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That Third Guy
A Comedy from the Stalinist 1930s with Essays on Theater
Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Translated and edited by Alisa Ballard Lin, Foreword by Caryl Emerson
A mix of philosophy and farce in the vein of Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
This collection of theater writings by the Russian modernist Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky brings his powerful, wildly imaginative vision of theater to an English-language audience for the first time. The centerpiece is his play That Third Guy (1937), a farce written at the onset of the Stalinist Terror and never performed. Its plot builds on Alexander Pushkin's poem "Cleopatra," while parodying the themes of Eros and empire in the Cleopatra tales of two writers Krzhizhanovsky adored: Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw. In a chilling echo of the Soviet 1930s, Rome here is a police state, and the Third Guy (a very bad poet) finds himself in its dragnet. As he scrambles to escape his fate, the end of the Roman Republic thunders on offstage.
The volume also features selections from Krzhizhanovsky's compelling and idiosyncratic essays on Shakespeare, Pushkin, Shaw, and the philosophy of theater. Professionally, he worked with director Alexander Tairov at the Moscow Kamerny Theater, and his original philosophy of the stage bears comparison with the great theater theorists of the twentieth century. In these writings, he reflects on the space and time of the theater, the resonance of language onstage, the experience of the actor, and the relationship between the theater and the everyday. Commentary by Alisa Ballard Lin and Caryl Emerson contextualizes Krzhizhanovsky's writings.
 Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (1887–1950) was a Russian writer of Polish heritage who lived in Moscow. His short stories, largely unacceptable to Soviet censorship, began to appear in 1989, and many are now available in English.
Alisa Ballard Lin is an assistant professor in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures at The Ohio State University.
Praise
“Wittily intertextual. . . . Its wryly irreverent concern with the silencing of the artist by imperial authorities would never have been approved by the censors.”
—Times Literary Supplement
“This beautifully crafted volume is so compelling that one hopes a monograph on Krzhizhanovsky’s theatrical life will follow.”
—The Russian Review
“This charming volume makes a notable contribution to the growing English-language literature by and about Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, one of the rediscovered gems of twentieth-century Russian literature.”
—Thomas Seifrid, author of The Word Made Self
Of Related Interest
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The Uncensored Boris Godunov
The Case for Pushkin's Original Comedy with Annotated Text and Translation
Chester Dunning with Caryl Emerson, Sergei Fomichev, Lidiia Lotman, and Antony Wood |
Foreplay
Hannah Arendt, the Two Adornos, and Walter Benjamin
Carl Djerassi |
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Larger images
August 2018
LC: 2017046467 PG
328 pp. 6 x 9
10 b/w illus.
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