The Letter Killers Club

“A Russian writer whose morbidly satiric imagination forms the wild (missing) link between the futuristic dream tales of Edgar Allan Poe and the postwar scientific nightmares of Stanislaw Lem . . . an impish master of the fatalistically fantastic.” —Bill Marx, The World

Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (1887–1950) was born in Kiev and moved to Moscow in 1922, where he became known in literary circles thanks to the readings he gave of his modernist texts. Krzhizhanovsky’s creative vision ran counter to the dictates of Soviet censorship. Not until four decades after his death could his works begin to be published. His works in English translation include Countries That Don’t Exist: Selected Nonfiction (Columbia, 2022).