Stravaging “Strange” is a wonderful collection of two novellas, a short story and notebook excerpts by one of the giants of twentieth-century Russian literature, Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky. Each work deserves its own review. Thus, I'll focus on the title novella, a very, very strange, unforgettable story where the narrator, a chap I'll call Ivan, embarks on an adventure where he's reduced to the size of a speck of dust.

Caryl Emerson is a scholar of Russian literature. As she outlines in her incisive introduction, Krzhizhanovsky had an abiding curiosity of foreign countries and cities, but, alas, living in the oppressive Soviet Union, he was barred from leaving the country. What to do when one has a passion for travel and authors such as Jonathan Swift, H. G. Wells and Jules Verne? Ah, embark on a journey via one's imagination! After all, we can always view our otherwise everyday world from a new, fresh perspective. This is exactly what we're given in Stravaging “Strange”. Here a number of snappy snapshots from this provocative tale:

TOTAL TRANSFORMATION
Honoring his request for travel to different dimensions, Ivan's old teacher hands him a phial containing the necessary solution. Walking back to his flat, Ivan mentally prepares to embark on his stravaging strange adventure where he will say goodbye to his familiar sense of space. Moments after arriving, he drinks every drop. “My body abruptly began to contract and collapse, a burst bubble” and Ivan finds himself the size of a dust mote.

Ivan is in for a series of surprises, beginning with a dramatic change in his vision. “The tincture that had shrunk my six-foot body to the size of a dust mote had also reduced the radius of my vision: my eyes could not longer see as far as Sirius and the North Star, while ordinary street lamps had replaced, as best they could, their constellations.” Such is the way of our all too human mind: we project what we think we will see when we take certain potions (or drugs) but our actual experience turns out to be much different than what we imagined.

LOVE BECKONS
Now that he's invisible to the human eye, where does Ivan wish to journey forth? Why, to the apartment above, the abode of a certain young lady who lives with an old professor. After many days traveling via an assenting vine, Ivan finally alights at her window. But there's a problem: the window is closed shut. “Vexed and angry, I roamed for an entire day along a carefully caulked crack: nowhere was there a breach, or even a gap. I could either: go back, down the wining ivy, or with inexhaustible patience wait for my onward. This time I chose the later.” Patience pays off. The window is finally opened by none other than that certain young lady.

52 PICK-UP
How strange is this Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky tale? Once in the apartment, Ivan encounters the King of Hearts among a deck of cards (echoes of the Russian author's beloved Lewis Carroll) where the King bemoans his plight. “My kingdom and my power were long ago disheartened: our venerable family became a silly suit, and I, who with my ministers once played people, I, now an ordinary card, must allow them, people, to play us, cards.” Oh, Sigizmund, you are such a card! And SK peppers this episode of Ivan's adventure, comrades, with references to a Bolshevik slogan and other political and historic happenings within the not-so-perfect Union Soviet.

TINY FOLKLORE FOLKS
Further along in his odd outing, down on the floor, Ivan comes upon “a regular conclave of ordinary house Imps”. Such irony! I suppose when you are the size of a dust mote, Imps can be both regular and ordinary. Anyway, Ivan listens in as the head Imp calls a meeting of his fellow Imps to order. “According to recent reports, our master has begun to smell a corpse. A sure sign he'll soon be under the sod. So then, what should we do about his widow?” Oh, my, the love of his life is soon to be available for the loving. Ivan's minuscule heart begins to thump a Katyusha.

BLAST OFFS AND LANDINGS
Ivan's outlandish, exorbitant orbit continues and he actually ventures forth on a second stravaging shrinking. You will read about the truly unbelievable. “I began to distinguish strange, utterly transparent creatures streaming past and through me, water through a filter.” And it goes on: time bacilli with stingers, Ivan's feeling of timelessness, Ivan entering the essence of a word, the past and future trading places, Ivan zooming through a human brain, Ivan's developing relationship with his love.

