Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky
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Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (30 January 1887, Kiev — 28 December 1950, Moscow) was an ethnically Polish Ukrainian-born Russophone short-story writer who described himself as being "known only for being unknown" and the bulk of whose writings was published posthumously.
Many details of Krzhizhanovsky's life are obscure. Judging from his works, Robert Louis Stevenson, Gilbert Keith Chesterton and Herbert George Wells were major influences on his style. Krzhizhanovsky was active among Moscow's literati in the 1920s, when several of his stories became known through private readings and a couple of them even found their way to print. In 1929, he penned a screenplay for Yakov Protazanov's acclaimed film, The Feast of St Jorgen, yet his name didn't appear in the credits. One of his last novellas, The Smoky Beaker (1939) tells a 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 the place where he was buried is not known.
In 1976 a scholar dropped across Krzhizhanovsky's archive and published one of short stories in 1989. As the five volumes of his complete works followed, Krzhizhanovsky emerged from obscurity as one of the few Soviet writers who attended to the artistic side of his writings, polishing 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 whimsical — are sometimes compared to ficciones of Jorge Luis Borges. Quadraturin (1926), the best known of such phantasmagoric stories, is a Kafkaesque novella in which allegory meets philosophy.
