The Return of Munchausen (New York Review of Books Classics)

Baron Munchausen’s hold on the European imagination dates back to the late eighteenth century when he first pulled himself (and his horse) out of a swamp by his own upturned pigtail. Inspired by the extravagant yarns of a straight-faced former cavalry officer, Hieronymus von Münchhausen, the best-selling legend quickly eclipsed the real-life baron who helped the Russians fight the Turks. Galloping across continents and centuries, the mythical Munchausen’s Travels went through hundreds of editions of increasing length and luxuriance. Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, the Russian modernist master of the unsettling and the uncanny, also took certain liberties with the mythical baron. In this phantasmagoric roman à clef set in 1920s Berlin, London, and Moscow, Munchausen dauntlessly upholds his old motto “Truth in lies,” while remaining a fierce champion of his own imagination. At the same time, the two-hundred-year-old baron and self-taught philosopher has agreed to return to Russia, Lenin’s Russia, undercover. This reluctant secret agent has come out of retirement to engage with the real world. Baron Munchausen's hold on the European imagination dates back to the late eighteenth century when he first pulled himself (and his horse) out of a swamp by his own upturned pigtail. Inspired by the extravagant yarns of a straight-faced former cavalry officer, Hieronymus von MUnchhausen, the best-selling legend quickly eclipsed the real-life baron who helped the Russians fight the Turks. Galloping across continents and centuries, the mythical Munchausen's Travels went through hundreds of editions of increasing length and luxuriance. Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, the Russian modernist master of the unsettling and the uncanny, also took certain liberties with the mythical baron. In this phantasmagoric roman A clef set in 1920s Berlin, London, and Moscow, Munchausen dauntlessly upholds his old motto "Truth in lies," while remaining a fierce champion of his own imagination. At the same time, the two-hundred-year-old baron and self-taught philosopher has agreed to return to Russia, Lenin's Russia, undercover. This reluctant secret agent has come out of retirement to engage with the real world First inspired in the eighteenth century by the tall tales of the real Baron Hieronymus von Münchausen, the legend of Baron Münchausen—as transmitted and transformed by Rudolf Erich Raspe and Gottfried August Bürger—soon eclipsed the fame of his living counterpart and has captivated the European imagination ever since. An irrepressible cavalier and raconteur, the Baron gallivants through battle (in one episode he climbs aboard an outgoing cannonball only to change his mind halfway and hop onto another one heading in the opposite direction), scoffs at death, and inflates his own stature at every turn. In Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky's update, the Baron returns in the troubled twentieth century, where he will rediscover the place of imagination amid the tenuous peace, universal mourning, and political machinations of the aftermath of World War I. "To me," he claims, "the debates of philosophers, grabbing the truth out of each other's hands, [resemble] a...