The long-forgotten Russian writer Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky has been having a revival lately; New York Review Books has published five collections of his fiction, and now Columbia University Press’s Russian Library series (which started with a bang and has gone from strength to strength) has put out Countries That Don’t Exist: Selected Nonfiction, edited by Jacob Emery and Alexander Spektor, which they were kind enough to send me. It’s every bit as impressive as you’d expect, fourteen pieces dated from 1912 to 1949 rendered into English by a range of translators and provided with a general introduction as well as introductions to each piece, and there are over forty pages of notes at the end. The first essay, “Love as a Method of Cognition,” is a sort of response to Vladimir Solovyov’s “The Meaning of Love” and is apparently his only actual work of philosophy; the last, “Writer’s Notebooks,” is a collection of epigrams (“I have noticed that in games played for one’s life, the trump card is always from a black suit”). In between there is everything from “The Poetics of Titles” (see the detailed discussion at Russian Dinosaur) to “A History of Unwritten Literature,” and of course the title piece, which was not published until 1994 and which the introduction calls an “imaginary autobiography.” Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings has a good review where you can find out more; I’ll just say this is one more bit of evidence that the Russian Library is one of the best innovations in the publishing world in recent years. Keep up the good work!
About twenty-five years ago, at an art gallery in the Pearl District (before it was widely called that) of Portland, Oregon, there was a showing of several thematically similar art projects. One of them was quite interesting; the creator had taken pictures of interesting buildings, parks, and public artworks he had come across and was using them as landmarks with invented histories on a slowly-developing map of an imaginary Canadian city. The other installations seemed to be much less carefully designed post-modern assemblages of pseudorandom urban imagery.*
Outside the gallery, there was a big banner advertising the installations, reading: “Fictional Cities.” On the brick wall below, a waggish graffiti artist had spray-painted: “Fictional Hairstyles.”
* There was also an unrelated installation, about driving three Ryder trucks around the country. Unfortunately, the creators came up with the idea just a bit too late, and the iconic yellow Ryder trucks that inspired the project were being phased out when it came time to take the actual trip; they were forced to settle for a mixture of yellow and off-white vehicles instead. Moreover, like the majority of the “fictional cities” projects, they didn’t seem to have figured out how to make the installation interesting. A bunch of televisions showing rental trucks stopped by the side of the road with their hazard lights** on just doesn’t hold one’s interest for very long.
** These are better known in my family as the “I’m-doing-something-screwed-up lights.”
Unfortunately, the creators came up with the idea just a bit too late, and the iconic yellow Ryder trucks that inspired the project were being phased out when it came time to take the actual trip; they were forced to settle for a mixture of yellow and off-white vehicles instead.
If I were an art theorist/critic, I’m sure I could come up with a good analysis/justification for this embarrassing contretemps. As I’m not, I merely chuckle oafishly.
@languagehat: It was actually something that they could, perhaps, have made interesting. I don’t remember whether they started with three yellow trucks, or with two yellow and one white. However, one of the yellow trucks broke down, and they had to replace it from a local Ryder franchise, which only had whites on the lot. There could have been an interesting story about this, but all they had as part of the display were a wrench they bought and a regional highway map that showed the detour they needed to make to get the replacement truck. The vast majority of the exhibit was just based around those televisions showing the trucks, sometimes in motion at night, sometimes stopped—but all showing essentially unedited footage, so that you could watch for many minutes and nothing would be going on. Had they had one monitor showing a shorter loop, composed from video shot while they were dealing with the breakdown, it might have been a lot more thought provoking.
Brett, was that display anywhere near the 24 Hour Church of Elvis?
Within walking distance.
I see that Krzyżanowski (to give an un-Russified spelling) was an ethnic Pole from Kiev, as a nice reminder of the ethnic variousness of that part of the world before the 20th-century strategy of rationalization-by-ethnic-cleansing had gotten underway.
Yes, it was Kijów back in the day.
Hey, the book is now freely available as pdf downloads!