Zhiznj i gibelj Nikolaya Kurbova (The Life and Undoing of Nikolai Kurbov) [Novel]

The book is in Very Good condition; cover bottom- and fore-edge show some fraying with occasional minor tears (0,5 cm or less), creases across cover corners, missing minor piece of bottom right corner of front cover; internally fine. 

Current the second Erenburg’s novel was published by Gelikon, one of the leading Russian publishers in Berlin, which printed contemporary authors with the designs of the important artists. This book's striking constructivist wrappers in black and red are designed by Eherenburg's wife, an avant-garde artist Lyubov Kozintsova (1899-1970). 

As Erenburg was a Soviet writer of different sort, one who did not adopt optimistic formulas or ignore troubling aspects of the new revolutionary order, so underlying his work for most of the 1920s is a brooding sadness over the fate of his country. The story of Nikolai Kurbov is about a Soviet secret policeman, a dedicated member of the Cheka, who becomes disallusioned when the NEP is announced, and he ends up killing himself. (Between 1917 and 1922, the Cheka, staffed primarily by young, careerist Marxists, were empowered to seize and execute individuals suspected of treason or sedition.) The themes of the revolution and the “little man” concerned in the novel higlights a significant double epigraph: first a mathematical formula underlained the idea that the revolution was the product of historical forces, predetermined like the roots of the quadratic equation, second a line from a popular song “Cyplenki tozhe hochut zhitj” means, that the weak ones also want to leave. The novel was quite popular, but did have its critics. Writing in the journal “Na Postu” (On Guard), Boris Volin denounced Nikolai Kurbov as: "...nauseating literature that distorts revolutionary reality, libels, exaggerates facts and types, and without stop and without a twitch of conscience slanders, slanders, slanders the revolution, revolutionaries, Communists, and the party." 

Ilya Erenburg (189 –1967) was profilic writer, poet, journalist, one of the most renowned Soviet intellectuals of his generation. To avoid trial for revolutionary agitation, he immigrated to Paris. He was close to the leftists of French society and became promoter of avant- garde art. Erenburg is known first and foremost as an author of modernistic picaresque novels which combine patriotism with cosmopolitanism, and as a journalist – in particular, as a reporter in three wars (First World War, Spanish Civil War and the Second World War).