Only one thing is for sure: You definitely should read this Russian tale to find out if and how it all comes together, Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky-style.


Russian author Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, 1887-195019 s Lark BenobiAuthor 1 book2,851

The three novellas in this collection are all deeply disorienting and equally remarkable to read. Cause-and-effect are nearly absent--instead what carries the stories along from sentence to sentence is a sort of internal longing, maybe, ever-present in the narrator--a striving for connection and understanding. It felt a singular voice, reaching out for a connection to another thinking person, while at the same time doubting there was such a connection to be found. The stories felt lonely. That the author of them felt lonely, that is--that the intellect behind the words had thrown off any belief that anyone was listening--and in this resigned state resolved to write whatever the hell he wanted. throwing a message in a bottle out to sea. Translator Joanne Turnbull found the bottle. I had the feeling as I read that Krzhizhanovsky had reached the perfect listener, across time, and through her translation I was also compelled to listen. Her word choices are delightfully archaic and I can't help but think they are the perfect choices to convey to me the sense of the original. The disorientation of the original. Stravaging Strange is an incomparable read in the most literal sense possible and it's a must-read for anyone who values the feeling "i've never read anything this before.'19 s Terese859 25

Oh, dear. This book was something, something Alice in wonderland for adults.
Alice in wonderland, meets Flatland, meets Kafka, meets Gogol,

I almost feel all one needs to know about this author is that in his notes for future works he out down things “briefcase carriers”, “marvelousl adventures inside a manual of logic” and, possibly the saddest thing I’ve ever read, “Yes, I love myself; but it seems my love is unrequited.”

Krzhizhanovsky was a new name to me and he seems to have struggled to get published and find success, which is a shame because this is mind boggling and fantastical stuff, it is inventive yet emotionally resonant, and just takes the strangeness of Gogol’s legacy into a new era.

The first story was probably the best, “Stravaging ‘Strange’” which is in essence the Alice in Wonderland story of drinking something and shrinking in size and wacky adventures ensues. Although in this case it is more horrifying run ins with dust-Imps who whisper in peoples ears, being trapped in claustrophobic spaces, becoming corrupted by your desires, getting lost in a clock having to fight against time bacilli, and finally murder. Some of this stuff was truly nightmare stuff, while highly entertaining at once. Who thinks of stuff this?

“Before my wanderings in watch-face land, I had thought that the concepts of order and time were inseparable: my own experience debunked that fiction invented by metaphysicians and watchmakers. In fact, there was more chaos than order! True, almost every Second, say, having plunged its stinger into a person’s brain, would dart away and slip back under the watch face glass to life out its life in complete idleness and peace. But sometimes time bacilli, having fulfilled their purpose, would refuse to yield to the new swarms come to relieve them; they would continue to to parasitism a person’s brain and thoughts, aggravating old bites with their empty stingers.”

After which the main character stars imagining a vaccine against time.
It is a peculiar story to say the least.
Then there was “Catastrohpe” which was a chaotic little interlude.

And then came a story about Gorgis Katafalaki which was strangely moving and sad, about a man who keeps trying to be as remarkable as he believes himself and his thoughts to be, but flitting from one field to another, trying to make it in a world that’s as unstable as he is.

“Those words stuck in Katafalaki’s mind. He had no intention of becoming lost. People him did not grow on trees. We’re he to lose himself, Gorgis Katafalaki, in the metropolitan maelstrom, where would you find another?”

And I agree, where would you find another dedicated investigator of haustology…

“….a haustologist has to catch yawns hidden behind palms, to hunt for them them under pursed cracks of mouths, to trace the isopropy of haustus in moist bulging eyes or driven inside quivering skin. (…) Here the investigator’s thinking ran into a knotty problem: the statistical tabulation of yawns.”

Basically, one of his fields of study - among others - is the study of yawns. It is as hilarious as it is bizarre, but it also feels an apt commentary of academica as a lot of it does focus on ridiculously specific things that you wouldn’t imagine anyone studying or for what purpose.

