Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky's Poetics of Passivity

Abstract

Confusion over the aesthetic quality of strength are pronounced in the Soviet context of underground and dissident fiction. Strength, and more broadly the alternatives to it employed by silenced authors and unpublished texts, is a central problem already in Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s 1926 novel The Letter Killers Club. Krzhizhanovsky’s meditation on literary irrelevance–questions of a censored art’s ability to exert itself in the world, and of an inadequate artist’s ability to realize an idea–braids together in a single fiction two concerns underpinning major theoretical approaches to strength vis à vis weakness: the automatization of production and the inspiration of influence. In The Letter Killers Club’s carefully curated re‐stagings of precursor texts in their intersection with literary economies, Krzhizhanovsky asks us to find the intersection between writing as the manifestation of literary influence (the author moved by the spirit of past culture) and artistic production as the result of automation (the worker moved by a mechanized will), both of which conceive the artwork as emanating from a condition of passivity. The metaphor of inspiration (vdokhnovenie), which suggests the alienated spirit of the divine animating the dumb, passive clay of human material, becomes for Krzhizhanovsky a demonic possession, identified with the frightening potential of a radically different industrial future, which nonetheless underwrites the continuity and independence of cultural tradition.