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Gudruna Trogstad, capitana.

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Scarce first edition, signed by the author, of a play following a female ship’s captain navigating the waters of a tropical storm, printed by an émigré publisher at the heart of the Buenos Aires literary scene.

Ilka Krupkin was the pseudonym of Elias Jolodovski (1902–1980), poet, playwright and author of the novels La taza de chocolate (1926) and El hombre que perdió el sueño (1928), who emigrated from Russia to Argentina as a child. The protagonist of his play, Gudruna, whose name recalls the powerful wife of the Germanic hero Sigurd, allows the passionate heat of the Tropics to sow seeds of doubt in her relationship with her first pilot and to conjure lust from their friendship. As a sensational and controversial representation of female sexuality in early twentieth-century Argentina, a contemporary critic thought the purpose of the play was ‘to show that the civilized woman would love like a savage if it were not for public opinion’ (Barnes). Twenty years later, Gudruna Trogstad, capitana was performed by the Federación Argentina de Teatros Independientes (FATI) at the Teatro del Pueblo, Latin America’s first independent theatre, between 1950 and 1951.

The Moldovan–Jewish printer Manuel Gleizer (1889–1966), a key figure in twentieth-century Argentinian publishing, also emigrated from Russia c. 1908 and opened a bookshop in Villa Crespo, the Jewish quarter of Buenos Aires, in 1922, subsequently publishing works of politics, literature, and Judaica; his bookshop was a popular meeting place for young writers, notably Krupkin (a friend of Alberto Gerchunoff and Leopoldo Marechal) and Jorge Luis Borges, whose El idioma de los Argentinos Gleizer would later publish.

OCLC finds four copies in the US (Kansas, Pennsylvania State, Stony Brook, Stanford), and none in the UK; not in Library Hub.

See Barnes, Books abroad 6:1 (1932), p. 29.