All in all, this book was bloody brilliant and a terrifically confusing way to spend a day,
Do you to feel slightly bemused and confused about what you’re reading?
Do you things strange and a bit peculiar, steeped in the harshness of reality?
Well, this might be for you.

I’m convinced that this author will one day be recognized as someone quite brilliant and sadly unrecognized. Posterity does love you, Krzhizhanovsky!

I am so grateful to Columbia University Press and NetGalley for the opportunity to read this ARC, in exchange for a review, I recently discovered CUP’s Russian library series, after surprisingly finding that they had published a modern copy of Avvakum Petrovich, and immediately started collecting these for more money than I care to admit. It is quite an extensive library and they are my Pokémon’s, gotta catch them all! Can’t wait for this to be published so I can add it to my shelf and revisit whatever it was that I just read… and maybe have some nightmares about my boyfriend drinking funny colored tinctures and getting small enough to crawl into the skin folds by my cuticles,,, urgh.10 s Kyle C512 25

This is a curious collection of three stories by the Ukrainian-Russian author, Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky. The first "Stravaging 'Strange'" (written in 1924) is an absurd fantasy about a man who takes a potion that can turn him into a microbe-sized miniature of himself. He talks to a king trapped in a paper playing card, fights neurons in the brain of an adulterer, is frozen in time, and discourses with an ancient Roman in faltering Latin. He muses about logic and syllogisms and repeatedly thinks about the nature of time and space but ultimately it is a hapless tale about romance and betrayal. The second story, "Catastrophe" (1919-1922), is a more absurdist cosmological tale about a thinker who ponders the universe but, when he decides to think about his own world, is met with resistance (the books revolt and hide their contents). Finally, the third "Material for a Life of Gorgis Katafalaki" (1933), is a collection of anecdotes about a muddle-brained idiot ("he wears rose-colored glasses that might fall off but not break"), wandering across Europe with just thirty German words and minimal worldliness. He is confused by an encyclopedia of authors and, when he finds the postnominal "Derselbe" repeated throughout, he decides to travel to Berlin to find the prolific author--but accidentally becomes a brief figurehead of the conservative movement. Later he is hoodwinked into marrying a woman under the misapprehension that she is someone else. Finally Time asks for his wisdom teeth to be extracted. Katafalaki wants to be a polymath but he winds up as a vagabond dentist.

Krzhizhanovsky is a bewildering writer. His use of phantasm, buffoon characters and surreal plots is reminiscent of Gogol. His style of illogical whimsy also reminds me a lot of Lewis Carroll as well. But Krzhizhanovsky has a distinctive style of self-lampooning melancholy (I particularly d the line "Of course I love myself, but it's an unrequited love"). There's a comic absurdism. In "Catastrophe" as the narrator describes the revolt of the universe, he lists a variety of inapposite catastrophes ("divided souls, smashed crockery, spilt soup"). He has a gift for aphorism ("The thing I know about Truth is that when we meet she does not bow", these are drawn from his notebooks and collected in the final section of the book). Ultimately, these stories are not simply parables of post-revolution Russia; they are the tragicomic caricatures of a mediocre Socrates never able to understand the world around him. Whereas Bernhard or Hesse or Kraszjnahorkai present itinerant sages tortured by their own genius, Krzhizhanovsky gives bumbling uncomprehending sophists.

