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JUNE 23,
2011 Memories of the Future
by
Sigizmund
Krzhizhanovsky, translated from the Russian by Joanne Turnbull, with
Nikolai
Formozov Sư Phụ Gạch Bỏ Hồi ức của Tương
lai Bài này quá
tuyệt, nhưng cũng khó nhá quá. Hoá ra là, như Walter Benjamin viết, cuộc cách mạng thực sự là một “làm mới”. Moscow là 1 thành phố “Tự Mày Làm Lấy Mày”. Ðâu đâu, bất cứ chỗ nào, ông quan sát, cũng đều có cái gọi là sự thích thú, về điều mà người Nga gọi là remont: một đam mê thay đổi, thêm thắt, chấm phá, sửa sang… làm mới hoài hoài: “Mỗi tư tưởng, mỗi ngày, mỗi đời nằm tê hê ra như nằm trên một cái bàn ở phòng thí nghiệm”. Ông viết thêm: “Xứ sở được động viên ngày và đêm”
JUNE 23,
2011 Adam
Thirlwell Memories of the Future by Sigizmund
Krzhizhanovsky, translated from the Russian by Joanne Turnbull, with
Nikolai
Formozov
New York
Review Books, 228 pp., $15.95 (paper) Russian
State Archive of Literature and Art 1. In December
1926 the German critic Walter Benjamin arrived in Moscow. Almost ten
years
after the Communist revolution, he was curious to see what revolution
now
looked like. It turned out, wrote Benjamin, that revolution was really
renovation. Moscow was the city of Do-It-Yourself. Everywhere, he
observed,
there was this gusto for what the Russians called remont:
an endlessly renewable, delighted, fussy passion for
fixing, touching up, reupholstering, redecorating. “Each thought, each
day,
each life lies here as on a laboratory table.” He added: “The country
is
mobilized day and night.”1 Another
inhabitant of this city was Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, a Ukrainian
writer with a
comically unpronounceable Polish name. Benjamin, of course, was a
tourist.
Krzhizhanovsky—whose occluded literary career coincided with the era of
Stalinist repression—was not. Krzhizhanovsky also noted the mania in
Moscow—”that gigantic flattened human hive”—for amateur renovation: A milliner
and a watchmaker had divided the tinplate sign above a mended shop
window. At a
crossroad, in a rusty cauldron under caracoling smoke, a new sidewalk
was
boiling. A street photographer was fastening a backdrop of
blue-and-white
mountains to a tired acacia. But this is
a momentary idyll of activity. Ultimately, Krzhizhanovsky’s Moscow was
a city
of relentless nullification. Revolutionary remont busied itself with
the
renovation of sidewalks; it also busied itself, famously, with the
engineering
of souls. In his great
book Main Currents of Marxism, Leszek Kołakowski describes the nature
of the
mobilizing politics of the USSR in the 1920s: The
totalitarian character of the regime—i.e. the progressive destruction
of civil
society and absorption of all forms of social life by the
state—increased
almost without interruption between 1924 and 1953….2 One aspect
of this absorption was the meticulous censorship of literature, which
was a
uniquely organized invention—a malicious care for the interior lives of
writers. No difference was allowed between the cultural and the
ideological.
Trotsky first sketched out the Communist principles of literature in a
note on
June 30, 1922, describing how “an attentive, cautious, and gentle
attitude is
essential toward those works and authors who, although they carry an
abyss of
all kinds of prejudices inside them, are clearly developing in a
revolutionary
direction.”3 Four days later, Stalin jotted a quick confirmation:
“Joining Soviet-inclined
poets into a single core and doing everything possible to support them
in their
struggle—this is our task.”4 In the same year, the main censorship
bureau,
known as Glavlit, was set up. The censor was envisaged as a benevolent
ideological coach. This benevolence manifested itself, as Krhizhanovsky
notes,
in a stamp imposed on manuscripts, a “narrow rectangle with the ten
letters
inside: DO NOT PRINT.” Literature
in Moscow in the 1920s and 1930s was a delirium of close reading. The
state and
the writer were in febrile communication. Consider, for instance, the
downfall
of the great novelist Andrei Platonov.5 In 1931, after reading one of
his
stories in the magazine Red Virgin Soil, Stalin scribbled angry
criticism in
the margins. A letter was drafted to the magazine’s editor, and
Platonov’s
career was over. Yet there is grandeur in Platonov’s response, as
recorded by
Shivarov, an officer from the 4th Section of the Secret Political
Department:
“I don’t care what others say. I wrote that story for one person (for
Comrade
Stalin), he read the tale and in essence has given me his reply. The
rest does
not interest me.”6 The downfall
of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, however, was slower, less theatrical, more
anonymous. Krzhizhanovsky is almost unknown to readers in English.
