Lot 31A email save

CHAGALL Marc (1887-1985) (illustrator) and David H

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Kiev: Kultur Liga, 1922. 24 pp., folio (335 x 245 mm). With 5 letterpress illustrations by M. Chagall. Partially uncut. Original decorated dark bluish gray wrappers designed by Chagall. Condition: wrappers faded at edges with small closed tear at upper margin, rubbing at fold; slight discoloration. first and only edition of this fragile yiddish book. This collection of ferro-concrete poems in Yiddish comment on the pogroms against the Jews in the Ukraine during the recent Russian Civil War. One is dedicated to the peasant poet Sergei Esenin. It is perhaps his most important work of illustration of this period as well as the most moving. It was also one of the last things Chagall worked on before leaving Russia. He was ousted from the Popular Art Institute in Vitebsk by Kazimir Malevich and his followers and he left for Paris in 1923, never to return. After the Revolution, Hofstein wrote only in Yiddish. He hailed the birth of the State of Israel in 1948; but when Stalin withdrew his support, Hofstein and other members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee were arrested. On August 12, 1952, now known as "The Night of the Murdered Poets," Hofstein with other prominent Jewish poets, artists, musicians and actors were executed in the basement of the Lubyanka prison in Moscow on Stalin's orders. Apter-Gabriel 150; MoMA 373.

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