The letter killers club
By: Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky ; introduction by Caryl Emerson ; translated from the Russian by Joanne Turnbull with Nikolai Formozov
Contributors: Turnbull, Joanne
Series: New York Review Books classics
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2011
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 123
ISBN-13: 9781590174500
Subjects: Translations into English; FICTION / Literary
Work titles: Klub ubiĭt︠s︡ bukv
Description: "Writers are professional killers of conceptions. The logic of the Letter Killers Club, a secret society of "conceivers" who commit nothing to paper on principle, is strict and uncompromising. Every Saturday they meet in a fire-lit room hung with blank black bookshelves to present their "pure and unsubstantiated" conceptions: a rehearsal of Hamlet hijacked by an actor who vanishes with the role; the double life of a medieval merry cleric derailed by a costume change; a machine-run world that imprisons men's minds while conscripting their bodies; a dead Roman scribe stranded this side of the River Acheron. The overarching scene of this short novel is set in Soviet Moscow, in the ominous 1920s. Known only by pseudonym, like Chesterton's anarchists in fin-de-sic̈le London, the Letter Killers are as mistrustful of one another as they are mesmerized by their despotic president. Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky is at his philosophical and fantastical best in this extended meditation on madness and silence, the word and the soul unbound"--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 113-123).

Translated from the Russian.