The Suicide

A brilliant and penetrating satire about an unemployed man who contemplates suicide and is besieged by spokespeople of discontented groups, from butchers to intellectuals, who want him to turn his suicide into a gesture on their behalf. The Suicide is a 1928 play by the Russian playwright Nikolai Erdman. Its performance was proscribed during the Stalinist era and it was only produced in Russia several years after the death of its writer. Today it is regarded as one of the finest plays to have come out of Communist Russia.