Ukraine – Photography – Avant-Garde

Robitnychyy zhurnal [The worker journal]. Nos. 3, 4, 5, 8, 9–10, 11, 12, 13–14, 15, 16, 17 (1928); 1, 13–14, 15–16, 17 (1929).

Khar'kiv: Vydannia "Robitnychoi Hazety Proletar" , 1928–29. Quartos (most issues ca. 37 × 27 cm, smaller issues ca. 31.5 × 23 cm). Original folded self-wrappers; ca. 12–16 pp. per issue. Somewhat fragile, with even toning due to stock; wear to edges, especially of the larger issues; occasional pre-WWII library stamps “P.B-ka Sr. Az.” (see below); overall good.

Group of nineteen issues (in fifteen fascicles) of this rare and important illustrated workers' journal, published as a free supplement to Robitnycha Hazeta Proletar (Worker Paper "Proletarian"). It contains contributions by leading Ukrainian modernist writers, including the Futurist Heo Shkurupii, Ostap Vyshnia, Mykhail Bondarenko, Yanovsky, Martyn Zadeka (i.e. Iosip Antonenko). With articles on theatre, cinema, arts and literature (e.g. on Kurbas and this theatre on Vasyl Krychevsky), as well as essays, some of them photo-illustrated, about Soviet construction of Ukraine, as well as detailed sketches about Leningrad, Tokyo, and other cities of the world, some authored by the traveler, writer and filmmaker Oleksandr Maryamov (1909–1972), who also contributed to the avant-garde periodical "Nova heneratsiia" (New generation). With illustrations, including photographs and drawings, by M. Glukhov, V. Bryskin, V. Rubenko, and others.

Provenance: small 1920s rubber stamps of the State Public Library of Central Asia (“G.P.B-ka Sr. Az.” and “GPB Sr.Az.”), subsequently renamed the State Public Library of Uzbekistan. As none of the issues feature later stamps following the renaming and restructuring in the early 1930s, the journal was evidently deaccessioned or moved to the exchange fund at this time.

A rare and ephemeral document of the brief flowering of Ukrainian cultural life in the 1920s, before Stalin changed his mind in the "national question" and began to suppress the use of Ukrainian as the leading language in the Ukrainian Republic from 1932 onward.

As of October 2023, not in KVK, OCLC.

Book ID: 52564

Price: $1,500.00