7 Stories
by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, translated by Joanne Turnbull
Glas £8.99, 200 pages

Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (1887-1950) used to say that he was “known for being unknown”. Only two of the remarkable pieces in 7 Stories were published during his lifetime. For the main part, Soviet editors rejected his work; they dismissed it as “untimely” or “not contemporary”, by which they meant it wasn’t appropriate to the socialist epoch. Curiously, one of the most startling qualities of his work is the directness with which it addresses our 21st century concerns. It’s 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 suggests 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.” In the end, however, 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 wherever they take him. In his own words, “A thinker is not someone who thinks loyally, but someone who is loyal to his thoughts.” His stories, like those of Jorge Luis Borges, are closer to poetry and philosophy than to the realistic novel. Some take their starting point from a common idiom. “The Unbitten Elbow” is a parable about a man who becomes famous for his attempts to bite his own elbow. It 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”.

“Quadraturin” is Kafkaesque. This time the starting point is a real-life problem: the shortage of living space in 1920s Moscow. The narrator lives in what is little more than a cupboard. A stranger brings him a tube that contains “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 agoraphobia and claustrophobia in a single image.

We are very lucky that Krzhizhanovsky’s work has survived. In 1976 a young scholar called Perelmuter uncovered his writing in the Central State Archive and, in 1989, published a selection - the first. The complete works - around 3,000 pages - are now being published in Russian and French. It is now clear that Krzhizhanovsky is one of the greatest Russian writers of the last century.

Robert Chandler is the translator of “The Railway” by Hamid Ismailov (Harvill Secker).