Russia produced more notable dramas in the twentieth century than at any other time in its history, yet many of the plays from this period have been only sporadically available in English, and others have never been translated before. For each of these eight works, Timothy Langen and Justin Weir provide an insightful introduction to the literary, cultural, and political contexts in which the plays first appeared, considering the influence that various literary movements had on the development of Russian drama and exploring the effect of the increasingly politicized climate of the new Soviet state.
Mayakovsky: Plays includes Mystery Bouffe, a mock medieval mystery written in 1918 to celebrate the first anniversary of the Revolution; The Bathhouse, a sharp attack on Soviet bureaucracy subtitled "a drama of circus and fireworks"; and The Bedbug, in which a worker with bourgeois pretensions is frozen and resurrected fifty years later, when the world has become a material paradise. The collection also includes Mayakovsky's more personal first play, Vladimir Mayakovsky: A Tragedy.
The plays in this volume mark Lasker-Schüler's movement away from the traditional aesthetic canon, revealing a unique formal development from naturalistic expressionist episodes in the lyrical Dark River to a historicizing politicization of the theater in Arthur Aronymous to the forms of montage and "epic" presentations in I and I. A short preface by Inca Molina Rumold places each play in its historical, biographical, and artistic context.
Although Tolstoy's fame rests on his novels, he was also a prolific dramatist. Because his plays are satirical, didactic, and colored by complex peasant dialect, earlier translations have been seriously flawed. These imperfect translations, coupled with Tolstoy's famous polemics against Shakespeare and Chekhov, have reinforced the general misapprehension that Tolstoy was not a dramatist.
Although Tolstoy's fame rests on his novels, he was also a prolific dramatist; yet this part of his oeuvre has been consistently neglected by scholars and readers alike. Because the plays are satirical,...
Along with Pirandello’s better-known works, Six Characters in Search of an Author, Emperor Henry, and Right You Are, this edition includes the widely performed The Man with the Flower in His Mouth, unavailable in any other collection.
The theatrical genius of Gogol has gone largely unappreciated by English-speaking audiences because literal translations have left his plays virtually impossible to perform. These fresh translations...
Tolstoy: Plays, Volume II offers two long plays written during the years 1886–1889. The Realm of Darkness is Tolstoy's best-known play, a treatment of moral issues within a community of Russian peasants. The lesser known The Fruits of Enlightenment, a comic portrait of an upper-class Russian family afflicted with various social diseases, was written to be performed for Tolstoy's family, and not intended for publication. Andrew Baruch Wachtel has added an informative introduction on this aspect of Tolstoy's art.