Until
recently, he was almost unknown to readers of Russian, too. That, of
course, is
the point. The Communist Revolution specialized in erasure: in
Krzhizhanovsky’s
phrase, Moscow was a city inhabited by the “crossed-out.” The
experience of
Moscow for Krzhizhanovsky was one of absolute isolation. The city was a
hive of
constriction. It was almost impossible to read his censored
contemporaries,
like Bulgakov or Platonov. It was equally difficult to read his
international
contemporaries, like Kafka or Joyce. (The first Russian translation of
Ulysses
appeared in 1989. Kafka only appeared in Russian after Krzhizhanovsky’s
death
in 1950.) But then, censored and rejected himself, it was almost
impossible to
read Krzhizhanovsky. 2. Sigizmund Dominikovich
Krzhizhanovsky was born in Kiev to a Polish-speaking family on February
11,
1887. This date places him in the midst of the modernist generation. He
was a
little younger than Kafka and Joyce, a little older than Bulgakov and
Pasternak. Another generation of Russian novelists—Yuri Olesha, Andrei
Platonov, and Vladimir Nabokov—would be born twelve years later, in
1899. At the time
of the abortive 1905 revolution, Krzhizhanovsky was eighteen. At
university in
Kiev, he studied law. From the evidence of his erudite stories, he
seems to
have studied everything else as well. In 1912, aged twenty-five, he
traveled
through Europe, visiting Paris, Heidelberg, Milan. After World War I
and the
1917 Revolution, he returned to Kiev, where he taught at the Musical
Institute
and the Theatrical Conservatory. In 1922, aged thirty-five, he left
Kiev for
Moscow, where he lived for the rest of his life. He wrote articles and
gave
lectures, in particular at Alexander Tairov’s Drama Studio. Tairov
was—with
Vsevolod Meyerhold and Constantine Stanislavsky—one of the most
important
theater directors in Moscow. From 1922 Krzhizhanovsky worked as a
consultant to
Tairov’s Chamber Theater. In 1924 a
collection of Krzhizhanovsky’s stories, Fairy Tales for Wunderkinder,
was accepted
for publication, but the publishing house went bankrupt before the book
came
out. And so begins the sad history of Krzhizhanovsky’s impossible
publications.
In 1928 and 1929 he wrote more stories, a screenplay, and a play. None
of these
appeared in public. On April 23, 1932, the Central Committee of the
Communist
Party created the Union of Soviet Writers, with Maxim Gorky appointed
the first
chairman. In the same year, Gorky stated that stories like
Krzhizhanovsky’s
“would hardly find a publisher,” and if they did, and managed to
“dislocate a
few young minds,” he added, would this really be desirable? In effect,
his opinion made Krzhizhanovsky definitively unpublishable. The next
year,
Krzhizhanovsky’s Academia edition of Shakespeare was canceled. In 1934,
another
play, The Priest and the Lieutenant, went unstaged. A collection of
stories
that was provisionally accepted by the State Publishing House was
stopped by
the censors. That year, the First Congress of the Writers’ Union set
the terms
of socialist realism. Gorky’s speech, “Soviet Literature,” contained
this
helpful sketch of future subject matter: Life, as
asserted by socialist realism, is deeds, creativeness, the aim of which
is the
uninterrupted development of the priceless individual faculties of man,
with a
view to his victory over the forces of nature, for the sake of his
health and
longevity, for the supreme joy of living on an earth which, in
conformity with
the steady growth of his requirements, he wishes to mould throughout
into a
beautiful dwelling place for mankind, united into a single family.7 The secret
police report on the congress—August 31, 1934—contains this record of
Isaak
Babel’s suicidally bored, accurate back-row scorn: “All this is being
done
artificially, under the stick, the congress feels dead, like a tsarist
parade,
and naturally no one abroad believes this parade.”8 In 1937 the
centenary of Alexander Pushkin’s death was to be celebrated in the
Soviet Union
by a jubilee. Preparations had begun in 1934. By July of that year, the
first
planning board of the jubilee was purged. An All-Union Pushkin
Commission was
set up—directly supervised, naturally, by Stalin. Among the
contemplated
celebrations was a performance at Tairov’s Chamber Theater of an
adaptation of
Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, with incidental music by the new Soviet star,
the
composer Sergey Prokofiev. Krzhizhanovsky was to write the stage
adaptation.9 A
first read-through occurred in early spring 1936. That summer,
the censors set to work, creating what Prokofiev called a “new plan.”
