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.

"Sensitively translated and with insightful essays by Lin, this publication introduces us to Krzhizhanovsky’s densely argued philosophical reflections on the art of the theatre, including analyses of Shakespeare, Pushkin and Shaw [...] Caryl Emerson adds a fine foreword, as well as a consideration of Krzhizhanovsky’s work on a stage production of Eugene Onegin for the Pushkin Jubilee in 1937." - Julie Curtis, TLS, March 2019

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.