The Legs of Izolda Morgan

by Bruno Jasieński, Soren Gauger (Translator), Guy Torr (Translator)

Considered the enfant terrible of the Polish avant-garde, lauded by critics and scorned by the public, Bruno Jasieński suddenly declared the end of Futurism in Poland soon after his short “novel” The Legs of Izolda Morgan, appeared in 1923. An extraordinary example of Futurist prose, this fantastic tale explores how the machine has supplanted the human while the human body is disaggregated into fetishized constituent parts. As one of the central texts in Jasieński's oeuvre, it is situated between two seminal manifestoes and the important essay “Polish Futurism,” which signaled the movement’s end in the context of its confused reception in Poland, the towering influence of Mayakovsky, and what set it apart from the futurisms in Italy and Russia. The condensed story “Keys” shows Jasieński’s turn toward satire to lambaste the pervasive hypocrisies of powerful institutions, and this is further developed in the two longer grotesques from his time in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Translated into English from the Russian for the first time, these two late stories expose the nefarious absurdity of racial persecution and warmongering and the lengths social and political structures will go to underpin them.

Genres: Polish Literature, Poland, Short Stories, Literature, Satire

163 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1923

About the author

Bruno Jasienski, born Wiktor Zysman, was a Polish poet and leader of the Polish futurist movement, executed during the Polish operation of the NKVD in the Soviet Union.
He was born to a Polish family of Zysmans with Jewish and German roots, but from his mother's side he was a descendant of nobility. His father, Jakub Zysman, was a local doctor and a social worker, member of the local intelligentsia.
In 1929 Jasienski moved to the USSR and settled in Leningrad, where he accepted Soviet citizenship, and was quickly promoted by the authorities. In 1932 he transferred from the Polish division of the French Communist Party to the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) and soon became a prominent member of that organization. He migrated to Moscow. During that period he served at various posts in the branch unions of communist writers. He was also granted honorary citizenship of Tajikistan.

By the mid-1930s he became a strong supporter of Genrikh Yagoda's political purges within the writers' community. Jasieński is often mentioned as the initiator of the persecution of Isaak Babel. However, in 1937 the tide turned and Yagoda himself was arrested and Jasieński lost a powerful protector. Soon afterwards Jasieński's former wife, Klara, was also arrested, sentenced to death and executed. Jasieński was expelled from the party, and soon afterwards he was also caught up in the purges. Sentenced to 15 years in a labour camp, he was executed on 17 September 1938 in Butyrka prison in Moscow.
His second wife Anna was arrested the following year and spent 17 years in various Russian concentration camps. Jasieński's underage son was stripped of his identity and sent to an orphanage, but managed to escape during World War II. After the war he went on to become a prominent figure in Russia's criminal underworld. He eventually discovered his true heritage, and under a Polish name became a member of various illegal organizations in opposition to the Communist authorities. He was killed in the 1970s.
Bruno Jasieński remains one of the most notable Polish futurists and as such is still acclaimed by members of various modernist art groups as a patron. A yearly futurist Brunonalia festival held in Klimontów, Poland, is named after him.

Reviews

[Bettie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bettie's Books

[tymbiasz · Rating 3 out of 5]

brat chyba nie lubi tramwajów

[Bbrown · Rating 4 out of 5]

You can tell from the essays in this collection that Bruno Jasienski was fucking unbearable. He was either incredibly far up his own ass or pretending to be to play up his persona as a bleeding-edge artist.* Either way, I'd rather gnaw my own arm off than be stuck hearing him ramble about his philosophy of Polish futurism.

But, for better or worse, you can be utterly intolerable and still be a hell of a writer. Jasienski's I Burn Paris was the best book I read last year, and the short stories in this collection prove that it wasn't a fluke. The titular story The Legs of Izolda Morgan is delightfully weird, depicting a man going complexly crazy in a world that also seems to be going a bit mad. It's my favorite work in the collection. Keys is a nice little dark fairy tale, skillfully constructed. The Nose is hardly the most original story, but a bigot being transformed into what he hates and getting his just deserts is a recipe that satisfies. The Chief Culprit is an interesting early depiction of PTSD, and the main character's fate is eerily similar to Jasienski's own demise only a couple of years later.

This collection contains a solid quartet of stories, showing that Jasienski was a master of his craft even at a ridiculously young age. While the essays are terrible, you can just skip them, so I'm not going to lower my rating of the collection because of their inclusion. You should be aware, however, that subtracting the essays means this book has less than 110 pages of substance, in case that impacts your estimation of the volume's value. I'll always take quality over quantity, so for me this collection is a 3.5/5, rounding up on the strength of The Legs of Izolda Morgan and Keys.

*I'm betting on the former, considering that Jasienski's epigraph for The Legs of Izolda Morgan quotes Dostoevsky and Jasienski's own poetry. The guy was putting himself on the same level as Dostoevsky when he was only 22 years old; you have to be unbelievably full of yourself to do something like that.

[Ala · Rating 3 out of 5]

W 1923r. we Lwowie przewidziano zagładę AI nad ludzkością
(nostradamusie zlituj się, ja nie chcę znaaa-aać tych twoich daaaaat)

,,Wkrótce wszystko dookoła nas zastąpią maszyny. Będziemy się poruszali wśród maszyn. Każdy nasz ruch czynimy zależnym od maszyny. Oddajemy broń. [...] Wy bez maszyny żyć już nie potraficie. Przodkowie wasi może by jeszcze potrafili. Wy już nie. Bronić się nie można. Trzeba czekać.''

