Proletarskaya poeziya (Proletarian Poetry) [Essay]

Near Fine condition;  small creases across outer corners of back cover, slightly damaged spine ends, cover shows some soiling to the spine; internally quite in fine condtion. 

Book cover is decorated with publisher’s logo designed by painter and graphic artist Vasiliy Denisov (1862-1922), who is considered one of the brightest representatives of symbolism in Russian art. Exhibited in the “Mir Iskusstava” (World of Art) and in the “Unoin of Independent Artists”. 

Soviet literary and art critic Vladimir Friche (1870-1929) considered the leading Marxist cultural theorist in the 1920s. The first published in post-revolutionary Russia treatise on history of proletarian literature in European countries – England, France, Germany, Italy, and also in Russia, by one of the main scholars of proleratian poetry V. Friche. Summing up the motifs of proletarian poetry Friche, wrote: “If the poets coming out of the working-class milieu want to create poetry that is truly proletarian both in spirit and in form, they should go not to the intelligentsia, not to professional poets of the bourgeois past, but back to their own milieu, back to the masses, to the proletariat, to the factories and plants. They should cease being only poets - let them again be above all workers and proletarians, and only during leisure time creator-artists of the word as well. Proletarian poetry was born in the factory and plant, and there, in the factory and plant, the true proletarian poetry of the near future should also be born.” In addition to given characteristic, it is necessary philosophical worldview prescription: “In the highest sense of the word "proletarian poetry" should not only be created by proletarian-class poets (with the above-mentioned reservations), but also imbued with the proletarian class spirit and communist idealogues.”