Our Notes & References

The first edition of Erenburg’s first book; a review copy, so designated (“dlia retsenzii”) in pencil on the front cover and on the title page. The unidentified reviewer has annotated the book in pencil, numbering the untitled poems, and occasionally challenging the quality of certain rhymes.

Very rare: Poems is said to have been published in an edition of 100 copies only. We could trace only one copy selling at auction in recent decades. WorldCat finds 6 locations: 4 in the US (Harvard, Stanford, UCLA and U. of Washington in Seattle), the BL and the BnF.

Ilia Erenburg is a colossus of Soviet literary culture, and a figure of remarkable contradictions. Born in Kiev in 1891 into a Lithuanian-Jewish family, he was arrested in 1908 by the tsarist secret police for his revolutionary activities and ended up in exile in Paris. He immersed himself in the bohemian milieu and befriended such luminaries as Modigliani and Picasso, who inspired him to try his hand at poetry (Rollberg) – resulting in the literary debut Stikhi in 1910.

Though he continued writing poems his whole career, Erenburg is primarily remembered as one of the USSR’s most prolific novelists and journalists. From his modernist beginnings, he metamorphized into a Stalin Prize-winning stalwart of socialist realism, whilst remaining the most cosmopolitan of Soviet writers, thanks to his long residence abroad. Then, after Stalin was replaced by Khrushchev, Erenburg came out with a novel – The Thaw (1954) – that gave its name to the entire period of de-Stalinization and cultural liberalization in the USSR from the mid-1950s to mid-1960s.

Stikhi was the first of several collections of verse published by Erenburg in Paris. The author later came to agree with his critics that this output represented for the most part the stylizations of a literary novice (Belaia); yet he recalled his joy at hearing that the Russian Symbolist Valerii Briusov thought he had “the makings of a good poet” (Meyer).

Provenance

A contemporary reviewer’s penciled marginalia, and “dlia retsenzii” in two places; Anatoly Bysov (purchased from him April 2006 by:); Eden Martin (b. 1940; American lawyer and noted collector of Russian, British and American literature works).

Bibliography

Okhlopkov 181 (“100 ekz.”, same collation, a copy “dlia otzyva” with a few marginalia too); not in Kilgour (but a copy in Harvard); Belaia, G. “Erenburg,” Kratkaia literaturnaia entsiklopediia v 9 t. (Moskva, 1975), 8, col. 942; Meyer, A. Il’ia Erenburg: The Early Years (1891-1921) (Stanford University, 1999), 71; Rollberg, P. “Erenburg,” in Neil Cornwell, ed., Reference Guide to Russian Literature (London, 1998), 278-79.