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[RESORTS VS ILLITERACY] Mikhei Kuz’mich na kurorte. Shuteinyi rasskaz [i.e. Mikhei Kuzmich at Resort. A Funny Story]

Bakhmetiev, V.

Moscow: Gostrudizdat, 1930. Item #1827

31 pp.: ill. 17,5x12 cm. In original illustrated wrappers. Covers slightly soiled and faded, otherwise very good.

Seventh edition. Released at the Nizhpoligraf printing shop in Nizhny Novgorod. Illustrated with seven black-and-white linocuts.
This small likbez book was written during the establishment of mass hygiene in the USSR, including a system of sanatoriums for workers. Since the mid-1920s, in order to organize recreation places, the authorities set about restoring plundered and destroyed estates and mansions on the Black Sea coast and in the Caucasus. Each hospital was assigned to an enterprise or a party organization. Soviet society needed a healthy and sober worker and early Soviet resorts offered some procedures and injections, healthy food and wellness sleep. Frequently, such places also were attraction sites for prostitution and adultery.
In this book, the uncertainty around the word “resort” prompts peasants to choose an old man as the first mover. He doesn’t have a sown field, so he may be absent during the season of summer field works. A neighbor warns an unintelligent wife of Mikhei Kuzmich that his age doesn’t matter for Bolshevik women and adultery may take place. However, the wife agrees to his vacation after local authorities promise her a good amount of flour. The old man goes to the unknown. By trial and error, he gets acquainted with the sanatorium: mineral baths and other procedures, daily routine and examination by physicians. The text is saturated with words of provincial pronunciation.
The writer Vladimir Bakhmetiev (1885-1963) was close with the Bolshevik party from 1905 and was arrested a few times by tsarist authorities. After the Revolution, he edited the party newspaper “Siberian worker” and was also the commissar for public education in Western Siberia. In his works, Bakhmetiev was an ardent supporter of literary realism.

No copies of this edition found in Worldcat.

Price: $650.00