In all,
Krzhizhanovsky produced four versions of the script. By the end of the
year,
the production had been censured into silence for its “creative
errors.” (The
commission, in the end, preferred to celebrate Pushkin’s oeuvre through
the safer
media of plaques, postage stamps, and the renaming of streets,
factories, and
collective farms.) A year
later, another play written by Krzhizhanovsky, That Man, the Third,
went
unstaged. In 1941—Krzhizhanovsky was then fifty-four—he had a
collection of
stories scheduled for publication: The Unbitten Elbow. And then World
War II
intervened, preventing it from appearing. He went on to plan a final
collection
of stories: What Men Die By, its title a counterpart to Tolstoy’s
parable What
Men Live By. He had long since become an alcoholic—prompted, he said,
by “a
sober relationship to reality.” This seems reasonable. In May 1950 he
suffered
a stroke and lost the use of speech. He died at the end of the year. His
works—almost all of them unpublished—were stored by his lifelong
companion,
Anna Bovshek, in her apartment, in her clothes chest, under some
brocade. The
afterlife of Krzhizhanovsky has a similarly uneven rhythm. In 1939 he
had,
despite his restricted publication history, been elected to the
Writers’ Union.
This meant that he was eligible for posthumous “immortalization.” In
1953
Stalin died, and three years later Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” to the
20th
Party Congress instituted a revisionist anti-Stalinist thaw. In
1957—the same
year as the publication of Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago—a commission was set
up to
examine Krzhizhanovsky’s literary legacy. It lasted two years and was
then disbanded,
having drafted a publishing plan that was never implemented. In 1976,
Vadim Perelmuter, a poet, literary historian, and essayist, discovered
Krzhizhanovsky’s archive. He had to wait until 1989 and the full thaw
of
perestroika before he could publish one of Krzhizhanovsky’s stories.
Between
2001 and 2010, Perelmuter finally edited a handsome five-volume edition
of his
writings. In 2006,
Joanne Turnbull published the first translations into English of
Krzhizhanovsky’s work, a selection of seven stories.10 The earliest of
these
dated from 1922, the last from 1939. The remaining five were written
between
1925 and 1927. Now, with this new collection, Memories of the Future,
she has
reprinted two of these stories—”Quadraturin” and “The Bookmark”—and
added five
more. Krzhizhanovsky
has been lucky in his translator: Turnbull’s translations patiently
invent
equivalents to his wordplay—”a metaphysics that had cast its ‘meta’
through the
gloom into the brume”—and his prose’s playful precision—”stone angels
with their
penguin-like wings grazing the earth.” But the sample of his works
available to
the English-speaking reader is still limited. The newly translated
stories were
all written by Krzhizhanovsky between 1927 and 1930. His corpus in
English
therefore now comprises twelve stories. Ten of them date from a short
five-year
period in his career—beginning in 1925, when he was thirty-eight. That, then,
is one way of describing the story of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky: through
the
limited history of his publications. It details one way a state absorbs
all
forms of social life. But the
state’s absorption of literature overwhelmed more than the mechanics of
publication. In Moscow, in the regulated cube of one’s room, prose
itself
became subject to the state’s encroaching care. The fizzy nervous
energy of
Krzhizhanovsky’s writing is caused by the minute negotiations he made
in it
with the state’s rhetoric. He wanted to perform imaginary experiments
with the
nature of time and space. Outside, in the streets, the Communist state
was busy
performing such experiments for real. In response, Krzhizhanovsky’s
prose has a
recklessly unstable tone in which a delighted examination of impossible
worlds,
or of mutated versions of Moscow, can slip into ferocious political
sarcasm.
The reader is left unnerved, exhilarated, and melancholic, a confusion
that is
one proof, I think, of Krzhizhanovsky’s startling talent. 3. Sutulin—the
hero of Krzhizhanovsky’s 1926 story “Quadraturin”—lives in a cramped
room of
about eighty-six square feet. He receives a visit from a salesman who
is
offering samples of a new product called Quadraturin. Once applied to a
room’s
walls, says the salesman, that room’s size will be radically increased.
