Description
Drama. Poetry. Translated from the Russian by C Dylan Bassett and Emma Winsor Wood. People disappear without explanation. The government takes hostages. War and death occur without reason or meaning. The cycle of poverty and deprivation proliferates. A FAILED PERFORMANCE is a collection of bizarre and darkly humorous plays and scenes from the Russian avant-garde writer Daniil Kharms. This collection—the first volume in English dedicated entirely to Kharms's dramatic works—includes his major stage plays Elizaveta Bam and Lapa as well as lesser-known sketches and hybrid poem-plays, most of which were never published or performed during his lifetime.
Author Bio
Russian author Daniil Kharms was born in December 1905 and starved to death in a Soviet prison hospital in February 1942. An experimental writer and a pioneer of the hybrid text, Kharms wrote in practically every genre—from plays in verse to children's books. Charged with spreading panic and anti-Soviet propaganda during his lifetime, the majority of Kharms's work was only published posthumously, with the first major collection of his writing not appearing in book form until the late 1980s during Gorbachev's glasnost. Today, Kharms is recognized as a major figure in both twentieth-century Russian literature and in the avant-garde.
Author City: SAINT PETERSBURG RUS