FIRST BOOK
SHKAPSKAIA, Mariia Mikhailovna.
Mater Dolorosa.
St. Petersburg, [Neopalimaia Kupina], 1921.
12mo, pp. 36; some light browning to first and last leaves, but a very good copy in the original stiff paper wrappers and printed paper dust-jacket, a few small chips, tear to foot of rear cover near spine, old stamps to inside rear cover.
Added to your basket:
Mater Dolorosa.
First edition of Maria Shkapskaya’s first book of poems. ‘You have taken to a new and very wide road. No woman before you has spoken so truthfully and in so firm a voice of her significance as a woman’ (Gorky to Shkapskaya, January 1923).
Maria Shkapskaya (1891–1952), ‘a sophisticated intellectual with a degree from the University of Toulouse, published several volumes of highly idiosyncratic poetry devoted almost entirely to a woman’s experience as a lover, wife, and mother. Sexuality, conception, abortion, pregnancy, giving birth, and the death of a child are her themes, always approached in the presence of God: how does a mother face God when He has allowed her child to die? Shkapskaya deals with her womanhood concretely, even carnally, yet also with a deep spirituality’ (Terras). After 1925 Shkapskaya’s poems were suppressed, and she was reduced to writing Five-Year Plan reportage; her creative work was rediscovered in the West only in the 1970s.
Tarasenkov p. 417.
You may also be interested in...
[ERENBBURG, BAL’MONT, BLOK, LERMONTOV, PUSHKIN, TOLSTOY, TURGENEV, et al.]
Izbrannye stikhi russkikh poetov. Seriia sbornikov po temam. Rossiia [Selections of verse by Russian poets. A series of collections by theme. Russia].
First edition of a patriotic anthology of poems on the theme of ‘Russia’, organised chronologically from Odoevsky to Kliuev. The theme is religiously adhered to, with contributions from both dead and living authors, including, as well as those listed above, Aksakov, Bely, Soloviev, Fofanov, Sologub, Briusov, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Sasha Cherny, etc. Ehrenburg was then in exile in Paris, and the two poems by him here (written 1912-3) appear for the first time in Russia.
PRE-FIRST EDITION BAUDELAIRE, Charles.
Les Fleurs du mal [from Revue des Deux Mondes, 1 June 1855].
First appearance in print of any of the poems from the celebrated but suppressed collection Les Fleurs du mal, extracted from the Revue des Deux Mondes.