It
seems, thinks cramped Sutulin, at least worth trying. He applies the
new
product, goes to sleep, and wakes up to discover that he can no longer
reach
his bedside table:
Tretyakov
Gallery, Moscow El
Lissitzky: Lenin Tribune, 1920. Illustration © 2011 Artists Rights
Society
(ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Everything
was the same: the skimpy, threadbare rug that had trailed after the
table
somewhere up ahead of him, and the photographs, and the stool, and the
yellow
patterns on the wallpaper. But they were all strangely spread out
inside the
expanded room cube. That
morning, he goes out to the office—and returns, aghast, to discover
that the
Quadraturin has continued to work throughout the day. “The entire room,
distended and monstrously misshapen, was beginning to frighten and
torment
him.” Meticulously, with the method of drab fantasy invented by Gogol,
Krzhizhanovsky continues his nightmare with sad detachment. Sutulin
goes to bed
but—in the “proliferating darkness”—”an unpleasant sense of
mooringlessness
interfered with his sleep.” The next morning, Sutulin is startled by
the visit
of the Remeasuring Commission, whose remit was to ensure that no one
lived in a
room that exceeded the regulation ninety-seven square feet. To prevent
them
from seeing his newly exorbitant room, Sutulin smashes his light
switch. In the
darkness the commission reluctantly retreats. Frightened,
that night Sutulin simply decides to run away from the catastrophe. He
tries to
gather his things. In the dark vast room, he lights a match: “light
crept in
yellow radiuses through the black air.” He manages to reach the middle
of the
room before his matches run out. He is lost in the darkness, in the
vastness of
his miniature room. And so, as often at the end of Krzhizhanovsky’s
stories,
the characters and the reader are left in a place of unexpected and
irrevocable
dislocation: In their
sleep and in their fear, the occupants of the quadratures adjacent to
citizen
Sutulin’s eighty-six square feet couldn’t make head or tail of the
timbre and
intonation of the cry that woke them in the middle of the night and
compelled
them to rush to the threshold of the Sutulin cell: for a man who is
lost and
dying in the wilderness to cry out is both futile and belated: but if
even
so—against all sense—he does cry out, then, most likely, thus. This is the
plot of “Quadraturin.” Its mechanics, however, are common to all
Krzhizhanovsky’s fictions—an accretion of impossible particulars. The
mechanics
derive from a coherent set of philosophical preoccupations. His prose
is a
method for investigating how much unreality reality might bear. His
philosophy is something like this. David Hume once ventured that a
dream is
distinguished from reality simply by the greater “vivacity” of the
impressions
we receive from reality. Reality is a phenomenon of pure surface, a
consistent
series of sense impressions. In the logic of Krzhizhanovsky’s stories,
such
materialism means that reality is therefore always fragile. In
“Autobiography
of a Corpse,” a bespectacled narrator states: Sometimes,
when I wipe my slightly dusty lenses with a piece of chamois, I have an
odd
feeling: what if along with the specks of dust that have settled on
their
glassy concavities I should wipe away all of space? Now you see it—now
you
don’t: like a sheen.11 Krzhizhanovsky’s
sentences are precise observations of this sheen’s fluidity, always
poised on
the cusp of a metaphor. In “Red Snow,” a man pushes a door open: “His
reflection, slippery on the slippery glass, stood aside at the push of
his
palm….” The more
reality becomes a matter of pure appearance, the more it is therefore
permeable
to dreams. If vivacity is the only criterion of reality, then a new
reality can
be created if the dream is strong enough. At this point,
Krzhizhanovsky’s philosophy
of perception becomes a philosophy of politics. In his great
story “The Branch Line,” a man falls asleep on a train and dreams that
he has
ended up in a city where dreams are produced. In this dream city, he
eavesdrops
on a lecture. The lecturer quotes Pascal: “‘Reality,’ he asserted, ‘is
constant, whereas dreams are flimsy and variable….’” That, says the
lecturer,
was Pascal’s view. But, he continues, reality
since Pascal’s time has lost much of its constancy and invariability,
events of
recent years are rocking it, the way the waves do a boat; nearly every
day the
morning papers give waking up a new reality, whereas dreams… Haven’t we
managed
to unify dreams? Haven’t we hoodwinked humanity with that sweet
million-brain
