumanitarnyi universitet, 2000), 40–43.