Countries That Don’t Exist: Selected Nonfiction

The nonfiction work of Russian writer Krzhizhanovsky (1887–1950) gets the spotlight in this thought-provoking collection. Krzhizhanovsky wrote partially during the period of Stalinist totalitarianism and was uniformly denied publication, so much so that much of his writing wasn’t unearthed until the 1980s. “For Krzhizhanovsky,” the volume’s editors write in the introduction, “a man who devoted his life to writing unread pages, literature is at once a bridge into the lives of others and the precipice that reinforces the divisions between us.” Krzhizhanovsky was particularly fascinated by the divisiveness of language. In “Idea and Word,” he writes that “the slightest attempt to convert any meaningful idea (of one’s own—this is the main thing) into words leads inevitably to the thesis: for pure thought, all human languages are foreigners.” Partly because of this disjunction between thought and language, Krzhizhanovsky believed, some artists’ ideas are never fully realized, and he wonders in “A History of Unwritten Literature” whether “graveyards for ideas” should be established “alongside ordinary graveyards.” The title essay, meanwhile, is a literary “grand tour of imaginary lands.” With a playful blend of logic and fantasy, Krzhizhanovsky’s works defamiliarize everyday concepts. Readers interested in the crossover between art and philosophy will be rewarded. (Feb.)