dream of brotherhood, a united dream about unity? Flags the color of
poppy
petals flutter above the crowds. In this
passage, a philosophical experiment mutates into a courageously direct
satire
of Communist utopia. Krzhizhanovsky
was fascinated by how a person’s—or revolution’s—idea of reality was
always
porously hospitable to fantasy. In another story, “The Thirteenth
Category of
Reason,” a narrator admiringly explains that those who are “out of
their heads,
evicted, so to speak, from all twelve Kantian categories of reason,
must
naturally seek refuge in a thirteenth category, a sort of logical
lean-to
slouched against objective obligatory thinking.” Krzhizhanovsky’s
characters
are often to be found in this lean-to: like Don Quixote, they are
devoted to
the unreal. But his stories also demonstrate the latent danger of
Quixote’s
apparently charming mania: such idealism can be deadly. In “The
Bookmark,”
written in 1927, a character summarizes an unpublishable article—”In
Defense of
Rosinante”: History, I
wrote, had divided people into two classes: those who are on top (in
the
saddle) and those who are underneath (under the saddle): the Don
Quixotes and
the Rosinantes. The Don Quixotes sally forth on their fantastically
marvelous
and distant quests, straight to the idea, the ideal and the
Zukunftstaat; all
eyes, beginning with Cervantes’s own, are on them and on them alone. No
one
cares about the winded and mercilessly lashed Rosinante…. Don Quixote
and Rosinante, in Krzhizhanovsky’s fictions, are aspects of one
another:
utopians create a lashed underclass, and this underclass, in turn,
responds
with dreams of its own creation. This isn’t a
surprising logic, given Krzhizhanovsky’s milieu. In the
incomprehensible
present of Moscow, Krzhizhanovsky was surrounded by a rhetoric of
futuristic
hope. Moscow—the city of remont! In 1922, when Krzhizhanovsky moved
from Kiev
and Trotsky jotted his scheme for breeding Communist writers, the
Bolshevik
economist Evgeni Preobrazhensky defended the Soviet New Economic Policy
(NEP)
in a book that took the form of an imaginary series of lectures given
in 1970
“on the history of the great Russian revolution.”12 In 1970,
apparently, it was
obvious that everything had turned out perfectly. Just as the artist El
Lissitzky lectured to his slow public: A sign is
designed, much later it is given its name, and later still its meaning
becomes
clear. So we do not understand the signs, the shapes, which the artist
created,
because man’s brain has not yet reached the corresponding stage of
development.13 In this
setting, Krzhizhanovsky’s stories—which meticulously imagine, for
example, what
it might mean for time to be abolished, as in the novella “Memories of
the
Future”—acquire a sardonic empirical precision. They test the
revolutionary
rhetoric in the trap of his style. Lissitzky had called his paintings
“expaintings,” while Malevich had called his own works “non-paintings.”
This
was meant to be exuberantly new. Dryly, irrefutably, Krzhizhanovsky
describes
the creations of the “crossed-out.” But the
apparent satire of utopian politics, although sometimes deliberately
and
garishly exploited by Krzhizhanovsky himself, is also in part a
retrospective
effect of history. Really, Moscow was momentary. In the absence of any
revolution,
Krzhizhanovsky’s style would still have been revolutionary. After all,
his
experiments possess a deep consistency. In his notes to his 1936
adaptation of
Eugene Onegin, Krzhizhanovsky emphasized the need to preserve the
“scenic cube”
of the proscenium stage.14 The word “cube” is important. It relates his
work in
theater to his fictions, so many of which are trapped in the “room
cube” of a
Moscow apartment. The cube is the central unit of his style. By taking
the cube
as the primary, given form, he investigates what can be done with the
elastic
limitations of reality. Krzhizhanovsky
once praised Alexander Tairov’s Chamber Theater for its repertory that
was
“almost always a play about a play, which meant that it became a
theater of the
highest theatricality, or more precisely—theater raised to the
‘theater’ degree
(TT).”15 His admiration for this reflexiveness is explained more
precisely in
his short 1923 text “Philosopheme on the Theatre.”16 In it, he
describes his
theory that reality is in fact a hierarchy: “Bytiye, byt’, bi, 0,”
which can be
roughly translated, without his diminishing wordplay, as “Being, life,
as if,
0.” Bytiye is pure immanence: it is the ground of Being itself. Byt’ is
everyday life: and this life, states Krzhizhanovsky, is make-believe.
