For readers who appreciate works that blend philosophy, humor, and the surreal, Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky's stories offer a captivating journey into the realm of the extraordinary and the uncanny.

I am very surprised this book was not for me. As soon as I saw it I was sure I was gonna love but unfortunately I ended up extremely bored of all three stories and it was a huge task for me to try to finish them. I was interested at times but it quickly bored me too much and made it extremely hard to concentrate, it really is a shame but I was not invested at all in this.

Krzhizhanovsky's stories defy easy genre labels, and are absolutely riveting. If you enjoy Gulliver, Don Quixote, and Alice in Wonderland then give this one a try.

Received via NetGalley.

My thoughts on this book which is super important in present times; a Ukrainian author who lived and wrote in Russia, I believe. This is a great translation with a foreword on "experimental realism", which as far as I'm aware is a fairly new term. The introduction gives a wonderful amount of information on the author, Krzhizanovsky, which I think is a great idea because it provides further context for the following material. More new stuff especially from lesser-known authors should do this!
After providing further context the introducer suggests that the stories are responses to various philosophies and philosophers, particularly Immanuel Kant. For those who enjoy those concepts parsed out in fiction, this is for you!

OTHER THOUGHTS:
Read the footnotes! They do kind of make the whole thing feel like a textbook though.

First story: reminds me of Kafka. Some foreknowledge of absurd literature will help contextualize the first part until the action gets going. Great temporal pacing considering the protagonist basically becomes Stuart Little. And then a being 1/100th the size of Stuart Little. Also some interesting ruminations on fidelity/infidelity, labor, etc.

Second story: far shorter than the first but a much denser and less interactive philosophical rumination. It's sort of like, personifying time, if time were a vignette that took a hallucinogen. Not totally sure of the Sage's role but I liked this short story's allusions to the maintaining of an oral history.

Third story: a bit imbalanced in the collection as it's over half the length of the whole volume. i didn't read this one through as thoroughly but it's really a remarkable translation. The prose (English) is quite scientific at times but easily processed even at its most absurd. I enjoy this one as an exploration of academia and struggling to innovate in oversaturated fields.
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Overall definitely check this out if you can access a copy; it's a heady read, but an important literary perspective to delve into!

As someone who reads Russian literature, both in the original Russian, and translated works, I was excited to read Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky's Stravaging "Strange"! All three short stories were captivating, and I enjoyed the quite surreal atmosephere these works had. It felt very 'dreamlike' and definitely strange at times, but in the best way. Though all three stories were interesting, Material for a Life of Gorgis Katafalaki (1933) was my favorite! I really enjoyed the optimistic and light-hearted personality that Gorgis exhibited as we followed him on his journey. This really reminded me of a classical picaresque novel, and I would be happy to read more of Krzhizhanovsky's works in the future, perhaps even in the original Russian! Thank you very much to both Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky and NetGalley for the ARC!

This book was different from any books I have read in the past two years at least. Humorous, eery, plain weird at time, I found it thoroughly enjoyable.

As it is a collection of three short stories, I am not going to summarize the plot, just the main devices and themes. The first story, which gives the title to the collection, is the story of a mage who is given a set of vials which shrink him to the size of a grain of dust, and who goes on a series of adventures in his neighbour’s apartment. It was not my favourite (I didn’t particularly like the protagonist), but I really liked the sense of impending doom and the bits of folklore sprinkled all around it. The second story was extremely short, and depicted a world falling into chaos due to a philosopher’s musings. So weird. The third story followed the life of a man who travels around Europe. This was my favourite story of the lot, focused on small and hilarious comedies of error, mostly based on language mishaps.

If I had to find the winning feature of this book, however, I would say it was the fourth part, which consisted of some snippets and extracts from the author’s notebooks. They were so lovely! I am legitimately sad that some of these never made it into full fledged stories. Which is where I see also the potential for some great classroom applications: you could take one of these prompt, and have your students do some creative writing, maybe also trying to use the same style of the author, who made some oblique references to the Russian Revolution and other historical events!

