Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky was born in the wrong place at the wrong time. Had his Polish ancestor not been exiled to Siberia, he might have become a figure in European literature; living in Soviet Russia he was, in his own words, ‘known for being unknown’. His fiction and plays, written in the 1920s–1930s, remained mostly unpublished — unpublishable — till 1989. That he can now be read in English is thanks to the translator Joanne Turnbull, who in collaboration with Nikolai Formozov has brought him out of obscurity.
What Krzhizhanovsky lacks in popularity he makes up for in the fame of his hero, Baron Munchausen, an incorrigible fantasist created by the 18th-century author Rudolf Erich Raspe. In this modernist phantasmagoria Krzhizhanovsky transfers Munchausen to the 1920s. After a Berlin introduction, in which the adventurer shows the 1785 edition of his tales to a poet visitor, and a London sojourn, Munchausen is sent as a reporter to Russia, where his motto ‘Truth in lies’ acquires new overtones.
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