The success and shortcoming os the postuhumous works of SK

Following up on yesterday's post on the Ukrainian writer Sigismund Krzhashanovsky, who wrote avant-garde short stories in the Soviet Union from roughly the 1920s to the 50s but was never published in his lifetime thanks to Soviet censorship and paranoia, I've tried as hard as I can to get engaged w/ his fiction but come away feeling great admiration for his persistence in the face of critical indifference and government hostility and personal danger, but his work, as judged by the first half of the NYRB-published collection Autobiography of a Corpse (as well as previous readings in his Munchausen collection, which I also couldn't finish reading) seems always to begin with a great premise that he never quite lifts off the ground. As noted yesterday, he's clear in the same mode as Borges and Calvino - two of the great writers of imaginative fiction, who found international success years after SK was writing in obscurity; he's also a descendant of Gogol and Kafka - though it's not clear (to me) how much he'd read of their works, as well as of Dostoyevsky (his narrators, with their outsider status and hostility to their society and culture, always recall Notes from Underground) and a forerunner of Becket, whom I think he would have loved to read, with a narrator strangely questioning his own existence. That's heady company, but that said, the stories just continue to disappoint me: Where Gogol could take the premise of a nose taking on a life of its own and bring it to hilarious conclusion, where Kafka could take the premise of a man starving himself in public as an act of performance art and make the story sorrowful and frightening, SK seems to go from his premise - a man sees an image of himself in his girlfriend's pupils and follow the image right into her eyeball (!) - to a series of philosophical investigations that are are (for me) to follow and don't really move or amuse me in the ways I'd hoped or anticipated (an exception is the brief story DNP, which stands for Do Not Publish and in which this frustrated writer opens his heart). It's great that his work has been lifted from obscurity, and he's worth a look - it may be that I'm missing something and expecting his work to be something it isn't; probably the right way to read these pieces is as philosophical "investigations," a la Wittgenstein, rather than as speculative fiction - but he doesn't bring, at least to me, the same kind of pleasure and enlightenment and sense of awe from the best of his European and Latin American (and maybe American, if you add in George Saunders) contemporaries and successors.