The Bedbug
Bedbug, The (Klop) Author: Vladimir Mayakovsky
First Performance: 1929, Moscow
Published: 1929
First English Translation: 1960
Genre: Com. in 9 scenes; Russian prose
Setting: Russia, 1929 and 1979
Cast: 12m, 3f, many extras
Ivan Prisypkin ( = ‘fried fish’) is a worker with social aspirations. Having worked for the Revolution as a trade unionist, he now seeks to improve his status under the tutelage of a petit bourgeois, Oleg Barn. He rejects his working-class fiancée, driving her to attempt suicide, in order to marry a manicurist. At the wedding, Ivan, who has changed his name to Skripkin ( = ‘violin’), becomes involved in a brawl. A stove is overturned and the hall burns down. Undiscovered, Prisypkin is frozen solid in the firemen's water. He is thawed out 50 years...
[The entire page is 312 words long]
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