[RUSSIAN REVOLUTIONARY SONGBOOK] Politicheskiia piesni svobody: marsel’eza, varshavianka, pokhoronnyi marsh i drugie [Political songs of freedom: the Marsellaise, Varshavianka, funeral march and others].
Petrograd: "Elektropechatnia" Ia. Kovitskogo, 1917. Original staple-stitched printed wrappers on pink stock; 16 pp. Light soil to wrappers; toned due to stock, else very good. Item #55326
Published between the February and October Revolutions of 1917, this ephemeral collection of revolutionary "freedom songs" was released during a period of unprecedented freedom of the press in Russian history, when all censorship restrictions were lifted. The volume opens with the revolutionary anthems such as the Russian version of the Marsellaise and the Russian rendition of the Polish revolutionary song “Varshavianka”. The latter was famously translated by Gleb Krzhizhanovskii, a revolutionary leader who in 1897 spent time as a political prisoner in the infamous Butyrka prison in Moscow with members of the Polish Socialist Party. Another song translated by Krzhizhanovskii is "Krasnoe znamia" [Red banner], originally written by the Polish socialist activist and writer Boleslav Chervinsky in 1880s. A signature song of the Polish socialists, Red Banner often appeared on the pages of illegal songbooks of the Bolsheviks before 1917. Many of the other songs in the volume are folk songs or have a folk base, such as "Akh ty dolia moia dolia" [Oh you my hard fate] and "Krestianskaia pesnia" [Peasant song], which date back to the late nineteenth century. One of the closing songs in the volume, "Gruz proshlogo" [Baggage of the past] satirizes the arrest of the last prime minister of the Russian Empire, Ivan Goremykin, after the February Revolution. The scandalous nature of this arrest was quicky surpassed by other, even more shocking events in this tumultuous period. The presence of the song provides a clue to the pre-October 1917 date of the publication of this volume; another clue is the use of the pre-revolutionary orthography.
A rare survival. As of September 2025, KVK, OCLC show one copy worldwide, but none in North America.
Price: €650.00