Event

Goodbye Cruel World

GOODBYE CRUEL WORLD tells the story of Semyon Semyonovich, an unemployed, impoverished young man who discovers the joy of life only when he decides to kill himself. Then word gets out and he finds himself inundated with sympathetic visitors - begging him to die on their behalf!

Playwright Nikolai Erdman was a Soviet dramatist and screenwriter primarily remembered for his work with Vsevolod Meyerhold in the 1920s. His plays (among them his comic masterpiece, The Suicide, and his first major but lesser known work The Warrant) form a link in Russian literary history between the satirical drama of Gogol and the post-World War II Theatre of the Absurb. Although three of Russia's greatest theater companies had all competed for the rights to produce The Suicide, Stalin was at the beginning of his first Five Year Plan. He banned the play, had Erdman arrested (for being a dissident) and exiled him to Siberia. Moscow finally allowed a showing 50 years later but by then Erdman had died, having never written another play.