Read Anywhere and on Any Device!

Subscribe to Read | $0.00

Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!

Create Free Account

That Third Guy: A Comedy from the Stalinist 1930s with Essays on Theater

0/5 ( ratings)

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 , 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 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.

Pages: 328

Format: Hardcover

Release: August 07, 2018

ISBN 13: 9780299317102

That Third Guy: A Comedy from the Stalinist 1930s with Essays on Theater

0/5 ( ratings)

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 , 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 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.

Pages: 328

Format: Hardcover

Release: August 07, 2018

ISBN 13: 9780299317102

More books from Caryl Emerson

The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays

4.1/5 ( ratings)

Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics

4.3/5 ( ratings)

Speech Genres and Other Late Essays

4.1/5 ( ratings)

Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics

4.2/5 ( ratings)

The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

3.6/5 ( ratings)

The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin

3.5/5 ( ratings)

Rethinking Bakhtin: Extensions and Challenges

3.5/5 ( ratings)

Bakhtin in Contexts: Across the Disciplines

3.5/5 ( ratings)

Problems of Idealism: Essays in Russian Social Philosophy

Modest Musorgsky and Boris Godunov: Myths, Realities, Reconsiderations

Chekhov's Letters: Biography, Context, Poetics

Rate this book!

Write a review?