Yesterday (24th May 2007) saw the second award of the biennial Rossica Prize for the translation of Russian literature into English - a contest free of any limits as to form or period, which means that the shortlist this time could boast Anthony Briggs's new version of War and Peace. That, by any measure, is heavyweight competition.
Yet Tolstoy failed to win. The Rossica Prize went to Joanne Turnbull's translation of the rediscovered tales of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, 7 Stories (GLAS/New Russian Writing, £8.99). On publication, Lesley Chamberlain's review in The Independent applauded these mind-bendingly surreal satires as fragments from a "Soviet Alice in Wonderland". Krzhizhanovsky's stories draw a sinister landscape of malign objects and baffling forces in which lost and hapless individuals blunder through their blackly comic nightmares. Things - from the Eiffel Tower to a pianist's own hand - turn nasty, run amok and take revenge...

Boyd Tonkin

Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (1887—1950) used to say that he was ‘known for being unknown’. Only two of these remarkable stories were published during his lifetime. For the main part, Soviet editors rejected his work; often they dismissed it as ‘untimely’ or ‘not contemporary’, by which they meant: ‘This is not what we need during our new socialist epoch.’ Curiously, one of the most startling qualities of his work is the directness with which it addresses our twenty-first century concerns. It is as if the Soviet editors were right; Krzhizhanovsky now seems more our contemporary than theirs.
One story, ‘Yellow Coal’, anticipates global warming. It is set in a time when we have run out of coal and oil and the sun is drying up our reserves of water: 'The earth had a fever. Flogged mercilessly by the sun's yellow whips, it whirled round like a dervish dancing his last furious dance.' A scientist thinks of harnessing the energy of human spite: 'On the long keyboard of feelings, you see, the black keys of spite have their own distinct, sharply differentiated tone.' Marriage, of course, is a good potential source of this energy: 'coldness and, wherever possible, repugnance multiplied by proximity would produce high-voltage spite...’ But there are other sources: 'Mills could make do with workers' hatred alone; the workers themselves were no longer needed. Factories and mills began laying huge numbers of people off, keeping only skeleton crews to man the spite collectors.' In the end, however, it appears that even the seemingly infinite energy of spite can grant humanity only a brief respite.
The pun on ‘spite’ and ‘respite’ is mine, but it is in Krzhizhanovsky’s spirit. He follows the play of thought and words as far as they will take him. In his own words, ‘A thinker is not someone who thinks loyally, but someone who is loyal to his thoughts’. He also wrote, ‘I am interested not in the arithmetic but in the algebra of life’ and ‘I am not alone. Logic is with me’. His stories, like those of Borges, are closer to poetry and philosophy than to the realistic novel. Some take their starting–point from a common idiom. ‘The Unbitten Elbow’, a parable about a man who becomes famous for his public attempts to bite his own elbow, is inspired by the Russian saying: ‘Your elbow is near, but you can’t bite it’, a rough equivalent of ‘so near yet so far’. Many stories are satirical; Jonathan Swift would have enjoyed ‘Yellow Coal’.
‘Quadraturin’ is Kafkaesque, although it is unlikely that Krzhizhanovsky knew of Kafka. This time the starting point is a real-life problem: the shortage of living space in 1920s Moscow. The narrator, like Krzhizhanovsky, lives in what is little more than a cupboard. A mysterious stranger brings him a tube containing ‘an agent for biggerizing rooms: Quadraturin’. The narrator smears this substance around the walls – and from that moment his room never stops growing. Many writers have described the boundlessness of the steppe; many have described the suffocating quality of a Soviet communal apartment. No one else has evoked both agoraphobia and claustrophobia in a single image.
We are lucky that Krzhizhanovsky’s work has survived. In 1938, he was, surprisingly, allowed to join the Soviet Writers’ Union. As a result, his manuscripts were preserved after his death by the Central State Archive. In 1976 a young scholar called Perelmuter was studying the archive of another writer, Shengeli, when he came across a reference to the death of ‘a writer-visionary, an unsung genius’. He was intrigued; Shengeli was known to have been fiercely critical of nearly all his contemporaries. Perelmuter uncovered Krzhizhanovsky’s work in the archive and, in 1989, managed to publish a selected works. The complete works – around 3000 pages – are now being published in both Russian and French. It is now clear that Krzhizhanovsky is one of the greatest Russian writers of the last century.
The translator, Joanne Turnbull, conveys his intellectual vitality. She provides neat equivalents for the puns and neologisms; my favourite is ‘psychorrhea or soul seepage’. More important still, her language is idomatically and rhythmically alive. This first sentence from the love story ‘In the Pupil’ exemplifies her ability to make words dance: ‘Human love is a frightened thing with half-shut eyes: it dives into the dusk, skitters about dark corners, speaks in whispers, hides behind curtains and puts out the light.’

Robert Chandler

Each of these seven stories is delightful to read, humorous, sad and meaningful. The most obviously satiric is 'Quadraturin', which is also the shortest, the story of a man who is offered a magic substance which will increase the size of his state-allotted accommodation, magical indeed in days when most Russian citizens had no more space to live in than a dog kennel.
...the flavour and personality of his (Krzhizhanovsky) writing is all his own, as if it were a subdued and friendly personal conversation. His method, as he put it, was not to borrow from reality, but to 'ask reality for permission to use his own imagination'.

John Bayley