Countries that Don't Exist by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky Edited by Jacob Emery and Alexander Spektor

 Countries that Don't Exist

by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky Edited by Jacob Emery and Alexander Spektor is a collection of superlative essays. If you are in love for literature, writing, if you are interested in the process of birth of a play, experimentalism, this beautiful book is for you.

Sigizmund describes the Soviet literature as a literature that tries to plumb the dephts of life, to listen to its breathing. The author in the essay Country that Don't Exist portrays the imaginary worlds created in literature by western authors, more than Russian ones: Swift, Cervantes...

Jules Verne stayed at home, tranquil (as did Emilio Salgari, not mentioned by Sigizmund but a good comparison) when invented his imaginative trip around the world: Sigizmund speaks of giants, often defeated by little creatures more sly than not them: although big they have a little brain: Sigizmund was in love for Baron Munchausen a man realistically existed, in fact, who spent time in Russia some time and was known for his favolistic intimate world and the fantastic stories he told to everyone. The comparison with Perogrullo known because he fought with value at the Battle of Pavia in 1521-1526 is evident Perogrullo was known because incredibly honest intellectually: he told always the truth: he didn't have any kind of imagination.

Sigizmund won't miss in another essay to study more closely a writer who started to make the difference: Egard Allan Poe. An interesting writer, someone with a wide dictionary, wrote Sigizmund, although a master in short tales: the one of Poe was an astonishingly writerly technique.

In Love as a Method of Cognition an essay on the description of Love, with a great example: our native Saint Francis of Assisi: the saint decided to love everyone and everything, inglobating every creature on Earth in his Love, calling them brothers and sisters. It's the best love, admits Sigizmund. Loving another person can be more limitative but there is anyway the extension of a love and wellness regarding other people: the same companion, love is blind, is seen only positively: lacks, or characteristics not too beauty are removed by the mind of the lover: our capacity of loving is measured by the way in which we have known and experienced love. Sigizmund writes that "The most insignificant vibration of the soul deposites into consciousness particles of experience, often imperceptible ones, and, accumulating one after the other, they later become visible and comprehensible as a certain truth of the world." An essay is written on George Bernard Shaw: I didn't know this, Shaw was a great estimator of Stalin. The author, takes in consideration the writing of the same Shaw but also his character and tastes: from the musicians he loved a lot, starting from Mozart, to past writers appreciated like Shakespeare, read and reread by Shaw successfully. Lev Tolstoy, differently, reports Sigizmund became always more irritated when reread Shakespeare. 

A book for every writer, reader, passionate. Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky a Russian born in the South, Kiev, was a fine man of letters although his production hasn't known the light entirely when still alive because of some censorship problems.

Highly recommended book.

I thank Columbia University Press for the physical copy of the book.

Anna Maria Polidori