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book offers a survey of Bruno Jasieński's writing career, starting with his heady days of artistic revolt in the Polish Futurist movement, continuing through his declaration of said movement's end, and on into his time in Russia before WWII. It begins with two Futurist manifestos, which read as what one would expect from such writing: bold and bombastic. And yet, as Jasieński writes, a manifesto is merely 'a threshold to be crossed'. He goes on:

To be sure, the end of every movement is spelled by its manifesto. The process is the exact reverse of what the public supposes. It scarcely matters if, sometimes for many years after announcing its faith, a given group behaves as though it is fulfilling the declared mission. This is a common delusion. Once a movement has been captured in a statement it is a dead movement...

He goes on to talk about how the movement is diffused into its participants and each progresses on an individual path, carrying the movement's spirit forward. Not to say that he is dissing manifestoes: for, after all, 'he who has never had a manifesto, who has never rejected anything, has nothing to say in life'.

Jasieński then delineates the separate strains of Futurism: Italian, Russian, and Polish. The Italians eroticized machines as humanity's ideal; the Russians saw the machine merely as humanity's product and servant; and finally, the Polish presented perhaps the most elegant vision: our relationship to the machine as 'the relationship of the body to a new organ'. Jasieński's perception that we had become forever joined to machines, and that to remove one from the other would be to cripple us, would prove to be rather prescient. In order for art to make this concept known, Jasienski believed it must construct 'new bodies on its own on the basis of mechanical laws: economy, purpose, dynamics'.

What I found most interesting was the parallels Jasieński draws between Futurism and the Renaissance:

The Renaissance first taught man to see the beauty of his own body. It elevated the human body from 'matter'— a sheath for the immaterial 'spirit' — to a coordinate organ.

Ever since, in man's endless struggle for survival, he has nurtured and manufactured countless organs, which have smothered the world like a polyp's tentacles.

Polish Futurism taught contemporary man to see the beauty of his own enhanced body in the object forms of civilization. It cured him of the fetishism that had plagued contemporary Futurist thought.

As for Jasieński's fiction, I found it to be a mixed bag. First there is the short novel 'The Legs of Izolda Morgan' which he describes as 'the history of Futurism' in novel form. His essay on Polish Futurism sets this piece nicely in context and the story kept my interest, but it was nothing extraordinary and felt intrusively didactic at times. The story 'Keys' is Jasienski's critique of the Catholic Church, which certainly was risky at the time, but now doesn't seem particularly noteworthy. 'The Nose', written in 1936 and taking its cue from Gogol, is a pretty clever attack on Nazi eugenics, although I thought it kind of fell apart toward the end. Finally, 'The Chief Culprit' is a fairly straightforward confrontation of the desperation and futility facing the average citizen unwillingly called up to serve during wartime, in this case repeatedly, and then later mistakenly accused of fomenting anti-war sentiment. These latter two works were written in Russian, whereas the previous selections were written in Polish and not all translated by the same person, which does lend itself to a bit of unevenness.

While I appreciate that the publishers were trying to provide both a survey of Jasieński's writing and an introduction to Polish Futurism, I don't feel like I came away with an entirely cohesive picture of Jasieński and his work. The collection spans 15 years of his life, and so it's natural that his philosophy and aesthetics would shift and evolve during this time. But the relative sparseness of what is presented here belies what I imagine to have been an even more nuanced literary figure. I found the strengths here to be in his writings on Futurism, and I plan to next read his novel I Burn Paris, in an effort to gain a fuller perspective on his fiction.

[Alicja · Rating 3 out of 5]

od kiedy przeczytałam "Mańfest..." wiedziałam, że Jasieński nie był normalny XD
dosłownie "główny" bohater jest zakochany w odciętych nogach swojej narzeczonej, ale w niej już niekoniecznie, a no i maszyny go absolutnie przerażają.

[paulzzzzz · Rating 3 out of 5]

"...Wkrótce wszystko dookoła nas zastąpią maszyny. Będziemy się poruszali wśród maszyn. [...] Zdajemy się zupełnie w ręce obcego, wrogiego nam żywiołu."

typ bardzo nie lubi tramwajow. mysle, ze teraz to wgl temat na topie, bardziej pod wzgledem ai niz samych maszyn sprzed 100 lat ale nie zmienia to faktu, ze ciekawe. powialo troche tedem kaczynskim. widze co brat kladzie na stol ale nie wiem czy zgadzam sie w 100% . ale widze. obserwuje. interesujaca szybka lektura, bedzie o czym gadac na zajeciach

[elektrospiro · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Kiedy czternaście par zdenerwowanych rąk gołych i urękawiczonych wyciągnęło wreszcie z pod przedniego pomostu tramwaju Nr. 18 okrwawione ciało Izoldy Morgan z okropnymi, wlokącymi się na taśmach kilku ścięgien, obciętymi poniżej pachwiny nogami, wszyscy ci ludzie doznali nagle nieprzyjemnego uczucia popełnionego nietaktu."

Antymechanistyczna groteska twórcy polskiego futuryzmu, która ukazała się zaledwie 2 lata po jego manifeście futurystycznym, który właśnie opiewał maszynę, ruch i szybkość. (...)

Cała opinia na stronie: https://nakanapie.pl/recenzje/biodra-...

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

Four splendid stories, plus 3 deranged Futurist manifestos. Best story is probably 'The Nose', which remixes Gogol's absurdist story as the nightmare of a Nazi racial profiling "scientist" whose nose suddenly turns into the caricature of a Jewish schnozz.

[Hadrian · Rating 4 out of 5]

8/10

[Mikołaj · Rating 4 out of 5]

przedziwne, niesamowite

[Maja · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5/5⭐

[Maja · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5/5⭐

[Cody · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Nose & Chief Culprit really carried it for me

[julia · Rating 4 out of 5]

😮‍💨🚬

[Vittoria · Rating 4 out of 5]

weird typa shit i like

[Jayden gonzalez · Rating 4 out of 5]

i appreciate the handy bookmark