Thank you Netgalley for letting me read and review this book. "Stravaging Strange details the darkly comic adventures of an apprentice magus: lovesick, he imbibes a magic tincture to reduce himself to the size of a dust mote, the better to observe the young lady in question. He stumbles across a talkative king of hearts, a gallant flea, a coven of vindictive house imps, and his romantic rival along the way to a cinematic d�nouement. "Catastrophe" wryly parodies Kant's philosophy: An old sage decides to extract the essence from all things and beings in a ruthless attempt to understand reality--and chaos ensues. This book also includes excerpts from Krzhizhanovsky's notebooks--aphoristic glimpses of his worldview, moods, humor, and writing methods--and reminiscences of Krzhizhanovsky by his lifelong companion, Anna Bovshek, beginning with their first meeting in Kiev in 1920 and ending with his death in Moscow in 1950."

This book reminded me some of Alice in Wonderland, and was a fun, dark read. I liked following the characters and learning more about this world. The writing style is interesting, but a little confusing. That is part of the fun though I think.

“Pack up your thoughts and be ready at a moment’s notice to move into a new worldview.”
–Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

My observations bordered on the fantastic. 
 
It seemed absurd yet logical when I began to note similarities between Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, a Soviet writer of  fantastic short stories, and Kelly Barnhill, an American writer of adult fantasy, science fiction, and children’s books.

These two disparate writers, the former a Russian author whose work was not published in his lifetime, the latter a popular, prize-winning Minnesotan author, have more in common than you’d think:  both are are obsessed with metamorphosis.  

Krzhizhanovsky (1887–1950) is a new writer to me. I used to dislike Soviet fiction, but having exhausted the 19th-century Russian classics I have reluctantly moved forward into Stalinist times. Fortunately, I am fascinated by the title novella of "Stravaging 'Strange,'” a new collection of Krzhizhanovsky’s novellas, stories, and notebooks, translated by Joanne Turnbull and published by Columbia University Press.  


Inspired by Swift’s "Gulliver’s Travels," Krzhizhanovsky entrances us with "Stravaging 'Strange,'” a tale of a magus apprentice’s laborious seventy-foot journey – the longest trip he ever took – after he drinks a potion that shrinks him to the size of a speck. 

The micro-man spends days crossing the floor of an apartment and climbing the wall to the window ledge.  In order to reach the  apartment upstairs where the professor keeps the phial with the antidote, he must wait days for the ivy to grow up to the window above. But it’s not just the phial he wants:  he hopes to seduce the professor’s young wife.

Once upstairs, he takes refuge at one point in the young wife’s watch. Alas, the watch does not prove to be a sanctuary.

He writes,


"A close study of the dial’s fauna led me to conclude that the creatures flustering under the locket glass were time bacilli. Time bacilli, as I soon became convinced, multiplied with every jolt of the hour, minute, and even second hand. The tiny nimble Seconds jostled on the second hand like sparrows on the branch of a hazelnut tree. On the minute hand’s long black perch, their stingers tucked under them, sat the Minutes; while on the sluggish hour hand, their jointed, tapeworm-like bodies wrapped round its black steel arabesques, the Hours swayed sleepily."

The magus apprentice’s adventures are both comic and disturbing, as are the decidedly odd events in the other two stories in the collection. 
                          

Kelly Barnhill, a lighter, more straightforward writer, says that she was inspired by Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony against Brett Kavanaugh to write her first adult novel, When Women Were Dragons.   Barnhill creates an alternate reality where raging, underemployed, unappreciated women leave their homes and metamorphose into dragons in order to be free.  The largest such “dragoning” happens in 1955, at the time of the McCarthy hearings.  Naturally, the government hushes up the incidents and redacts all records of dragons from the newspapers and scientific journals.  


