Ilia Chavchavadze. Selected Poems and Narrative Poems (Izbrannye stikhi i poemy) / In translations by Boris Brik, 1938. In Russian.

Ilia Chavchavadze. Selected Poems and Narrative Poems (Izbrannye stikhi i poemy) / In translations by Boris Brik, 1938. In Russian.

$60.00
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Ilia Chavchavadze. Selected Poems and Narrative Poems (Izbrannye stikhi i poemy) / In translations by Boris Brik, 1938. In Russian.
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Ilia Chavchavadze. Selected Poems and Narrative Poems (Izbrannye stikhi i poemy) / In translations by Boris Brik, 1938. In Russian.

$60.00

Чавчавадзе И. Г. Избранные стихи и поэмы / в переводах Бориса Брика.
Москва : Государственное издательство «Художественная литература» [Гослитиздат], 1938. — 183 с.
Издательский ледериновый переплёт светло-кремового цвета с блинтовым (слепым) тиснением. Малый формат 75×110/32 (около 140×185 мм). Тираж 5 000 экземпляров. 
С сохранённым шёлковым ляссе красного цвета.
Состояние хорошее: издательский ледериновый переплёт с равномерным возрастным потемнением и лёгким загрязнением, потёртости и небольшие заломы по углам и краям крышек, незначительная потёртость и небольшой залом по верхнему краю передней крышки у корешка. Блок крепкий, шитьё прочное, страницы чистые.
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Chavchavadze I. G. Selected Poems and Narrative Poems / in translations by Boris Brik.
Moscow : State Publishing House for Belles-Lettres [Goslitizdat], 1938. — 183 pp.
Publisher's pale cream lederin (cloth-imitation) binding with blind-stamped decoration. Small format 75×110/32 (approximately 140×185 mm). Print run of 5,000 copies. With the original red silk ribbon bookmark preserved.
Condition good: the lederin binding shows even age-toning and light overall soiling, rubbing and minor creasing to edges and corners, slight wear and a small crease along the top edge of the front board adjacent to the spine, spine fully preserved. Text-block firm, sewing sound, leaves clean and fresh.

Ilia Grigorievich Chavchavadze (Илья Григорьевич Чавчавадзе, 1837–1907) — the central figure of nineteenth-century Georgian letters and the principal architect of modern Georgian national consciousness: poet, novelist, journalist, public man, founder of the journal Iveria, leader of the тергдалеулни ("those who drank from the Terek") generation, and from 1906 a member of the Russian State Council representing the Tiflis nobility. Assassinated in 1907 in a politically motivated attack near the village of Tsitsamuri, he was canonised as Saint Ilia the Righteous (წმინდა ილია მართალი) by the Georgian Orthodox Church in 1987. The present volume is one of the more substantial early Soviet attempts to make his major verse available in Russian translation, prepared for the centenary celebrations of his birth (officially marked across the USSR in 1937). The book carries, however, an additional and sombre bibliographical significance through the figure of its translator. Boris Iosifovich Brik (1904–1942), a Leningrad poet of refined formal gifts associated in his youth with the late-Acmeist and OBERIU milieu, had by the time the volume was signed for printing in March 1938 already been arrested by the NKVD on fabricated charges (in 1937) and was at the disposal of the camp system; he would perish in the Gulag in 1942. His name nevertheless remained on the title page of this edition, making it one of the last public appearances of his name in print before his work was effectively suppressed for the remainder of the Stalin period. The book is at once an artefact of the Soviet state's instrumentalisation of national-literary classics in the late 1930s, a milestone in the long history of Georgian-Russian literary translation, and — in its handsome small-format Goslitizdat production, with blind-stamped lederin, gilt vignettes, red-printed title and silk bookmark — a fine example of late-1930s Soviet trade-book design on the eve of the war.

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