Thanks to netgalley for the chance to read this fantastic collection--I only wish the publishers had included more stories.3 s Keith39

Finished an odd mixture of novellas and pessimistic musings, SAVAGING "STRANGE," by an equally odd Russian author, Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (1887-1950), who said of himself, "I am known for being unknown," or as a friend said of him, "all his hard life he was literary nonbeing, honestly working for being." Only a few of his dozens of stories were published in his lifetime, presumably for not being sufficiently ideologically Communist. Krzhizhanovsky loved traveling, key themes of the two main stories, "Savaging 'Strange'" (1924) and "Material Life for a Life of Gorgis Katafalaki." "Savaging" is indeed a strange story of a man who explores the intricacies of love and time in miniature (think a Russian "The Incredible Shrinking Man" film). He drinks a secret potion that reduces him to the size of a dust mote. He manages to kill the man who beguiled his lover by organizing the man's blood cells into socialist work brigades so they would work only 8-hour days. He belatedly realizes that his plan is self-defeating. No doubt Soviet censors suspected the same. In a very funny "Material Life," a gullible Katafaliki (think a Russian Forrest Gump) goes from one venture to another, including being dismissed as a dentist apprentice for suggesting tiny dynamite sticks for removing teeth and walking every street of London. The material for his life ends when he's confronted by two Soviet agents, and he removes himself from public life. Again, it's not surprising Russian censors did not find the story as amusing.
The Great Russian Literature project marches onward. Next up, a literary trip of my own to the 19th century with A JOURNEY FROM ST. PETERSBURG TO MOSCOW (1790) by Aleksandr Radishchev (1749-1802).891-russian-literature krzhizhanovsky-sigizmund-au science-fiction ...more1 Amanda478 8

Krzhizhanovsky's stories defy easy genre labels, and are absolutely riveting. If you enjoy Gulliver, Don Quixote, and Alice in Wonderland then give this one a try.

Received via NetGalley.1 Dan1,312 37

My thanks to both NetGalley and the publisher Columbia University Press for an advance copy of this new collection of stories by this nearly lost Russian author.

The more one investigates the lives and works by writers that are from different cultures from one's one the more one learns that not only do marvelous stories and tales await, but there is a lot of weird stuff out there. Writing that seems both of their time, and yet of a period and full of images, ideas, questions without answers and plots that sometimes become lost or forgotten. Yet these books still have a power to make one go hmm, or I don't get it but I think I it, and I want to know more. Some of these books were written during the worst times in the past century, and yet they still have a feeling of hope, and more importantly freedom. Stravaging “Strange” by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, translated by Joanne Turnbull with Nikolai Formozov is a collection of three stories not published during the author's lifetime because of both their message, their oddness, and yet are full of both whimsey and fantasy.

The book begins with the eponymous story Stravaging "Strange" which is also the strongest and longest. An apprentice to a mage takes a drink of a magic potion that makes him as small as a speck of dust. As he explores his surroundings he takes an interest in the much younger wife of his master, enters the body of his rival and defeats him from inside, and ends the book in part of the inner workings of a watch. While the solution to his problem is printed inside the bottle he sipped from. The second is shorter, and just as different, featuring a man with a plan to learn all the knowledge of the world, but is betrayed by the books around him. After the third story, one that covers many cities and places, their are some bits from the author's notebooks, biographical sketches and more saved by his companion over their thirty year relationship.

An odd book, one in witch a familiarity with both Russian history and literature would probably be helpful, but a book filled with a lot of wow's, or that's odd moments, that make the reader keep going. Being translated I am not sure what the style of the original was , but I the way this book read, and the feeling of how the story was revealed. And I enjoyed the oddness, the time it takes for a person the size of a speck of dust would take to climb a crack in a wall. Or how books can erase their words and meaning. Again some of this can be a little much, and some of the story gets a little lost, but I enjoyed them, all, and actually enjoyed the introduction and collection near the end quite a bit.

Recommended for fans of odd stories and writing, or for people who enjoy Russian authors. Though honestly one wouldn't really know the author as Russian, that feeling of magical realism makes the books more of a time than a place, but I still enjoyed this quite a bit, Catherine Regina41 2

My thoughts on this book which is super important in present times; a Ukrainian author who lived and wrote in Russia, I believe. This is a great translation with a foreword on "experimental realism", which as far as I'm aware is a fairly new term. The introduction gives a wonderful amount of information on the author, Krzhizanovsky, which I think is a great idea because it provides further context for the following material. More new stuff especially from lesser-known authors should do this!
After providing further context the introducer suggests that the stories are responses to various philosophies and philosophers, particularly Immanuel Kant. For those who enjoy those concepts parsed out in fiction, this is for you!

