SIGIZMUND KRZHIZHANOVSKY (1887–1950), the Ukrainian-born son of Polish emigrants, studied law and classical philology at Kiev University. After graduation and two summers spent exploring Europe, he was obliged to clerk for an attorney. A sinecure, the job allowed him to devote most of his time to literature and his own writing. In 1920, he began lecturing in Kiev on theater and music. The lectures continued in Moscow, where he moved in 1922, by then well known in literary circles. Lodged in a cell-like room on the Arbat, Krzhizhanovsky wrote steadily for close to two decades. His philosophical and phantasmagorical fictions ignored injunctions to portray the Soviet state in a positive light. Three separate efforts to print collections were quashed by the censors, a fourth by World War II. Not until 1989 could his work begin to be published. Like Poe, Krzhizhanovsky takes us to the edge of the abyss and forces us to look into it. “I am interested,” he said, “not in the arithmetic but in the algebra of life.”
JOANNE TURNBULL’s translations from Russian in collaboration with Nikolai Formozov include Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s The Letter Killers Club (winner of the AATSEEL Prize for Best Literary Translation into English) and Autobiography of a Corpse (winner of the PEN Translation Prize).
OTHER BOOKS BY SIGIZMUND KRZHIZHANOVSKY PUBLISHED BY NYRB CLASSICS
Autobiography of a Corpse
Translated by Joanne Turnbull with Nikolai Formozov Introduction by Adam Thirlwell
The Letter Killers Club
Translated by Joanne Turnbull with Nikolai Formozov Introduction by Caryl Emerson
Memories of the Future
Translated by Joanne Turnbull with Nikolai Formozov
The Return of Munchausen
Translated by Joanne Turnbull with Nikolai Formozov
UNWITTING STREET
SIGIZMUND KRZHIZHANOVSKY
Translated from the Russian by
JOANNE TURNBULL
with NIKOLAI FORMOZOV
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
New York
THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK
PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
www.nyrb.com
Stories copyright © 2000 by Éditions Verdier
Translation copyright © 2020 by Joanne Turnbull and Nikolai Formozov
All rights reserved.
The publication was effected under the auspices of the Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation TRANSCRIPT Programme to Support Translations of Russian Literature.
Published with the support of the Institute for Literary Translation (Russia)
Cover image: Jenny Snider, Montage of Attractions, 2008–2010; Davis Museum at Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA
Cover design: Katy Homans
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Krzhizhanovskiĭ, Sigizmund, 1887–1950, author. | Turnbull, Joanne, translator. | Formozov, Nikolai, translator.
Title: Unwitting street / Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky ; translated from the Russian by Joanne Turnbull with Nikolai Formozov.
Description: New York : New York Review Books, [2020] | Series: New York Review Books classics
Identifiers: LCCN 2020006161 (print) | LCCN 2020006162 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681374888 (paperback) | ISBN 9781681374895 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Krzhizhanovskiĭ, Sigizmund, 1887–1950—Translations into English.
Classification: LCC PG3476.K782 A2 2020 (print) | LCC PG3476.K782 (ebook) | DDC 891.73/42—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020006161
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020006162
ISBN 978-1-68137-488-8
For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:
Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
CONTENTS
Cover
Biographical Notes
Other Books by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky
Title Page
Copyright and More Information
Comrade Punt
My Match with the King of Giants
The Slightly-Slightlies
The Played-Out Player
The Life and Opinions of a Thought
The Flyelephant
“A Page of History”
God Is Dead
The Smoke-Colored Goblet
The Gray Fedora
Paper Loses Patience
The Mute Keyboard
Death of an Elf
The Gamblers
In Line
The Window
Journey of a Cage
Unwitting Street
Notes
COMRADE PUNT
SO THEN, it was an ordinary morning. In one of the two million rooms, the sum of which makes Moscow, stretched out on his bed, lay Comrade Punt; on an armchair drawn up to the bed, their empty legs hanging over the chair’s straight back, a pair of Punt’s pants waited.
