I've always been fascinated by samizdat, something rooted in my own childhood experiences. And since I have my own publishing house, why not indulge in the pleasure of publishing my own books?

That's how my writings — spanning theatre, essays, and poetry — found their way into print, along with my translation of R.U.R. by Karel Čapek, directly from Czech into Spanish. The play that gave the world the word “robot.”

And here they are, for the sheer pleasure of bringing them into existence.

Живодійність (zhivodiynist’) is a Ukrainian neologism that names the vital force through which a life becomes a world.

I imagined this book, woven from essays, poetry, and theatre, as a table set for literature, philosophy, and artistic expression to enter into dialogue about encounter as a force that creates reality. Between Bakhtin, Wittgenstein, Arendt, Lispector, songs from an Arctic people, a dance, and the images that accompanied this exploration, a poetic formula emerges: I + You = the World.

I began with a question: how do we participate in the emergence of the world? By the emergence of the world, I mean that event in which one presence affects another, one life responds to another, and something that did not exist before begins to take shape between them. According to philosophers of dialogue, the I needs a You in order to become an I. The question then becomes inevitable: who is the You? And what happens if the + ceases to be a sign of addition and becomes a unit of meaning, a space? When does an encounter cease to be mere coexistence?

Needless to say, I have no answers: zhivodiynist’ is born precisely out of these questions and a few intuitions.

178 pages · 17 × 15 cm
ISBN: 978-631-90441-2-6
Etruska Editora

essay.poetry.theatre

Dostoevsky Didn't Know Many Things inhabits an unsettling space where reality begins to give way to the narratives we construct to explain it. The play explores the tensions between truth and fiction, identity and belonging, history and power, asking what happens when an idea becomes more important than a human life, and how violence, time and again, finds arguments to present itself as necessary.

Through humour and the logic of the absurd, the play raises a broader question: how much of our humanity are we willing to sacrifice to keep a system of beliefs intact when faced with a reality that has the unfortunate habit of being complex?

68 pages · 17 × 15 cm
ISBN: 978-631-90441-4-0
Etruska Editora

theatre

Written in 1920, R.U.R. imagined a world in which the industrial production of artificial beings would free humanity from labour. A century later, with today's levels of automation, artificial intelligence, and transhumanist projects no longer belonging exclusively to the realm of fiction, Karel Čapek's question feels unsettlingly close: what does it mean to be alive?

At the Reason factory, the Robots were created solely to work, and what was meant to ensure a more efficient world ultimately challenges the very certainties of their creators.

This edition returns directly to the Czech text published in 1920 and, under the title Reason’s Universal Robots, restores characters, nuances, and resonances of the original.

198 pages · 17 × 15 cm
ISBN: 978-631-90441-3-3
Etruska Editora

theatre