Still Alive: An Autobiographical Essay

Kott, Polish-born essayist, theater critic and Shakespearean scholar who emigrated to the U.S. in 1966, begins this autobiographical odyssey in Paris in 1939 where he played boccie with Leon Trotsky's future murderer. It ends with an account of the author's fifth heart attack in 1990 and a meditation on reconciling oneself to death. Accident, fate and the molding forces of history are leitmotifs in Kott's existential adventure. In France he befriended the Surrealists Andre Breton and Tristan Tzara, as well as their circle, yet also spent months as a seminarian in a Dominican monastery. Born in Warsaw in 1914, Kott returned to Poland in 1939, fought in the resistance against the Nazis and joined an underground Communist cell; he relates a series of hair-raising, narrow escapes from the Germans. His protracted enchantment with Stalinism, a blind faith that nearly wrecked his marriage, takes up the final phase of this sharply etched memoir. Readers' Subscription Book Club selection. (Apr.)