Unwitting Street

Eighteen strange, whimsical, and philosophical tales by the Russian master of the weird, all now in English for the very first time.

When Comrade Punt does not wake up one Moscow morning -- he has died -- his pants dash off to work without him. (The substitution of a part for the whole is not unusual under the sun.) The ambitious pants soon have their own office and secretary. So begins the first of eighteen superb examples of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky's philosophical, phantasmagorical, at times Swiftian short-form oeuvre. Where the stories included in two earlier NYRB collections (Memories of the Future and Autobiography of a Corpse) are denser and darker, the creations in Unwitting Street are slighter and/or lighter: an ancient goblet brimful of self-replenishing wine drives its owner into the drink; a hypnotist's attempt to turn a fly into an elephant backfires; a philosopher's free-floating thought struggles against being "enlettered" in type and entombed in a book; the soul of a politician turned chess master winds up in one of his pawns; an unsentimental parrot journeys from pre-war Austria to Soviet Russia. In the title story, a story in letters, a disaffected alcoholic with no friends, but a wealth of postage stamps, writes to imagined addressees, present and future, one of whom will live on Unwitting Street (a real street in Moscow). Meanwhile the out-of-step letter-writer and others like him must live on history's Unwitting Street.


Spanning the twenty years (1920-1940) when Krzhizhanovsky was at the height of his powers, these wildly imaginative stories from fantastical points of view are indispensable to a full understanding of this Russian modernist master.