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June 2011

"...As for the human brain's affinity for pillows, it's entirely natural: they're related, after all, the pillow and the brain. For what do you have under the crown of your head? A grayish white, porous-plumose pulp wrapped in three pillowcases. (Your scientists call them membranes.) Yes, and I maintain that in the head of any sleeper, there is always one pillow more than he thinks. No point pretending to have less. No, sirree. Off you go!"
(From "The Branch Line", p. 96)

Well, I can't speak for anyone else, but my brain certainly feels like a pillow.

The seven stories in Memories of the Future, all written in Moscow in the 1920s, didn't quite get Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (may I call you Siggy?) in trouble, but they were still too subversive--not Soviet-friendly enough, that is--to be published; they certainly didn't capture the mood the government wanted the times to have. Siggy's vision of the present situation was hardly ideal, or pleasant--never mind that his vision of the future, as told in the title story, was even worse.

In "Memories of the Future," a hapless inventor finds his work on a time machine delayed for years by revolution and war; when he finally finishes and tests the device, the future he finds is just as unsatisfying as the present. In "Quadraturin," (check out the short film ), a man tries to escape the allotted eighty-six square feet of his apartment by applying a "biggerizing agent" to the walls, and ends up lost in his own room. A corpse in "The Thirteenth Category of Reason" misses his own funeral and gets little sympathy from the living. In "Red Snow," a man with a very hard job--"being out of a job"--resigns himself to wandering the streets, and even ignores the line for logic. Elsewhere, wanderers, misfits, and the out-of-luck trade themes and swap stories-within-stories, because there seems to be nothing else to do.

I'll admit, I bought this book because I liked the cover, and because I couldn't pronounce the author's name, and because it was published by NYRB. As penance for being somewhat shallow, I'll also admit that a lot of what Siggy--sorry, Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky--wrote went wayyy over my head. Siggy K. was a fantastic, brilliant, clever, super-imaginative genius writer whose brain could run circles around my own poor pillow-brain, and each of these stories is testament to that. One read-through isn't going to be enough--I'll need several, because Krzhizhanovsky deserves to be read by more and better readers, and to skim through it and hope to 'get' his work just won't cut it.