Lot 134A email save

MAYAKOVSKY, Vladimir Vladimirovich (1893-1930) an

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Petrograd: IMO, 1918. 58 pp., 4to (270 x 200 mm). With a forward by Lunacharsky. Original wrappers with letterpress illustration. Condition: wrappers lightly thumbsoiled with repairs to verso on front, back wrapper restored from extensive original loss at margins. With additional contributions on revolution by Nikolai Aseev, David Burliuk, Vasily Kamenskii, Velimir Khlebnikov and Boris Kushner. Lunacharsky was the Commissar of Enlightenment personally appointed by Lenin; he and Mayakovsky did not always see eye to eye. "Let the worker hear and evaluate everything, the old and the new," he declared in the forward to this book. "We will not impose anything on him; we will show him everything." However, that same year Lunacharsky wrote rather despairingly of Mayakovsky, "He's very talented. It's true that within his new forms, coarse but tough and interesting, he conceals essentially very old-fashioned thoughts and an old-fashioned taste....But then what frightens me is his boyhood, which continued too long. Vladimir Mayakovsky is an adolescent." One of 5000 copies. MoMA 190.

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