Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky--try saying that after you've had a couple. Actually, the man himself (1887-1950), a Ukrainian-Polish contributor to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia and author of ingenious plays and short stories, was well-known for regular consumption of more than a couple, and you couldn't blame him. He was a great writer utterly neglected in his day, known, he said, only "for being unknown." Hardly any of his work was published in his lifetime, thanks to bad timing re: the tides of change and repression in the Soviet Communist Party. When the stories were posthumously published, they were later compared to the work of Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortazar. "One of his last novellas, Dymchaty bokal ('The smoky beaker,' 1939), tells the story of a goblet miraculously never running out of wine, sometimes interpreted as a wry allusion to the author's fondness for alcohol." Wry, indeed. His outstanding talents were stymied at every turn; this being the age of Stalin, Krzhizhanovsky of course had no choice but to stay. No emigration, unless to Siberia. He died in Moscow at 63, three years before the dictator. Not until 1989 did his work begin appearing, upon which people greeted a long-forgotten genius. I dunno. Sometimes life's ironies are just too much. At least we can now read Krzhizhanovsky, which will be a greater pleasure for most of us than trying to pronounce his name.