Everything was as always: behind the curtain slung between two cupboards (Punt’s room was a passage), sleepy slippers shuffled past; through two closed doors, once, and then again, came the crash of water rushing down pipes*; the tip of the minute hand on the wall above Punt had reached the Roman nine. This was the moment when Punt, before unclenching his eyelids, would allow a yawn to escape his mouth. His mouth was indeed open, but the yawn was strangely protracted, and his eyelids remained tight shut.
In the kitchen the broken spigot began to mutter, spattering spit; the scrape of a key fidgeting in the lock—then the dull slam of the back door. Whereupon a reflex ingrained by 365 repetitions a year would make Punt’s eyes open and push Punt’s hand toward his pants. The pants, ready as usual, waited. But their owner did not stir: his mouth had been unloosed by a yawn grown cold, and if one had checked the temperature of the body stretched out from pillow to wall, it would have been that of the room. In short, Citizen Punt was dead.
Meanwhile the minute hand passed five more divisions and rose up over the Roman ten. It was at that moment that the left leg of Punt’s pants gave a slight start. They could wait no longer. The back door was letting hurried footsteps in and out. The pants raised their unfastened front and sat quietly down on the ridge of the chair back, musingly swinging an empty leg. The wall clock, scarcely breathing, quietly rapped out the seconds. The pants paused, then leapt softly to the floor, thrusting buttons into buttonholes, and strode soundlessly to the curtain. Someone’s late-for-work briefcase brushed against the curtain’s folds, rushing to gain a minute. The pants dove under a fold and, right behind the man running late, zigzagged down the back stairs, cut across the yard, and found themselves in a clattering and dumbstruck bustle of streets.
The morning was fine, with ginger dust motes swirling in sunbeams, with a blue roof of sky above the city’s motley roofs. The pants walked along, trying to avoid the soles of passersby. The sun, like an X-ray, pierced their flannel with merry needles, while the wind kept slipping unceremoniously inside. The pants’ pace was still slow and unsure—this was only natural: the pants were not yet used to not being worn. This was their first brave venture, requiring practice and repetitions. No wonder, then, that while crossing the street—with their springy, cottony gait—the pants became disoriented and stumbled, one leg tripping the other. Four flattening tires ran over them, reeking of gasoline. For anyone else this would have led to ordinary death. But the pants shook themselves and got up from the asphalt as from an ironing board; they had, if anything, only gained in elegance now that their two vertical creases, long since effaced by time, were once more in evidence. The entire incident, which lasted no more than two seconds, missed the incidental news. The chauffeur merely increased his speed, while the backs hanging in bunches from the handrails of a passing
tram were backs for just that reason, so as not to see. The pants advanced noiselessly amidst the briefcases knocking into each other, the hurried staccato of footsteps, the businesslike eyelessness of a big-city morning shuffling people into their jobs and lines. Having safely reached the usual doorway, they passed, somewhat shyly, by the usual desks and sat down in their usual seat facing the familiar, ink-stained folder. No one looked up. Pens raced along lines; bobs, bangs, parts, and bald spots were bent over the papery rustle.
Someone tossed a stamped sheet on top of the folder:
“Visa, Comrade Punt.”
A ledger, cracked noisily open, lay on top of the sheet:
“Comrade Punt, sign at the bottom. That’s right.”
