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Krzhizhanovsky’s The Bookmark is the best short story I've read in years. It brings to mind The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim by Borges, who reviews the work of a fictional author and summarizes some of the author's works, except that in The Bookmark you actually get to hear the complete (or nearly complete) stories of the fictional creator, which are every bit as engrossing as they are depicted as being. Walking the streets of Moscow, the narrator chances to sit on a bench by a man spinning a tale of the Eiffel Tower run amok, and other fantastic stories follow. Fantastic in terms of quality, not genre: the storyteller sometimes delivers impossible tales, others are utterly realistic; all of them are good. This is a five star story, and it's worth reading the collection for it alone.

But it's not the only good story in Memories of the Future, there are several other strong tales in this Krzhizhanovsky compilation (though none to match The Bookmark). The first story, Quadraturin, might be a bit misleading because it's prone to making you think that Memories of the Future will consist of enjoyable but familiar surreal stories, setting up a topical problem (too small of a living space), and giving a careful-what-you-wish-for resolution. But it's good nonetheless, and even a collection consisting entirely of such stories would have been enjoyable. However, it's actually by far the most standard of the tales contained here.

Next comes The Bookmark, already discussed, then Someone Else's Theme, a story also dealing with a run-in with a stranger that has a particular view of the world, this time a philosophical one that was intriguing but nevertheless a step down from its predecessor. Then comes The Branch Line and Red Snow, two stories where the strangeness of Krzhizhanovsky's stories is at its zenith, literally concerning dreams instead of merely being dreamlike. The Thirteenth Category of Reason is a return to a more standard story, a gravedigger relaying an anecdote about a bothersome corpse and their travels together. Lastly comes the longest, titular story Memories of the Future, as much of a hard science fiction take on time travel that I've ever read, though it also discusses the psychological aspect of such a topic as well. It spends much of its length discussing the technical side of time travel, but the most interesting aspect of the story is how other people react to the main character Shterer's obsession: the people around Shterer see the possibility of a time machine as a way to escape their poverty, pending prosecution, or death itself. Others fear knowledge of the future, and its contradiction of the soviet party line.

Thus, there are a variety of stories here, told in a variety of styles (Memories of the Future, for instance, taking the form of a summarized biography of the main character, with frequent reference to another biography of that character written by another character in the story). Despite this, though, all of the stories are distinctly Russian, dealing with the post-Revolution world that Krzhizhanovsky inhabited. They are critical of the system, even suggesting the eventual demise of the Soviet Union, so it's easy to see why they weren't published in Krzhizhanovsky's lifetimes. I'm glad they were eventually, though.

After reading The Bookmark, I knew that this wouldn't be the last thing I read by Krzhizhanovsky, even if the rest of the stories were garbage. And they weren't garbage, this collection would have been solid even if it lacked The Bookmark, even if some tales were a bit underwhelming. As a whole, Memories of the Future averages out to four stars. One more thing to note is that Joanne Turnbull's translation was masterful, and I'm glad she is the one who has tackled Krzhizhanovsky's other works.

Postscript, February 18, 2018: It's been just shy of nine months since I read Memories of the Future, and the strength of The Bookmark has stuck with me in a way that few stories do. From the cat on the ledge to the couple reliving their days in poverty with their friends, it's a masterpiece (it's so great that I'm surprised to find I didn't go into more detail about it in this review). Oftentimes my approach is to average out my feeling towards the stories in a collection, which almost always results in a middling rating unless I'm reading something by Calvino or Borges. Here, I think the more appropriate move is to rate the collection based on its best story. So, for me Memories of the Future is a five star collection, the mediocre parts of it fading away and the best imprinting themselves upon your memory in the best possible way.