Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky: Ethics and Poetics

Abstract

A new language is what deep changes in culture are looking for both in the future and in the past, where fruitless, barren retrospect is not less dangerous than barren intuition. Missing a yesterday’s genius we risk to turn a deaf ear to the genius being born today. Sigizmund Dominikovitch Krzgizdanovsky was a soviet time philosopher, writer, poet and art theorist but not soviet in spirit or style. His language still waits in the wings for thousands of philologists, literary critics and historians of philosophy to come and study his heritage. The article sees Krzgizganovsky’s creativity as poetic, primary, or philosophic-poetic. The author’s word as a poetic and ethic act, as the only possible viable form of existence of the thinker, is considered as a kind of myth-making, relevant both for a small number of the writer’s contemporaries and a growing number of modern readers of the beginning of the 21st century.