Blok | Dvenadtsat, St Petersburg, 1918, original wrappers, with an original drawing by Annenkov

BLOK, ALEKSANDR

DVENADTSAT. RISUNKI YU. ANNENKOVA [THE TWELVE. DRAWINGS BY YURI ANNENKOV]. PETERSBURG: ALKONOST, 1918

FIRST EDITION, folio (320 x 245mm.), copy number 219 from a limited edition of 300 copies, initialled by the artist below the justification, WITH AN ORIGINAL INK PRESENTATION DRAWING BY ANNENKOV TO ILYA IONOV pasted in the front, depicting a man in a bowler hat carrying a newspaper walking along a street in a town, original printed wrappers, backstrip slightly damaged and repaired

RARE FIRST EDITION of Blok's poetic masterpiece on the October Revolution, issued in just 300 copies and quickly reprinted, though not universally understood or acclaimed at the time.

PRESENTATION COPY to Ilya Ionovich Ionov (1887-1942), a Bolshevik who became head of the Petrograd section of Gosizdat, the state publishing house; this was part of a move to have Party officials rather than editorial professionals in charge of publications. Ionov's sister was married to an associate of Lenin, Grigory Zinoviev, who effectively ruled Petrograd.

Gorky described Ionov as "not literate enough to run that kind of cultural business [a publishing house]... He absolutely cannot stand people who are smarter and more literate than he is..." (Letter to Stalin, 25 January 1932, quoted in Soviet Culture and Power: a history in documents 1917-1953, p.180).

LITERATURE:

The Russian Avant-Garde Book 170

PROVENANCE:

Ilya Ionov, presentation drawing