Autobiography of a Corpse

An NYRB Classics Original Winner of the  2014 PEN Translation Prize Winner of the 2014 Read Russia Prize The stakes are wildly high in Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky"™s fantastic and blackly comic philosophical fables, which abound in nested narratives and wild paradoxes. This new collection of eleven mind-bending and spellbinding tales includes some of Krzhizhanovsky"™s most dazzling conceits: a provincial journalist who moves to Moscow finds his existence consumed by the autobiography of his room"™s previous occupant; the fingers of a celebrated pianist"™s right hand run away to spend a night alone on the city streets; a man"™s lifelong quest to bite his own elbow inspires both a hugely popular circus act and a new refutation of Kant. Ordinary reality cracks open before our eyes in the pages of Autobiography of a Corpse, and the extraordinary spills out.