The narrator, Alex Green, is the daughter of a brilliant mathematician, now a housewife.  The Greens’ family is hastily rearranged after Aunt Marla, a mechanic and a former pilot, metamorphoses into a dragon and flies away, leaving Alex’s mother to raise her daughter, Beatrice.  Without the help of a magically shrewd, brilliant, influential librarian, Alex and Beatrice would not have survived .


There is some preaching about tolerating “dragons” – who seem to be mostly LBGTQ+ – but not all women choose to become dragons. 
  

 I am not quite up-to-date on my dragon lore, but Barnhill has written a robust feminist fantasy.

Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky has been one of my favorite writers since I first encountered one of his stories as an undergraduate. I've been delighted by the chance to read more of his work in English translation thanks to this collection (and, from the same publisher, Countries That Don't Exist: Selected Nonfiction). Being already familiar with and fond of the author, I was well-disposed toward this book from the beginning. It did not disappoint.

The stories in this collection are, as I suppose the title suggests, often strange. They're also surprisingly moving, and while it helps to have some understanding of Krzhizhanovsky's context before enjoying his stories (as with every book in the Columbia University Press Russian Library I've read thus far, the introduction does an admirable job of providing a lot of this context, and the endnotes are also there to help) I think they're enjoyable even if you don't catch all of his references. I can't pretend to catch them all, despite a decent familiarity with Russian literature and some Polish--Krzhizhanovsky's references are wide-ranging, but they don't feel pedantic.

Personally, I particularly enjoyed the last two segments of the book: excerpts from some of his notebooks and looseleaf notes, and the afterword of excerpts of Anna Bovshek's "Through the Eyes of a Friend (Material for a Life of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky). Together, they provide a glimpse of Krzhizhanovsky the man as well as Krzhizhanovsky the author.

I don't think this book was for me. Couldn't really engage with the writing style but I think anyone who enjoys books that don't follow the usual narrative style will like this book.

Like all Russian literature, this is so touching and immersive. I found myself eating up sentimental thoughts of the characters, and you would feel it in your heart to be moved by how heart-wrenching and so true they are.

I will always be thankful for Netgalley and Columbia Press University for approving my request for this eARC!

My thanks to both NetGalley and the publisher Columbia University Press for an advance copy of this new collection of stories by this nearly lost Russian author.

The more one investigates the lives and works by writers that are from different cultures from one's one the more one learns that not only do marvelous stories and tales await, but there is a lot of weird stuff out there. Writing that seems both of their time, and yet of a period and full of images, ideas, questions without answers and plots that sometimes become lost or forgotten. Yet these books still have a power to make one go hmm, or I don't get it but I think I like it, and I want to know more. Some of these books were written during the worst times in the past century, and yet they still have a feeling of hope, and more importantly freedom. Stravaging “Strange” by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, translated by Joanne Turnbull with Nikolai Formozov is a collection of three stories not published during the author's lifetime because of both their message, their oddness, and yet are full of both whimsey and fantasy.

The book begins with the eponymous story Stravaging "Strange" which is also the strongest and longest. An apprentice to a mage takes a drink of a magic potion that makes him as small as a speck of dust. As he explores his surroundings he takes an interest in the much younger wife of his master, enters the body of his rival and defeats him from inside, and ends the book in part of the inner workings of a watch. While the solution to his problem is printed inside the bottle he sipped from. The second is shorter, and just as different, featuring a man with a plan to learn all the knowledge of the world, but is betrayed by the books around him. After the third story, one that covers many cities and places, their are some bits from the author's notebooks, biographical sketches and more saved by his companion over their thirty year relationship.

An odd book, one in witch a familiarity with both Russian history and literature would probably be helpful, but a book filled with a lot of wow's, or that's odd moments, that make the reader keep going. Being translated I am not sure what the style of the original was like, but I like the way this book read, and the feeling of how the story was revealed. And I enjoyed the oddness, the time it takes for a person the size of a speck of dust would take to climb a crack in a wall. Or how books can erase their words and meaning. Again some of this can be a little much, and some of the story gets a little lost, but I enjoyed them, all, and actually enjoyed the introduction and collection near the end quite a bit.