OTHER THOUGHTS:
Read the footnotes! They do kind of make the whole thing feel a textbook though.

First story: reminds me of Kafka. Some foreknowledge of absurd literature will help contextualize the first part until the action gets going. Great temporal pacing considering the protagonist basically becomes Stuart Little. And then a being 1/100th the size of Stuart Little. Also some interesting ruminations on fidelity/infidelity, labor, etc.

Second story: far shorter than the first but a much denser and less interactive philosophical rumination. It's sort of , personifying time, if time were a vignette that took a hallucinogen. Not totally sure of the Sage's role but I d this short story's allusions to the maintaining of an oral history.

Third story: a bit imbalanced in the collection as it's over half the length of the whole volume. i didn't read this one through as thoroughly but it's really a remarkable translation. The prose (English) is quite scientific at times but easily processed even at its most absurd. I enjoy this one as an exploration of academia and struggling to innovate in oversaturated fields.
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Overall definitely check this out if you can access a copy; it's a heady read, but an important literary perspective to delve into! Theediscerning7,441 99

Perhaps I should not have been reading this in an age when Putin takes advantage of "prostodushie" (naive goodheartedness) in his and other countries, but you know, schedules. And the author was from Kiev originally. Not that there's really much of a connection between 2022's current affairs and what could be called such peculiar writing. The first piece is a definitively Russian work of Carrollian frippery, with a man using the "drink me" potion to be near-microscopic, and to talk to playing cards en route to knowing someone he had a crush on. A shorter piece is nearly readable, before another novella-length "travel" work. This was also frivolous, but nicely wacky – the Quizotic hero in the many episodes of his life once takes it upon himself, more or less, to try and learn at the feet of that great scholar "ibid" he keeps seeing mentioned in the best and most learned resources.

Yet again we get subjected to thirty pages or so of aphorisms, story ideas, jottings and so on from the author – this is a new fashion in this series of books, to pad them out with the slightest of ephemera, although some mordant wit here kind of makes it worthwhile ("I'm a foreign tourist in life. It's time I repatriated to nonexistence," indeed). We close with the biographical notes from the woman who would become his wife, which only goes to underline the question as to why we're getting what we're getting, when all of it is available in English from the same translators as this selection. The mind boggles at any suggestion of this being a 'best of'. Still, it may well live with the notice that you'll as not never have read anything else quite this – which comes with its own inbuilt caveat, about how there may well be good reasons for that. But as for the Cervantes-meets-Kafka-meets-lawks-knows-what middle chunk, that's one of the better works I've read in this publisher's Russian library so far. Hanna Gil89 6

For a reader, there is nothing better than discovering a new, great writer. I hadn't heard about Sigizmund  Krzhizhanovsky (1887-1950) until I got a short book, "Stravanging Strange," which consists of three stories, his notes, and excerpts from his wife, Anna Bovshek's memoir. It was the perfect material to ignite my interest in this unique writer. Reading his stories reminded me of a great movie, "The Saragossa Manuscript," which, according to Kristin Jones of Wall Street Journal, "interweaves the rational with the supernatural."

Krzhizhanovsky thought in images. The first two stories are a magical yet logical description of travels similar to Gulliver's journey but on a smaller scale. In the first story, after drinking a potion, the protagonist is reduced to the size of a "dust mote." As such, he watches his beloved in her apartment, where even the shortest distance transforms into a week-long journey. The second transformation is even more radical – this time, our hero enters the bloodstream of his rival, and there with help from his new friend Null and other equally small cells, becomes a mini David who defeats Goliath. The third story is perhaps the most realistic but also the most philosophical: it talks about Katafalaki, a man living in London, a careful observer with the eyes of a wondering child, whose project is to walk every one of London street according to the carefully hatched up plan.

