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[RARE TBILISI EDITION BY A FEMALE POET] Or marta k martu [i.e. From March to March]

Dekaprelevich, L.

Item #2842

Tbilisi: 3-aya Tip. p/tr. VSNKH Gr., 1928. 32 pp. 17x12,6 cm. In original publisher’s illustrated wrappers. Loss of pp. 3-4 (apparently a half-title), light soiling of the wrappers, but otherwise very good.

Scarce. First and only edition. 1 of 600 copies. Text in Russian.

An extremely rare collection of poems by the little-known Russian poet Lina Dekaprelevich (Magdalina de-Kaprelevich), published in Tbilisi in 1928.

Dekaprelevich emerged from the remarkably cosmopolitan literary world of post-revolutionary Tiflis, where she was associated with Sergei Gorodetsky’s Guild of Poets. Little is known about her life, including whether she was a local resident or came to Georgia during the influx of Russian writers and artists in the years of the Revolution and Civil War. Two of her poems appeared under the name Magdalina de-Kaprelevich in Akme, the Guild’s 1919 anthology, placing her among the young poets associated with the city’s Acmeist circle. A further notice in Akme indicates that she intended to publish a collection of poems as early as 1921, although we have been unable to trace such a volume during our research.

The present collection contains more than twenty-five poems devoted to Clara Zetkin, Lenin, Kamo, aeroplanes and other themes characteristic of the early Soviet period.

The Tiflis Guild of Poets had been founded by Gorodetsky in 1918 and became one of the prominent literary circles of the Georgian capital during the brief flowering of Russian-language modernist culture there. Its meetings brought together poets working within the Acmeist tradition, while Tiflis itself simultaneously supported a remarkably diverse avant-garde scene of Symbolists, Futurists, Georgian modernists, artists, and writers. Dekaprelevich’s appearance in Akme is therefore particularly significant, revealing an early stage of her career rooted in the sophisticated literary culture of pre-Soviet Tiflis. Her later poetry moved sharply toward proletarian themes, making the present 1928 collection an intriguing document of the transformation of a poet formed in the modernist milieu of the late 1910s into a writer of the new Soviet literary age.

No copies found in Worldcat.

Price: $950.00