For a man
in everyday life believes in the reality of his wife, his job, his
room: but
these are just contingent, not permanent. So byt’ is the “make-believe,
not
wanting to be make-believe.”17 The
insistent italics are Krzhizhanovsky’s. And since everyday life doesn’t
want to
be exposed as make-believe, it therefore fears theater—since theater,
precisely
through its precise imitation of it, exposes the imaginary nature of
everyday
life. True theater, therefore, argues Krzhizhanovsky, the realm of the
“as if,”
will extend this reflexiveness one stage further, continuing to play
with the
diminishing levels of reality. This
unreality, in the end, is the lesson of Krzhizhanovsky’s work. His
stories move
through minute renovations of perspective—like, say, this lovely
sidestep: For a minute
the story stopped. Wasteland and kitchen gardens stretched all about
us. Along
a distant embankment, shavings of white locomotive smoke curled up into
the air
in elongated rings. But then,
this pattern of occlusion structured his own history. And so the new
selection
from his work leaves the ambivalent reader astonished, admiring, and
unsatisfied. Krzhizhanovsky still remains, with this small selection, a
silhouette in literary history. And yet he was prepared for this
precarious
position. He knew that, logically, a fluid reality will be hospitable
to
history’s repression. Or even that nothing exists without deletions. A
record
of one of his seminar series from 1919 in Kiev survives. On Monday,
March 12,
1919, he lectured on “the draft, an analysis of deletions.” Three years
later, this master of the crossed-out moved to Moscow
1 Walter
Benjamin, "Moscow" (1927), reprinted in Selected Writings, Volume 2:
1927–1934 , translated by Rodney Livingstone and others, edited by
Michael W.
Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Belknap Press/Harvard
University
Press, 1999), pp. 28–29. ↩ 2 Leszek
Kołakowski, Main Currents in Marxism , translated from the Polish by
P.S. Falla
(Norton, 2005), p. 794. ↩ 3 Soviet
Culture and Power: A History in Documents, 1917–1953 , edited by
Katerina Clark
and Evgeny Dobrenko, with Andrei Artizov and Oleg Naumov (Yale
University
Press, 2007), pp. 34–35. ↩ 4 Clark and
Dobrenko, Soviet Culture and Power , p. 37. ↩ 5 See Orlando
Figes, " A Great Russian Writer in the Communist Cauldron ," The New
York Review , April 29, 2010. ↩ 6 Vitaly
Shentalinsky, The KGB's Literary Archive (London: Harvill, 1995), p.
211. ↩ 7 A. Zhdanov,
Maxim Gorky, N. Bukharin, K. Radek, A. Stetsky, Problems of Soviet
Literature:
Reports and Speeches at the First Soviet Writers' Congress , edited by
H.G.
Scott (Co-operative Publishing Society of Foreign Workers in the
USSR/International Publishers, 1934), pp. 65–66. ↩ 8 Clark and
Dobrenko, Soviet Culture and Power, p. 169. ↩ 9 An excellent
account of this collaboration, from which the following details are
taken, can
be found in Caryl Emerson, "The Krzhizhanovsky-Prokofiev Collaboration
on
Eugene Onegin, 1936," in Sergey Prokofiev and His World , edited by
Simon
Morrison (Princeton University Press, 2008). ↩ 10 Sigizmund
Krzhizhanovsky, Seven Stories , translated by Joanne Turnbull (Glas,
2006). ↩ 11 Krzhizhanovsky,
Seven Stories , p. 87. ↩ 12 E.A.
Preobrazhensky, From New Economic Policy to Socialism: A Glance into
the Future
of Russia and Europe , translated by Brian Pearce (New Park, 1973), p.
xv. ↩ 13 El
Lissitzky, "New Russian Art: A Lecture," in El Lissitzky: Life,
Letters, Texts , edited by Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers (Thames and Hudson,
1968)
p. 339. ↩ 14 Quoted by
Emerson, "The Krzhizhanovsky-Prokofiev Collaboration on Eugene Onegin,
1936," p. 90. ↩ 15 Quoted by
Emerson, "The Krzhizhanovsky-Prokofiev Collaboration on Eugene Onegin,
1936,"
p. 91. ↩ 16 A summary of
the text is given by Emerson in "The Krzhizhanovsky-Prokofiev
Collaboration on Eugene Onegin, 1936." The text—"Philosophema o
teatre"—appears in the fourth volume of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky,
Sobranie
Sochinenii v pyati tomakh , edited by Vadim Perelmuter (St. Petersburg:
Symposium, 2006). ↩ 17 "Philosophema
o teatre," p. 54. ↩
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