CHAGALL, MARC. 1887-1985.


HOFSHTEYN, DOVID. Troyer [Mourning]. Kiev: Kultur-lige, 1922. Folio (357 x 261 mm). Four inserted letterpress illustrations, and two others in-text by Chagall. Original two-color decorated tan wrappers by Chagall. Some restoration to wrappers; small marginal tears closed, some chipping; internal soiling.FIRST AND ONLY EDITION OF CHAGALL'S POIGNANT ILLUSTRATIONS. Written in response to the recent pogroms carried out in the Ukraine during the Russian Civil War, Troyer incorporates Chagall's mystical Cubist designs to illuminate the sorrow expressed in the poetry: his first drawing depicts "a man with weeping hands, the next refers to blood dripping amid sunshine, and the last is a moving drawing of a series of houses over a headless body symbolizing the pogroms" (Apter-Gabriel 62). Within the Cubo-Futurist concrete poetry tradition, Hofshteyn plays with the shape of verse as in the circular poem on p 11. Another is dedicated to the famous peasant poet Sergei Esenin on p 9. At the time Chagall himself was battling Malevich and his Suprematists (including the turncoat El Lissitzky) who, offended by what they considered to be Chagall's "bourgeois individualism," overthrew him as head of the Popular Art Institute in Vitebsk that he had founded. Not long after this insult, Chagall left Vitebsk for good and eventually settled in Paris. Troyer was published by the Kultur-lige, then the center of the Jewish cultural renaissance in Kiev. Apter-Gabriel 62; Rowell/Wye 373.