Melancholy Nightmares Poem by gershon hepner

Continuity provided by our melancholy
nightmares fill our waking moments. Only when
we fall asleep have we the power to forget their folly,
for once we wake the nightmares all resume again.

The gaps in our existence that are less like life than not-
life are the places that we fill with fiction, and
since facts will often not turn out to be precisely what
occurred they are impossible to understand.


Inspired by a review of “Memories of Our Future” by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, translated by Joanne Turnbull with Nikolai Formozov, in the NYT Book Review, October 25,2009 (“Night Visions”) :
IN the 1920s, a disaffected Soviet encyclopedia editor named Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky — a man haunted by Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason” and by Communist realities — began writing a series of philosophical, allegorical, fantastical short stories. Seven of them appear in “Memories of the Future, ” a selection of his fiction that takes its title from the book’s longest entry — the tale of a brusque monomaniac who builds a “timecutter” to eject himself from 1920s Moscow. None of these ¬stories were published in Krzhizhanovsky’s lifetime. This was not because the work had been rejected or because it was, well, a little weird. Krzhizhanovsky, it seems, was too proud, too shy or (more likely) too frightened to show them around — given that he was spinning his dystopic fictions at about the same time that Stalin was collectivizing the Soviet countryside. Still, Krzhizhanovsky read his stories to friends at literary gatherings where they were, apparently, well received. And after his death, in 1950, at the age of 63, his wife deposited his manuscripts at the State Archives in Moscow, except for one novella, “Red Snow, ” an anti-Soviet parable she concealed among her personal effects. In 1976, the scholar Vadim Perelmuter discovered the Krzhizhanovsky archival stash and went on to spend decades compiling and publishing the writer’s work. Now the translators Joanne Turnbull and Nikolai Formozov introduce Krzhizhanovsky’s neologistic whimsy, feverish invention and existential angst to a wider audience. “Very tall, thin, slightly stooped, with a pale nervous face and a pince-nez, ” Krzhizhanovsky the man could be a character in an absurdist tale by Gogol or an allegory by Kafka. But Krzhizhanovsky the author is harder to pin down. As he wrote in the story “Someone Else’s Theme” (in which a writer is accosted by a beggar who trades aphorisms for soup) , “I should describe you as a literary descendant of Leskov, with his apocryphisms, and of Poe, with his love of the fantastic... but all that’s beside the point.”…
For all the phantasmagoria in the works of Kafka and Bulgakov, it’s the undergirding reality that gives them their power. Borges once wrote of Kafka that he “knew he could dream only nightmares and was aware that reality is a continuous sequence of melancholy nightmares.” Kafka may have marked a difference between sleeping and waking, but did Krzhizhanovsky? “I live in such a distant future that my future seems to me past, spent and turned to dust, ” he wrote. The time machine his protagonist boards in “Memories of the Future” allows him to look back on the Soviet 1920s from the distance of the 1950s. He sees “destitute years stained with blood and rage when crops and forests perished while a forest of flags rose in revolt” and concludes that “in a certain present there is more of the future than in the future itself.” In Krzhizhanovsky’s tales, relics of a future past, he transports readers back to the present he renounced, to a life that’s “not-life, a gap in existence” — a place from which he sought refuge in fiction and dreams.


10/25/09