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[MAGNIFICENT KLUTSIS-KULAGINA DUO] Iazyk Lenina: Odinnadtsat’ priemov Leninskoi rechi [i.e. Lenin’s Language: Eleven Devices of Lenin’s Speech]

Kruchyonykh, A.

Item #923

Moscow: Izdanie Vserossiiskogo Soiuza Poetov, 1925. 60, [2] pp.: ill. 19x14,5 cm. In original illustrated wrappers. Covers restored, pencil marks, pale water stain on the upper inner corner throughout the copy, pale stamp on publisher’s advertising page, otherwise very good.
First edition. One of 5000 copies. Constructivist cover design was produced by Valentina Kulagina and 4 drawings were created by her husband, Gustav Klutsis. The collaborators considered outstanding masters of photomontage poster and book design. They worked in this field together for 16 years until Klutsis was executed in 1937.
This book resembles the artist’s activities in the early 1920s. Klutsis met Kruchyonykh in 1921, soon after he got the first publishing project and produced a cover design for the Union of Poets. At the same time, he was attracted to productive art. He designed more than 20 transforming propaganda structures for street mass events: tribunes, broadcasting loudspeakers, screens and other installations. Klutsis developed own method of combination of slogans and geometrical figures. This book features four such installations - three loudspeakers and mobile poster stand with the slogan ‘Workers of the Vorld [world] Unite’ .
Kulagina bringing one of loudspeakers ‘Lenin’s Speech’ that projected Klutsis to cover design created an excellent match with the book title on colored plates that at the same time made up the frame for drawing.
This edition became the only one where the contrast between ‘speech’ and ‘language’ took place - the second (1927) and the third (1928) editions were merely named ‘Devices of Lenin’s Speech’. This attempt to analyze features of Lenin’s oratory as a phenomenon of propaganda art was a drop in the ocean. Kruchyonykh planned to write a comprehensive work on Lenin’s language as well as the language of Trotsky, but none of them was published. In this small book, Kruchyonykh stressed that the party leader was fond of using quotes but spoke in clear phrases and sought to clarify heading in the first lines of text.
Worldcat shows copies in Princeton, Yale and Stanford Universities, Chicago Art and Getty Research Institutes, Amherst College, NYPL, MIT Libraries.
MoMA. 596.

Status: On Hold