The Book of Theater

This book has been waiting for more than 100 years to meet its readers. It was ready for printing in the summer of 1914 when the high Manifesto with which Russia entered the First World War was published on 22 July. Her author is mobilized, spends years at the front, in Galicia, where heavy fighting takes place, follows 1917, the Civil War ... He returns to St. Petersburg, realizes that there is no future for him in his homeland in the changing situation and he chooses the difficult route of emigration. He manages to get to Odessa and reach the Balkans, along with other tens of thousands of the White Guardsmen" (Belogvardeytsi). In the early 1920s, he found refuge in Bulgaria, where he tasted all the joys of emigrant life. And the manuscript, along with many other valuable things, remains in Russia.

"The Book of Theater" is interesting not only for the fate of its author. The original text stored in the archive does not look like a "normal" manuscript. Typically, the author writes his book by consistently exposing on paper the thoughts that excite him. But the "manuscript" of Yarsev's book is not written by hand or typewriter. It is composed of articles published at different times in the press. The author cut them off from the newspapers; stuck them in a sequence determined by him, made the necessary adjustments: shortened some of the superfluous, changed several titles ...

Indeed, in these papers cut out by various newspapers, were gathered the most important of what he wrote for years while he watched the theater processes in his homeland and abroad.