The language of the stories is beautiful and unique. Apart from the already mentioned "The Saragossa Manuscript," it reminded me of some great English stories with a Kafkaesque twist and the addition of haunting longing. I read that Krzhizhanovsky spent most of his life in Moscow, giving lectures about literature and theater, and writing. He did most of his traveling through his imagination - which is the best way to travel. Stefania287 35

*I received an ARC from Netgalley in exchance for an honest review*

After studying Russian language and literature at university, I came to the conclusion that when you read a book written by a Russian author you either love it or you. I was lucky with The Master and Margarita and Forever Flowing, a bit less lucky with Stravaging "Strange".

I usually weird books. And I know that "weird" doesn't really help defining what I really mean by that. Let's just say that I enjoy reading things that don't always follow logic but rather go beyond it and despite they still somehow make sense. After all, that's why I love Alice in Wonderland so much.

And in a certain way the first story of this book kinda reminded me of Alice in Wonderland. If the main character were a young man whose actions are led my love for someone else's woman and jealousy.

I was initially intrigued by the writing style as I perceived it as different from typical prose, but it soon became too much to handle. It was mentally draining, and it ultimately made me drag this book on for several months.
As expected from a Russian author, there are many references to encyclopedic knowledge of different areas. Notes are added, of course, but especially if you're not reading the physical copy, you'll be forced to go back and forth to understand what the author is talking about. Due to this my reading experience was almost fragmented and not smooth as I wished.

I feel I would have probably enjoyed this book more (I doubt I would have loved it, but at least appreciated it more) if it had been read and explained during a Russian culture course. I'm sure there's much more meaning to what I just read, but I couldn't interpret it properly because of a lack of knowledge. Ashley259 29

I received an electronic ARC via NetGalley.

Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky has been one of my favorite writers since I first encountered one of his stories as an undergraduate. I've been delighted by the chance to read more of his work in English translation thanks to this collection (and, from the same publisher, Countries That Don't Exist: Selected Nonfiction). Being already familiar with and fond of the author, I was well-disposed toward this book from the beginning. It did not disappoint.

The stories in this collection are, as I suppose the title suggests, often strange. They're also surprisingly moving, and while it helps to have some understanding of Krzhizhanovsky's context before enjoying his stories (as with every book in the Columbia University Press Russian Library I've read thus far, the introduction does an admirable job of providing a lot of this context, and the endnotes are also there to help) I think they're enjoyable even if you don't catch all of his references. I can't pretend to catch them all, despite a decent familiarity with Russian literature and some Polish--Krzhizhanovsky's references are wide-ranging, but they don't feel pedantic.

Personally, I particularly enjoyed the last two segments of the book: excerpts from some of his notebooks and looseleaf notes, and the afterword of excerpts of Anna Bovshek's "Through the Eyes of a Friend (Material for a Life of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky). Together, they provide a glimpse of Krzhizhanovsky the man as well as Krzhizhanovsky the author.review-books Donna84

Book Review - Stravaging "Strange" by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky; translated Joanne Turnbull with Nikolai Formozov.

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This was an ARC provided by NetGalley.

This book is made up of 3 stories :

Stravaging "Strange" (1924) - This tells the fantastical tale of "miniaturisation, maturation and loss". Our magus takes a tincture which makes him the size of a dust mite. He meets the King of Hearts, house imps, and various creatures within a watch (as you do) - but to me, it is ultimately a tale of love, jealousy, and revenge. There are clear influences from HG Wells Invisible Man and Swifts Gullivers Travels.

Catastrophe (1919-22). The synopsis states that this is a wry parody of Kant's philosophy, and I'll just have to take their word for it as this one went over my head. My knowledge of philosophy is limited to the ancient greats of Plato and Aristotle and I had no idea what was going on
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