The Letter Killers Club by Sigizmund KrzhizhanovskyMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
You may well think: KRZH-what? This difficult to pronounce name is Polish, our author Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (1887-1950) was born in Kiev to Catholic Polish emigrants and was a writer under the Soviet Union. But the story is even stranger than the name: it is about a club of writers who have condemned the manuscript to death.
The club (or rather, secret society) consists of seven men and they meet every week on Saturday evening in a fire lit room lined with empty black bookshelves. They are writers who do not write things down, they only imagine things, for letters kill ideas. Books are seen as a way of confining ideas, not of spreading them.
So these men – who are observed in the story by an unnamed narrator – are “conceivers” and “imaginers” rather than writers and every week they communicate their new stories orally to each other. They have abandoned letters in an effort to liberate ideas from confinement in ink. Once distinguished literati, they have vowed to give up reading and writing and to keep their own ideas firmly in the realm of pure thought.
They are not known by their own names or even normal pseudonyms – after all, names also convey meaning and that is not allowed. They therefore use nonsense syllables as Zez, Rar and Mov. When one member tells his story, the others immediately offer their suggestions and criticisms and these are instantly implemented at the order of the chairman. On the spot the stories are changed, plot-lines are reworked, different characters are introduced and new themes emphasized. Sometimes, too, everything has to be discarded.
Ideas have to be liberated from books – isn’t that a typical idea that could only occur in the Soviet Union where ideas and books both were subject to heavy censorship? By not writing, by only telling virtual stories, one can also not be censored. The novella is thus a reflection of the stifling world in which Krzhizhanovsky lived. But even non-writing does not seem to offer enough safety: the members of the club are strangely mistrustful of one another, and the chairman is a despot - there is no telling, in the end, just how lethal the purely conceptual may be...
The novella contains five examples which all have to do with the relationship between conceptions versus letters, abstract versus manifest forms, self versus body. In the first story an actor in Hamlet vanishes with his role, thereby obstructing the rehearsal. In another story, based on dystopian science-fiction, a strain of bacteria seals of the mind from the body, which is then manipulated by the State with a radio transmitter. In a third one, a priest whose clothes are stolen looses his office and dignity as without his vestments, nobody believes he is really a priest.
This unusual novella (really a cycle of stories) was written in 1926 but did not make its way into print until after the fall of the Soviet Union, nearly half a century after Krzhizhanovsky’s death in 1950.
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