Background
Krzhizhanovsky was born in Kiev to a Polish family on 11 February 1887.
Krzhizhanovsky was born in Kiev to a Polish family on 11 February 1887.
Krzhizhanovsky was active among Moscow"s literati in the 1920s, while working for Alexander Tairov"s Chamber Theater. In 1929 he penned a screenplay for Yakov Protazanov"s acclaimed film The Feast of Street Jorgen, yet his name did not appear in the credits. He also wrote the screenplay for the 1935 stop-motion animated feature film The New Gulliver, but, again, was left uncredited.
One of his last novellas, "Dymchaty bokal" (The smoky beaker, 1939), tells the story of a goblet miraculously never running out of wine, sometimes interpreted as a wry allusion to the author"s fondness for alcohol.
He died in Moscow, but his burial place is not known. In 1976, scholar Vadim Perelmuter discovered Krzhizhanovsky"s archive and in 1989 published one of his short stories.
As the five volumes of his collected works followed, Krzhizhanovsky emerged from obscurity as a remarkable Soviet writer, who polished his prose to the verge of poetry. His short parables, written with an abundance of poetic detail and wonderful fertility of invention – though occasionally bordering on the whimsical – are sometimes compared to the ficciones of Jorge Luis Borges.
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Quadraturin (1926), the best known of such phantasmagoric stories, is a Kafkaesque novella in which allegory meets existentialism.
