The Wandering 'Strange'

"A Prose Genius Who Missed His Chance"—that’s what Georgiy Shengeli called Sigismund Krzhizhanovsky. “As of today, I’m not on good terms with the present, but I’m loved by eternity,” the writer used to say about himself. He never saw a single one of his books: his first book was published thirty-nine years after his death. Now he’s called the “Russian Borges,” the “Russian Kafka,” translated into European languages, published, studied, and—most importantly—avidly read.

Krzhizhanovsky’s novellas are the brightest example of intellectual prose: they’re elegant like chess studies, yet in each of them you can feel the pulse of time and trace paths toward eternal mysteries of existence.