Caryl G. Emerson

Among the silenced Russian modernists, Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky was not “repressed” but rejected, unpublished, unperformed. Now the subject of a growing research industry in Russia, he bridges several media, disciplines, and cultures, inhabiting the roles of philosopher, theorist of dreams, surrealist prose writer, experimental dramatist, theater pedagogue, innovative film scenarist, librettist—as well as penetrating critic of Pushkin, Bernard Shaw, Poe, and Shakespeare. His prose fiction has begun to appear in English. This research project synthesizes and restores to its proper context his original contribution to the performing arts and musicalized drama, often so incompatible with official Russian culture of the Stalinist 1930s and thus so necessary as a lens on it.