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[POETRY OF WINTER WAR] Leningradskaia doblest’ [i.e. Leningrad Valor]

Reshetov, A.

Item #2769

Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1942. 95, [1] pp. 12x9,5 cm. In original illustrated wrappers. Front cover slightly detached from block exposing rusty staples, otherwise very good copy with clean pages.

Wartime edition. The book was approved for print on July 1, 1942.

The front cover features an engraving created by Ukrainian artist Leonid Khizhinsky (1896–1972). He was born in Kyiv and studied in the architectural Faculty of the Kyiv Art College, then in the workshop of M. Boychuk at the Kyiv Academy of Arts. In 1922 Khizhinski moved to Petrograd. He was enrolled in the Graphic Faculty of the Academy of Arts where he studied under V. Konashevich and D. Mitrokhin. In 1939, he traveled to the Caucasus and other places tied with Lermontov’s lifetime where he made sketches from nature. He created a woodcut series for the 100th anniversary of Lermontov’s death (1941) but the whole printrun was lost in 1941 during the bombing of the Leningrad Print Yard. The artist likely continued to live in Leningrad during the siege.

Working at factories, Alexander Reshetov (1909–1971) started to publish his literary works in 1927 and released his debut poetry collection in 1931. That year, he was sent by the Komsomol to the Khibiny Mountains to build a mining and chemical plant, where he also worked for the newspaper Khibinogorsky Rabochy. When the Soviet-Finnish War erupted in 1939, he was there, among the forces advancing on Petsamo. He went through the Second World war as a correspondent for frontline newspapers. He read his wartime poems in the Great Hall of the Philharmonic in besieged Leningrad in November 1943.

This small verse collection contains 27 poems written during the Great Patriotic War and 11 compiled during the Winter War “against Finnish White Guard movement”.

Worldcat shows copies located at Harvard, Princeton and Stanford Universities.

Price: $550.00

Status: On Hold