Sigizmund Krzhizhanovskii, the witty, prolific, and long-overlooked Soviet author, worked with Aleksandr Tairov's experimental Kamernyi Theater in Moscow for almost three decades. From the early 1920s until 1948, while accumulating a vast repertoire of unpublished prose fiction, Krzhizhanovskii lectured on the philosophy and practice of drama for the Kamernyi's acting school. He also produced ten dramatic texts, including adaptations of G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday (a popular hit for the Kamernyi in 1924); a Falstaff mash-up based on three different Shakespeare plays; a version of Evgenii Onegin commissioned for the 1937 Aleksandr Pushkin jubilee; and, among a handful of never-performed original drama, a four-act play based upon the shadowy figure of “tot tretii,” or “that third guy,” the Egyptian queen's anonymous third suitor in Pushkin's poem “Cleopatra.” In Krzhizhanovskii's 1937 play, That Third Guy: A Comedy, the nameless protagonist is a penniless Roman poetaster whose obsession with posthumous fame leads him to bid for a night with the beautiful queen. But, reluctant to die for the privilege, he escapes the morning after, thus challenging received notions of honor, identity, and authorship as he flees.

Alisa Ballard Lin's critical edition includes the first English translation of this skittish (in both senses of the word) piece, with a selection of Krzhizhanovskii's writings about theatrical philosophy and on his idols George Bernard Shaw, Shakespeare, and Pushkin, also translated here for the first time. Each translation is prefaced by an explanatory note from Ballard Lin (Krzhizhanovskii, as a devoted exponent of the study of paratexts, would have approved). Every effort is made to counteract the writer's lingering obscurity: Ballard Lin's thoughtful and substantive introduction, “Krzhizhanovsky and Theatrical Modernism,” places him not only in the context of Russian but also European dramatic innovation of the early twentieth century, alongside Bertolt Brecht, Luigi Pirandello, and Antonin Artaud. Her second essay, “Thirdness in the Theaters of Art and Life,” explains why the play That Third Guy should be considered as both the fullest exposition of Krzhizhanovskii's personal metaphysics of theater, and a significant drama in its own right. Caryl Emerson, long an advocate for Krzhizhanovskii's re-integration into the Russian literary canon, has provided both a foreword and a separate chapter detailing Krzhizhanovskii's involvement with on-stage Pushkiniana (“Krzhizhanovsky's Collapsed Contributions to the Pushkin Jubilee”). The 1828 version of Pushkin's “Cleopatra,” which Krzhizhanovskii cited, is reprinted here in Ballard Lin's translation. Striking archival photographs include a staged shot of Tairov and Shaw together, and costume designs for the Kamernyi's 1934 dramatization of Pushkin's Egyptian Nights.

Krzhizhanovskii's contribution to Soviet theater clearly compares to that of other theorist-playwrights like Nikolai Evreinov or even Aleksandr Afinogenov; in fact, his meagerly-published theatrical essays (rather than his much greater, but largely stifled, fictional output) secured his eventual admission to the Soviet Writers’ Union in 1939. Articles on individual writers appear here in order of composition and/or publication. “Imagined Shakespeare,” a brief essay poking fun at inaccurate Russian renderings of Shakespeare (including Aleksandr Sumarokov's Hamlet) featured in Sovetskoe iskusstvo in 1937; characteristically, Krzhizhanovskii finds time to compare translators to erratic boatmen who “often drown their load where [the water] is deepest” (243). In “The Dramatic Devices of George Bernard Shaw” (1934), Krzhizhanovskii deploys the English idioms “to upset the apple-cart” and “in apple-pie order” to visualize Shaw's dramatic technique as reverse entropy, working from chaos back to original harmony. Ballard Lin notes that while Krzhizhanovskii's grasp of English idiom is (here) exemplary, his culinary know-how is doubtful: his extended apple-pie metaphor for Shaw's play The Apple Cart is actually a description of a strudel. The same essay correlates playwriting and chess: “The chess figure, having killed, stands on the place of the killed figure. In this is the essence of the tragic style” (155). Krzhizhanovskii points to Macbeth taking Duncan's throne after murdering him. Shaw prefers nifty evasions (“dramaturgical castling”) to high Shakespearian tragedy; hence his plays recall “the art of checkers rather than that of chess” (155). The most substantial essay included here, “A Philosopheme for the Theater,” composed in 1923, draws on Immanuel Kant, Henrik Ibsen, atomic theory, entomology, Ancient Greek tragedy, and medieval mystery plays to contend that the stage is an ontologically separate realm, where actors temporarily embody one of an infinitely diverse range of possible futures. A decade later, in “Shakespeare's Comediography,” Krzhizhanovskii introduced his concept of super-realism or “realiorism,” arguing that the intensive action and speeded-up time of plays such as Shakespeare's enhances their intellectual and emotional impact on audiences: “Theater…is the art of imparting facts with the speed of thoughts” (168).

That Third Guy: A Comedy experiments with enacting such alternative velocities on-stage; morally, intellectually, and even physically, its hero is out of step with other characters. Ballard Lin suggests that this quality makes him imperceptible as well as elusive, sometimes enabling the Third Guy to literally slip between cracks. Krzhizhanovskii's twist on the Cleopatra theme arose interstitially from overlapping treatments by Shakespeare, Shaw, Pushkin, Aleksandr Blok and most of the Acmeist poets; its light-heartedness never hides the brutal authoritarianism of the Third Guy's world, where the only choices are sudden death or eternal anonymity. Despite his concern about “bequeathing [his] name to the ages” (85), the Third Guy's truly lamentable compositions, and a running joke comparing him to a duckling, ensure that his legacy is perpetually questioned. Ballard Lin's limpid translation retains Krzhizhanovskii's historical realism (customs, clothing, and even botany are minutely observed) and his penchant for puns, pathetic fallacy, and throwaway epigrams (“I knew one philosopher who was so chaste that on meeting naked truth he always turned away,” 92). Parallels with Soviet Russia, and with Krzhizhanovskii's own interstitial existence abound. Emerson's foreword observes the odd contrast between Krzhizhanovskii's chthonic, gloomy prose and his comedic theatre; in fact the two are never far apart, linked by recurring themes and symbols (many footnoted by Ballard Lin) and an underlying philosophical pessimism.

Too scientifically minded to be surreal, too imaginative to be predictable, erudite but too erratic (and inaccurate) for academia, Krzhizhanovskii was a lucky misfit: he slipped, like his character, between the cracks of political repression. By making That Third Guy and his theatre criticism available to Anglophone readers, this excellent critical edition makes the case for reinstating Krzhizhanovskii as a modernist playwright, an original essayist and as a case study in intellectual survival.