MAIAKOVSKII, Vladimir Vladimirovich.

Stikhi o revolutsii. Oktiabr'. Fevral'. Golod. Evropa. Iskusstvo. Smeshnoe [Poems on the revolution. October. February. Famine. Europe. Art. Laughs].

Moscow, “Krasnaia Nov’”, 1923. 8vo, pp. 98, [2]; a very good copy in the original paper wrappers, printed in red; in a folding cloth box. First edition, with nineteen satirical poems about Soviet life. ‘O driani’ (‘About some trash’) ‘is the earliest and probably the most potent of Mayakovsky’s attacks on the philistines now panoplied in the red flag of revolution … The philistine is defined by his overweening interest in comfortable apartments, pianos and piano lessons, higher incomes, and showy uniforms…’ (Brown).‘Prozasedavshiesia’ (‘Lost in conference’) satirises the Communists’ love of unnecessary meetings and had drawn Lenin’s favourable attention when it appeared in Isvestiia in 1922: ‘Yesterday I happened to read … a poem by Mayakovsky on a political theme … It’s a long time since I experienced such pleasure and satisfaction, from a political and administrative point of view’ (quoted in Brown). ‘Biurokratiada’ (‘Bureaucratish’), contains a similar attack on officialdom, while ‘Stikhotvorenie o Miasnitskoi, o babe i o vserossiiskom masshtabe’ (‘A Verse about Miasnitskaia street, about a woman and about the all-Russian scale’) contrasts the inflated rhetoric of the state with an old woman dragging her possessions through the pot-holes of a Moscow street.Hellyer 349; Russian Modernism 541; Tarasenkov, p. 250. Edward Brown, Mayakovsky, a Poet in the Revolution, Princeton UP, 1973.

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• libraire: Bernard Quaritch Ltd. (GREAT BRITAIN)