40 pp. of poetry paired with 15 full-page monochrome photographic illustrations, unnumbered (including two double-spreads). Quarto (11 3/8 x 8 3/4 inches). Original publisher's cloth binding with blind-tooled ornamentation of the Dnieper Hydroelectric Station, photographic illustrated endpapers. Light soiling to covers, some spitting along spine to interior, light scattered toning and foxing, overall very good. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo (GIZ) "Khudozhestvennaia literatura", 1935.

Aleksandr Ilyich Bezymensky/Bezymenskii (1898-1973) was a Soviet poet, screenwriter, and journalist. He was born in Zhytomyr, Ukraine, to a middle-class Jewish family. He participated in the October Revolution of 1917 and began editing newspapers and journals that year, and publishing his own poetry the following year. In 1918 he was delegated to the First Congress of the Komsomol in Moscow, otherwise known as the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League, and was elected to the Central Committee. In 1921, he was called to Moscow to serve as an editor for the Komsomol's main newspaper, "Krasnaya Molodezh [Red Youth]". In the following years, he helped create the literary groups Young Guard and October/Oktyabr, and wrote numerous poems, songs, and satires in various genres including epigrams, caricature captions, and plays in verse. This photobook is dedicated to the Dnieper Hydroelectric Station, erected by constructivist architects Viktor Vesnin and Nikolai Kolli in 1932. The completion of the dam was hailed as a victory of Soviet ingenuity. Bezymensky visited the construction site multiple times, gathering material for what would become this poetic tribute to the labor of the builders. This volume represents one of the earliest artistic reflections on the grand-scale post-revolutionary projects undertaken in the Soviet Union ahead of World War II. The book is best known for its avant-garde photomontages by Vladimir Grünthal (1898-1963), a photographer associated with the October group and influenced by the experimental style of Alexander Rodchenko. Many constructivist works were surpressed in the 1930s in the Soviet Union, and so the highlighting here of Grünthal's layered photomontages is somewhat surprising. The complete volume features 15 full-page monochrome images of Soviet workers, construction, and machinery, with the endpapers highlighting a striking image of the Dnieper Hydroelectric Station. An early constructivist Soviet photobook, scarce in its original 1935 edition. 52 pp. avant-garde typographical poem from an important Soviet Constructivist artist and designer. Original Constructivist-design full red cloth with embossed and silver accents. Slightly rubbed and soiled, ink notation to front flyfleaf, overall excellent. This volume combines elements of typography, drawn graphics and illustrations, experimental typesetting, and photography, and its production was a joint work of students working at the 1st Exemplary Printing House of Gosizdat and employees of the 1st Sovkino Film Factory. It became the earliest Soviet film-book to flourish in the 1930s. Telingater used typesetting in blocks, stairs, waves, and multi-column layouts. Some pages have an avant-garde aesthetic, with letters laid on their sides, words turned at an angle, or letters gradually increasing in size over the course of a single word. The text is printed in black and red. Photographs are used to illustrated some pages, and were taken by K. Otian with the exception of the title page image, which was taken by Safonov. The selection of photos was done by the "director of illustrations", E. Kokhanova. Page 37 also contains a photomontage composition by Telingater, created by exposing several negatives together. It is considered to be the only instance of a such a complex photographic work in contemporary Soviet photomontage. The final image in the volume is of a boy holding a Komsomol card raised above his head, which was used in multiple editions of the poem. This poem is a scarce and eye-catching example of 1920's Soviet Constructivist design by a forerunner in the artistic movement. As of May 2024, OCLC locates only 4 copies of this commemorative edition of Bezymenskii's poem in North American libraries.

Book ID: 53595

Price: $1,950.00