Unwitting Street

“These philosophical, melancholic, darkly funny tales merit a place beside those of Kafka, Borges, and Calvino.” —Kirkus, starred review

“This collection … mixes playful and morose tones in stories of the kooky and the condemned … clever and satirical in his descriptions, Krzhizhanovsky is at his best when finding levity in grave revelations.” —Publishers Weekly

“Krzhizhanovsky found his definitive English voice in the Moscow-based translator Joanne Turnbull… . Turnbull has co-created Krzhizhanovsky’s best phantasmagorical modernist fictions in paperbacks published by New York Review Books.” —Caryl Emerson

Sigizmund Krzizhanovsky (1887-1950) studied law and classical philology at Kiev University. In his philosophical and satirical stories with fantastical plots, he ignored official injunctions to portray the new Soviet state in a positive light, and three separate efforts to print different collections were quashed by the censors, a fourth by World War II. Two of his short story collections, Autobiography of a Corpse and Memories of the Future, and his novels The Letter Killers Club and The Return of Munchhausen are also available as NYRB Classics. Joanne Turnbull’s translations from Russian in collaboration with Nikolai Formozov include Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s The Letter Killers Club (winner of the AATSEEL Prize for Best Literary Translation into English) and Autobiography of a Corpse (winner of the PEN Translation Prize).

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