In the Pupil

"A genius who was missed"—that’s how Georgy Shengeli called Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky. “As of today I don’t get along with my time, but eternity loves me,” the writer said about himself. He never saw a single one of his books: his first book was published thirty-nine years after his death. Today he is called the “Russian Borges,” “the Russian Kafka,” he’s translated into European languages, published, studied, and—most importantly—read with great enthusiasm. Krzhizhanovsky’s novellas are a bright example of intellectual prose: they’re as elegant as chess studies, yet in each of them you can feel the pulse of time and the outlines of paths to eternal mysteries of existence.