Gastev, Aleksei.

[PROLETKULT POETRY – AVANT-GARDE] Poeziia rabochego udara [The poetry of the worker’s blow].

St.Petersburg: biblioteka proletkul’ta, 1919. Octavo (21 × 15 cm). Original staple-stitched printed wrappers on orange stock; 46, [1] pp. Very good. Item #P5766

Second edition (first published in 1918). An important work by the "proletarian bard of the machine age," which proved of great importance to Russian avant-garde and early Soviet writing. Aleksei Gastev (1882–1939) was an early member of the Russian revolutionary movement and participated in the 1905 Revolution. He eventually became close to the Bolsheviks and was in personal contact with Lenin until 1907. Following numerous arrests he fled abroad, where he came in contact with French Syndicalism and various forms of labor organization, while working in numerous factories. After the October Revolution, Gastev initiated the "NOT", a movement aiming at the scientific and rationalist organization of labor based on the ideas of Frederick Taylor. His lyric poetry and prose poems formed a unique genre blending this fascination with physical labor, the machine age, and the human body: "Gastev's collection of hymns to factory work, Poeziia rabochego udara (Poetry of the Worker's Blow, published in 1918), mixes revolutionary agitation with cosmic symbolism and a futurist cult of the machine age. His best-known work, the prose poem 'My rastem iz zheleza' ('We grow out of iron,' 1914), evokes a sort of transsubstantiation from flesh into steel, as the narrator merges with the metal girders of a blast furnace to become a gigantic human machine" (Adrian Wanner, Russian Minimalism, p. 37).

Although Gastev operated outside of established literary schools and styles, his prescient treatment of the body as technologically enhanceable and his bombastic, cosmic rhetoric was a key influence on Russian futurist poets such as Velimir Khlebnikov and Vladimir Mayakovsky, as well as the fiction of Andrei Platonov. Another major Russian futurist, Nikolai Aseev, dubbed Gastev the "Ovid of miners and metal-workers." In 1917 Gastev became one of the key organizers of Proletkult, a proletarian arts organization devoted to creating a uniquely proletarian culture by encouraging and supporting artistic work by the members of the working class. The first and second editions of this work were published by Proletkult. By 1919 Gastev had distanced himself from the organization. In 1938 Gastev was arrested and executed during the wave of violent repressions Stalin initiated after the murder of Kirov.

As of February 2024, KVK and OCLC show copies of the second edition at Trento, Columbia, and the National Library of Israel only. (First edition at Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Staatsbibliothek Hamburg, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, and NYPL).

Price: €600.00

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