The Yalta Stunts

Fiction. Art. Performance Art. THE YALTA STUNTS, one of the most perfect, charming, and enigmatic works of the always mysterious 20th century underground poet Alvin Krinst, has circulated in hand–printed editions of uneven quality for decades since its first clandestine publication in 1963. Commissioned for the 1945 Yalta Conference and first performed there by Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt themselves, these stunningly original Stunts are not merely important precursors of the artistic revolution of the 1960s, but potent poetic and political statements in their own right. This reader's edition, based on the definitive 1993 revision of Emily MacGregor's pioneering 1989 variorum edition, and updated to incorporate the results of the latest scholarship, is the first to make available the full, unexpurgated text of this work, with carefully reproduced illustrations, to the general public. We hope this is the first step in bringing to public attention not only a dazzling masterwork by an unjustly neglected literary figure, but a crucial episode in the creation of the post–WWII world order that has almost been effaced, one cannot but suspect willfully, from the historical record.