Recommended for fans of odd stories and writing, or for people who enjoy Russian authors. Though honestly one wouldn't really know the author as Russian, that feeling of magical realism makes the books more of a time than a place, but I still enjoyed this quite a bit,

For a reader, there is nothing better than discovering a new, great writer. I hadn't heard about Sigizmund  Krzhizhanovsky (1887-1950) until I got a short book, "Stravanging Strange," which consists of three stories, his notes, and excerpts from his wife, Anna Bovshek's memoir. It was the perfect material to ignite my interest in this unique writer. Reading his stories reminded me of a great movie, "The Saragossa Manuscript," which, according to Kristin Jones of The Wall Street Journal, "interweaves the rational with the supernatural."

Krzhizhanovsky thought in images. The first two stories are a magical yet logical description of travels similar to Gulliver's journey but on a smaller scale. In the first story, after drinking a potion, the protagonist is reduced to the size of a "dust mote." As such, he watches his beloved in her apartment, where even the shortest distance transforms into a week-long journey. The second transformation is even more radical – this time, our hero enters the bloodstream of his rival, and there with help from his new friend Null and other equally small cells, becomes a mini David who defeats Goliath. The third story is perhaps the most realistic but also the most philosophical: it talks about Katafalaki, a man living in London, a careful observer with the eyes of a wondering child, whose project is to walk every one of London street according to the carefully hatched up plan.

The language of the stories is beautiful and unique. Apart from the already mentioned "The Saragossa Manuscript," it reminded me of some great English stories with a Kafkaesque twist and the addition of haunting longing. I read that Krzhizhanovsky spent most of his life in Moscow, giving lectures about literature and theater, and writing. He did most of his traveling through his imagination - which is the best way to travel.

*I received an ARC from Netgalley in exchance for an honest review*

After studying Russian language and literature at university, I came to the conclusion that when you read a book written by a Russian author you either love it or you. I was lucky with The Master and Margarita and Forever Flowing, a bit less lucky with Stravaging "Strange".

I usually like weird books. And I know that "weird" doesn't really help defining what I really mean by that. Let's just say that I enjoy reading things that don't always follow logic but rather go beyond it and despite they still somehow make sense. After all, that's why I love Alice in Wonderland so much.

And in a certain way the first story of this book kinda reminded me of Alice in Wonderland. If the main character were a young man whose actions are led my love for someone else's woman and jealousy.

I was initially intrigued by the writing style as I perceived it as different from typical prose, but it soon became too much to handle. It was mentally draining, and it ultimately made me drag this book on for several months.
As expected from a Russian author, there are many references to encyclopedic knowledge of different areas. Notes are added, of course, but especially if you're not reading the physical copy, you'll be forced to go back and forth to understand what the author is talking about. Due to this my reading experience was almost fragmented and not smooth as I wished.

I feel like I would have probably enjoyed this book more (I doubt I would have loved it, but at least appreciated it more) if it had been read and explained during a Russian culture course. I'm sure there's much more meaning to what I just read, but I couldn't interpret it properly because of a lack of knowledge.

