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The Letter Killers Club New York Review Books Classics Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky Joanne Turnbull Caryl Emerson 9781590174500 Books

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The Letter Killers Club New York Review Books Classics Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky Joanne Turnbull Caryl Emerson 9781590174500 Books

This novella (112 pages: approximately 30,000 words) is, at its simplest, a brief and much more recent equivalent of The Canterbury Tales. A group of men meet on successive Saturday evenings to tell widely-varying stories of their own invention. There is a certain amount of tension between the storytellers and some of the stories have elements of bawdiness (in this case, much milder than Chaucer’s).

The Club’s name relates to its founding principle that nothing should be written down (the tale-telling is purely oral). A thought or conception, in its quest for creative life, must separate itself from the written word. Writers are ‘professional word tamers’. A bookcase full of pinned-down words spells the end of the imagination. The seven Club members – Zez, Das, Tyd, Hig, Mov, Fev and Rar – call themselves not writers or readers but conceivers. All have adopted names consisting of a vowel surrounded by two consonants that in combination have no meaning.

Are you still with me? When I write that a novel, or in this case novella, is ‘of ideas’, I do so quite as much as a warning to the unwary as an enticement for those who like that sort of thing.

Besides its framing story, the book contains five more-or-less self-contained pieces of writing. The first is a playlet derived from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Guildenstern (of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern) becomes two people, Guilden and Stern; Ophelia: Phelia and Phelya; and Hamlet I (white cloak) and Hamlet II (black cloak) take turns to speak the famous soliloquy: ‘To be?’; ‘Or not to be?’; etc. It works surprisingly well!

The more conventional stories are a priestly tale set in mediaeval France; a dystopian science fiction story in which scientists separate the brain’s directives from the body’s motor functions; a tale in which three friends set out to determine which of the mouth’s three functions, talking, kissing and eating, is the more important; and a Roman story in which a slave girl, left alone with the body of her recently dead master, takes the coin that, in accordance with the custom of the time, has been placed in his mouth. He is thus unable to pay Charon for his passage across the Styx. The story has alternative endings; an interesting twist.

Looking for meanings in the individual stories and in the novella as a whole could occupy years of study. The temptation to factor-in Krzhizhanovsky’s situation as a Soviet writer should not be resisted, but what to make of it? Virtually all the fiction that he presented to the censor in his lifetime was rejected, but he was kept busy with writing screenplays and a libretto, and proof-reading the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia, was not subjected to persecution, and in 1939 was admitted to the Union of Soviet Writers. Born in 1887 and active as a writer for two decades from about 1920, he lived to 1950. Most publication of his work stems from 1976, when a trove of his work preserved by his life partner, Anna Bovshek, an actress, was rediscovered.


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The Letter Killers Club New York Review Books Classics Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky Joanne Turnbull Caryl Emerson 9781590174500 Books Reviews

Sigizmundundik Krzhizhanovskyalovski is another Polish writer who lived in a Russia where writers were to be killed or exiled. His Letter Killers Club is another example of his intriguing use of words. He reminds me of Daniil Kharms (a surrealist and absurdist writer Died 1942).
Seven men. Five Saturdays. A room of empty bookshelves, and an agreement to keep – at all costs – one’s ideas from reaching ink. Nothing must be written, for letters kill ideas. These self-identified “conceivers” – their president a former bestselling author – are observed by an unnamed narrator, who hears their weekly, orally-communicated tales.

The Letter Killers Club was written and takes place in 1920s Soviet Union. It wasn’t published until the fall of the Soviet Union, after Krzhizhanovsky’s death, likely because it serves as a reflection of the strange and stifling world in which he lived.

While I don’t know Russian, I can tell that Joanne Turnbull is one of the best translators we have – along the lines of Italo Calvino’s William Weaver. The prose is crackling, poetic fun to read, even while it depicts warped psyches and bizarre narrations. It felt like a cross between Sherlock Holmes, something by H.G. Wells, and other Soviet writers like Daniil Kharms. Overall strange but strangely comforting.
Krzhizhanovsky is an obscure Soviet writer, who in this text, emerges as one of the most interesting literary figures of his time. Through allegorical construction, he unveils the Letter Killers Club, a secret society who gather to present stories that cannot be committed to paper. This demonstration of the purity of narrative concepts unfolds with brilliant precision and irony- Krzhizhanovsky weaves stories of wonderful cleverness and depth. Perhaps the most memorable is the creation of a performance of Hamlet, wherein an actor disappears with the role during rehearsal. For all its challenges, The Letter Killer's club is lucid in its satirical demolition of Soviet censorship-and I have a hunch that his work will experience a new readership through this excellent re-printing.
This novella (112 pages approximately 30,000 words) is, at its simplest, a brief and much more recent equivalent of The Canterbury Tales. A group of men meet on successive Saturday evenings to tell widely-varying stories of their own invention. There is a certain amount of tension between the storytellers and some of the stories have elements of bawdiness (in this case, much milder than Chaucer’s).

The Club’s name relates to its founding principle that nothing should be written down (the tale-telling is purely oral). A thought or conception, in its quest for creative life, must separate itself from the written word. Writers are ‘professional word tamers’. A bookcase full of pinned-down words spells the end of the imagination. The seven Club members – Zez, Das, Tyd, Hig, Mov, Fev and Rar – call themselves not writers or readers but conceivers. All have adopted names consisting of a vowel surrounded by two consonants that in combination have no meaning.

Are you still with me? When I write that a novel, or in this case novella, is ‘of ideas’, I do so quite as much as a warning to the unwary as an enticement for those who like that sort of thing.

Besides its framing story, the book contains five more-or-less self-contained pieces of writing. The first is a playlet derived from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Guildenstern (of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern) becomes two people, Guilden and Stern; Ophelia Phelia and Phelya; and Hamlet I (white cloak) and Hamlet II (black cloak) take turns to speak the famous soliloquy ‘To be?’; ‘Or not to be?’; etc. It works surprisingly well!

The more conventional stories are a priestly tale set in mediaeval France; a dystopian science fiction story in which scientists separate the brain’s directives from the body’s motor functions; a tale in which three friends set out to determine which of the mouth’s three functions, talking, kissing and eating, is the more important; and a Roman story in which a slave girl, left alone with the body of her recently dead master, takes the coin that, in accordance with the custom of the time, has been placed in his mouth. He is thus unable to pay Charon for his passage across the Styx. The story has alternative endings; an interesting twist.

Looking for meanings in the individual stories and in the novella as a whole could occupy years of study. The temptation to factor-in Krzhizhanovsky’s situation as a Soviet writer should not be resisted, but what to make of it? Virtually all the fiction that he presented to the censor in his lifetime was rejected, but he was kept busy with writing screenplays and a libretto, and proof-reading the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia, was not subjected to persecution, and in 1939 was admitted to the Union of Soviet Writers. Born in 1887 and active as a writer for two decades from about 1920, he lived to 1950. Most publication of his work stems from 1976, when a trove of his work preserved by his life partner, Anna Bovshek, an actress, was rediscovered.