Beschreibung
RARE FIRST EDITIONS OF GORKY'S VITRIOLIC CRITICISM OF AMERICA IN THE FORM OF THREE SATIRICAL INTERVIEWS - Duodecimo, 7-3/4 inches high by 5-1/4 inches wide. Bound in early floral decorated maroon boards, backed with a black cloth spine, with the original front wrappers bound in. The covers are rubbed with wear to the corners. The cloth along the spine's rear joint is partially split. 23 & [1] pages; 26 & [2]pages; and 27 & [1] pages. There is a chip to the front edge of the first "interview's" half-title. The titles of the three essays are penned in ink on the front pastedown. Good. RARE FIRST EDITIONS of Gorky's complete 3 "Interviews" in the original Russian language.Association copies from the library of "Socialist Youth of Russia/Organized Nov. 15th 1907", with the group's stamp on the first half-title, at the head of the text of the first essay, and on the last page of text.The publisher, Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Dietz, was a legend in the publishing of socialist books, including works by Marx, Engels and Lenin. At the head of each of the essays the publisher has printed the German title of the work: "Ein Priester der Moral/Interview von Maxim Gorki", "Einer von den Konigen der Republik/Interview von Maxim Gorki", and "Die Beherrscher des Lebens/Interview von Maxim Gorki".Gorky visited America from April 10 to October 13, 1906 in the hope of raising money for the Bolshevik cause. He arrived in the U.S. as a literary lion and was celebrated by the likes of Mark Twain, Edwin Markham, William Dean Howells, and adoring crowds supporting a revolution in Russia. As reported in the New York Tribune on April 13 Gorky stated his intentions: "I came to America because it is the most democratic country on the globe, and I believe Russia is destined ultimately to stand next to America as the land of democratic ideas. I shall do all I can to arouse American interest and call out American sympathy, and my success in giving it concrete form will determine my course while in the country." However, only 2 days later on April 15 The New World published what at that time seemed a scandalous story that the woman with whom he was traveling and who claimed to be his wife was not in fact Madame Gorky. The story quickly became fodder for the American press and, apart from a few prominent American socialists, Gorky became the subject of disdain and ridicule. During the summer of 1906 he took refuge from a now vitriolic press in a cottage in the Adirondacks near Keene, New York. It was there that he wrote his savage satiric "Interviews" as well as his novel "Mother".In her revealing essay in The Kentucky Review entitled "'As exciting as being in hell' Maxim Gorky in the United States" Judith H. McDowell writes: "In all these essays the United States is seen as a land where the promise of freedom has been brutally erased from the minds of the people by the rapacity of the capitalists. The people, dulled by their insignificant roles as cogs in the capitalist machine lubricated by the oil of religion administered by the hypocritical Bible-thumpers, are both tragically enslaved and comically self-satisfied. The leaders of the people, the millionaires and the so-called 'Kings of the Republic', are consumed by greed, incapable of human affection, completely racist and sexist, and hideously corrupted, themselves slaves also to the 'Yellow Devil - Gold'." McDowell concludes her article: "Thus the American people dismissed Gorky, relegating his essays on them to the dustbin as uninteresting and unimportant. And so they would be, were it not for the fact that Gorky's Bolshevik cause was ultimately successful in 1917. When we consider the enormous significance of Gorky in Russia, and the fact that millions of Soviet readers even today believe his essays on the United States to be interesting, important, profound, and true, then not only a few individuals but also two entire nations are involved in the results of this disastrous 1906 visit. It is not to stretc. Bestandsnummer des Verkäufers 97249
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