The ledger clapped shut: the pants had now been included, under the name of Punt, in the establishment’s credit-and-debit existence. The substitution of a part for the whole is a thing not uncommon under the sun, and in this case it occurred in perhaps the most painless way, as compared with other cases recorded by history. What’s more, in years to come a number of scientists, attempting to untangle the pantspunt problem, would propose a number of hypotheses. One of these, proceeding from an elementary fact of physics—“rubbing a piece of flannel against sealing wax produces an electrical charge such that little balls of paper brought near the excited bodies are alternately attracted and repelled”—offered this conclusion: given the presence, in the pantspunt case, of paper, wax seals, flannel, and, most importantly, the daily friction of that flannel against the seat of a chair, then why not suppose the emergence of a distinctive, as yet little-studied energy entirely sufficient to fulfill exactly and conscientiously Punt’s official pants-worn functions. Another hypothesis, in essence an extension of the first, was based on psycho-physiological premises: since the so-called heart or, rather, neurovibrations of a clerk tend to sink into his boots, then return to his head so as to again . . . in short, to constantly oscillate between boots and crown, it is entirely natural that the pants seam rumpalia,1 located midway, would each time retain some small part of those vibrations, gradually amassing and enseating itself with some semblance of thought, thus giving the pants the right to a rational and entirely independent life. In conclusion, why not regard the seat seam of Punt’s pants as analogous to the brain’s seamlike convolution connecting the hemispheres of gray cortical matter. Objections invoking the multi-linearity and convolutedness of the brain’s convolutions were cast aside by this hypothesis: one general brain line (and a straight one at that) was more than sufficient and even had a number of unquestionable advantages over a tortuous tangle of branching coils.
At any rate, having stepped into life, the pants picked up where Comrade Punt had left off . . . If during the first weeks they tried to slip from doorway to desk and from desk to doorway unnoticed, hugging the wall, a carefully buttoned-up hush on warily bending flannel knees, then as the desk calendars, sending date after date down metal arcs, turned their back to what had happened, the pants grew bolder—they strode in, sat down, stood up, bowed and scraped, pressing one pant leg to the other, almost like anyone else. And little by little that “almost” dissolved in the days.
In essence, the pants had every qualification, not counting experience: a soft, stealthy step; a sedulous seat; a grayish dusk-colored appearance; wordlessness.
Comrade Pant attended general meetings; listened closely with pockets cocked to the speakers; voted by raising his right leg; signed upon receipt of his wages (the “s” at the end of his name could be taken for both an “s” and a flourish); tucked the money in his left ear (pocket, that is); and so on. Everything was going splendidly for the posthumous life of Comrade Punt. Busy people have no time, of course, to doubt the existence of their colleagues, but if . . . Then again, there’s no point muddying this scrupulously factual story with any “but ifs.” And why, after all, couldn’t one receive “by proxy” someone else’s existence, all the outward signs of his doings, just as one could his earnings?
The sedulity exhibited by the pants was noticed by the top brass. The pants were moved from a wooden armchair to a leather one, while the sum of their salary shot up. The pants now had their own office and secretary. The messenger referred to them as “they,” which, in this case, could not be called flattery. The pants, blending into the half-light of their gloomy office, listened in silence, one leg crossed over the other, to their secretary’s reports and petitioners’ requests. The one thing that could threaten Comrade Pant was parried with a sign in large letters: NO SHAKING HANDS.
The crisp creases on Comrade Pant’s front, pressed into place by that happy accident with the automobile, stood out with such impressive stiffness as to discomfit certain female colleagues, who lowered their eyes in embarrassment whenever they met him. This too played into the pants’ hands . . . Or rather, as one must say here, the pants’ legs.
The pants (this story is straight as a seam and may not ignore facts) were even drawn into a sort of romance. The rat-a-tat of the fourteen typewriters in the typing room, whose door was catty-corner to that of Pant’s office, had long muffled the thump of a certain heart that was pounding much too hard. But—as always happens—this secret became known to its “object.” The object, i.e. the pants, were somewhat taken aback and unsettled by this situation: to give away one’s secret in return for that of a girl was dangerous; then again, the pants had nothing to offer but air buttoned into flannel.
The sacrificial letter from the young creature across the hall was left unanswered. A week went by. And another. If Comrade Pant happened to walk past the typing room, he invariably quickened and shortened his step. Then a second letter arrived. It began:
“I think I’ve guessed the reason for your silence . . .”
