7 Stories
Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky
Translator: Joanne Turnbull
Written between 1922 and 1939, these remarkable stories attest to Krzhizhanovsky's boundless imagination, black humour and breathtaking irony. A man loses his way in the vast black waste of his own small room. A woman's former lovers wind up confined to the recesses of her pupil. The rebellious hand of a famous pianist flees a concert hall in mid-performance. Another man lives to try and bite his own elbow. A bibliophile finds that he has lost his ‘I' in the new Soviet order. A scientist solves the energy crisis by converting human spite. The Eiffel Tower goes mad and drowns itself in Lake Constance...
Elaine Feinstein, writer, literary critic and one of the Rossica Prize judges, says: "What is astonishing is not that he was ‘known for being unknown', but that his genius survived Soviet disapproval to be rediscovered long after his death."