This is not an easy book to review. It is a collection of three short works and some excerpts from the author’s notebooks. This is Modernist literature, in the spirit of Dada and Surrealism. The stories are very fantastic, but not in any way the average reader is familiar with. It isn’t Tolkien, but more a blend of Alice in Wonderland with Franz Kafka. This creates fascinating if a bit hard to follow stories that you shouldn’t read while involved in other things. You should give some time to focus just on these stories. It will pay off. The title story is the most accessible to most readers. “Stravaging” means to wander aimlessly. The story does this a little but does have some purpose in the main character trying to get together with the woman he is attracted to. To go on this journey, he drinks a potion that shrinks him, and that’s when things get Strange, taking him though an epic journey through her room, inside of a rival’s body, and finally into the workings of a watch. None of these are described with scientific accuracy, but are turned into fantasy worlds for the author’s imagination.
This book is a translation from the Russian. The translators did an amazing job. I don’t read Russian so I don’t know how accurate the translation is, nor do I care. The English here is brilliantly written to the level of poetry - even though it is prose.
An amazing book. I read a NetGalley copy, but pre-ordered my hardcover copy before I was finished. I will definitely seek out more from Krzhizhanovsky.

Well this was definitely strange! And that’s not a bad thing at all.
I thought I was well versed in the weird genre, but this book showed me that I can still be weirded out.
I can see this not being everyone, and it’s a bit difficult to stay engaged, Buy when you stick with it and heed the detailed descriptions of the characters and their every move snd environment, it just adds to the strangeness.
It did take me a bit to become invested in this but it was worth it after I gave it my full attention.

This book consists all in all of three fictional and absurd stories of the Russian author Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, who was unfortunately unknown during his time.
I will admit that this is not my normal cup of tea and that it took some time for me to get immersed into the book but after a while I really enjoyed the beautiful absurdity of it all and got into the writing style! All three stories were interesting in a new way for me and I was able to enjoy them all (even tough Stravaging Strange was my favourite). However, at the beginning of each story I was often confused and did not fully understand what was going on but decided to go with the flow, which payed off in the end.
I’ve seen this book describes as “Alice in wonderland for adults” before and I think this fits my feelings (especially while reading the first story).

Stravaging "Strange" is a collection of three short stories by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, translated by Joanne Turnbull. It made for an interesting read, but sadly I have to say it didn't quite live of to the expectations I had going in. Most of the reviews I read about this book before diving in claimed it to be an incredibly immersive and whimsical read, but I found it mostly a little tedious. Sure, there were some great lines and beautiful writing, but mostly the stories just seemed to be meandering around without any rhyme or reason. Then again, maybe this book just wasn't for me.

This book, admittedly, was strange. But strange books are right up my alley. This collection of stories muddled my brain but in a unique, surreal way. never has a reading experience been odder, but enjoyable at the same time. The plots were weird, and incomprehensible at times, but all the stories were brilliant showcases of absurdism.

Stravaging “Strange”

[Blurb goes here]

Let me start by copy/pasting a quote from the Soviet era author: "I’m not on good terms with the present day, but posterity loves me." Maybe if you came across these words in the 1920s, you would either think the man to be full of himself, or you would readily ignore him. These words are an echo from the past that prove themselves to be right on the mark. Krzhizhanovsky is a superb author.

This collection of stories dwell on the fantastic. The first one, "Stravaging (to roam, to wander) Strange", asks the question: what if a potion were to make you as small as a dust mote? The apprentice mage that ingest the liquid, meets with all sort of characters, some a danger to himself, some telling their tale, some intent on helping him: house imps whispering secrets to the house's inhabitants. The King of Hearts from a deck of cards, who lost his kingdom and former three dimensional shape. Time basili, when traveling through the inner parts of a watch while mulling over a "Time Vaccine". It is through this adventure that the author deals with subjects such as infatuation, love, infidelity and loss.

While, at times, the stories on the book get a bit confusing, all are kin on detailing every aspect surrounding the characters with great precision. Something not to be taken lightly, since it's hard to find in today's myriad of literary works. Also, not something meant to be read in one sitting, as it's meant to be savored.

It's to be noted that this book includes excerpts from the author's notebooks, one such, is a treaty on the study of yawns. The mind of this man is worth exploring through his short tales and musings.

His memories of the time spent with his long life companion, Anna Bovshek, give you glimpses into his psyche, and further insight into this collection.

This is a read to explore, to enjoy. I can recommend it enough.

Thank you for the advanced copy!