And below, over the empty line where her signature ought to have been:
“Now my eyes are open.”
The pants, staring at the letter with a pair of wide-set side buttons, studied the text with care: ordinary amorous nonsense, jumping lines, and declarations, but in the handwriting itself, in the pointedness of the words, there was something threatening, and on top of that she had “guessed . . .” Hmm . . .
The next two days the pants did not come to the office. Then they reappeared. But their appearance was preceded by a written directive: Dismiss typist so-and-so. Signed: “Pant”—with an s-like flourish.
All obstacles, it seemed, had been left behind. Ears craned respectfully toward the pants’ orders, mouths smiled fawningly, and already there was talk of a senior position, when suddenly . . .
The establishment was, as usual, being inspected by numerous brigades, verification committees and subcommittees; and it so happened that someone’s particularly sharp eye was caught by the s-like flourish at the end of Pant’s signature: the flourish looked suspicious, the “s” too much like a letter. The subcommittee met, then notified the editors of the wall newspaper. A week later, the ten items on the large sheet affixed to the wall by Pant’s office door included this five-line one in blue:
It’s time to get rid of cronyism and nepotism. Is management aware (and if not, why?) that relatives work in our establishment, the Comrades Pant? That is not right! The Pants must be separated.
An Observer
Pant’s secretary, closing the door tight behind him, apprised his boss of the unpleasant news. All that day the pants experienced an unpleasant sensation in their mid-seam, the one dividing them in two. The ground had shifted slightly, but if they said nothing, then . . .
The next edition of the wall newspaper led with an explosive article: “Silence Means Dissent.” Five long paragraphs asked: “Is there, in the end, a force capable of tearing Pant from Pant?”
The secretary didn’t even dare report this. But two telephone calls disturbed the silence in Pant’s office. The situation was becoming serious, though not irremediable. It was at that point that an official letter marked “Confidential” stole past Pant’s door: Find out—immediately—if Comrade Pant is descended
from Ruyspant, a once famous Dutch mystic and obscurantist. The pants’ career was cut short—abruptly and irreparably. “Confidential” crept from ear to ear. On learning the news, Pant’s secretary stood for a long time with briefcase and mouth agape. The pants spent the day in their ill-lit office, alone and abandoned. Even the black telephonic ear remained silent. The pants sat for a long time, sunk deep in the depths of their leather armchair. Only the frayed edge of their left cuff shivered a little. The tread of steps and distant rat-a-tat of typewriters gradually ceased. A hundred inkwells clapped on a hundred copper caps, while people, jostling in the cloakroom, exchanged tickets for coats and hats. The pants went cautiously to the door and listened at the keyhole. The coast was clear. They could go.
The dusky street was swathed in long shadows, striating the way. A sudden gust of wind burst inside the pants, as if trying to blow them out of themselves. Round blue-yellow lamps like toads’ eyes swayed on wires thin as nerve threads.
That night, in the room behind the curtain folds, bad things went on. Having waited until all ears in the apartment were pressed to pillows, and lights snapped out to summon dreams, the pants scrambled furtively up to a coat hook and tried to hang themselves. But the suicide was a failure: the flannel leg was too soft, empty, and limp to kick away the stool; and then, as we all know, pants are professional hangers, their experience with hooks helps only to smooth them out, to prevent bunching, wrinkling, and bagging at the knees.
In short, after struggling for a good hour, the pants finally broke loose from the hook and lay for a long time like a shapeless blot on the floor.
But the minute hand continued to move around the deathly white disk—first the Roman nine, then the angle stealing up to the vertical, and finally, the vertical. Past the curtain folds familiar slipper backs slapped, through three doors cistern water crashed down. The pants, half-opening their left pocket, listened: they must live—no matter how hard it was—but for lack of anything else—live they must.
Unwitting Street Page 1
