Alexandre BLOK / Georges Annenkov - Les douze - 1923

Alexandre BLOK: The twelve.

Drawings by J. Annenkoff

Revolutionary poem translated by Y. Sidersky.

The Peerless - Paris - 1923.
19 x 14 cm, 45 pp
Small marks and stains on the cover, interior fresh, a good copy of this rare work.

Georges Annenkov (or Georges Annenkoff; in Russian: Юрий Павлович Анненков, Iouri Pavlovitch Annenkov) was a Russian painter, cinema decorator, and costume designer, born July 11, 1889 in Petropavlovsk, in the Russian Empire, and died July 12, 1974 in the 14th arrondissement of Paris.

From Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau to Jacques Becker and Alex Joffé, via Max Ophüls, from 1926 to 1966, Georges Annenkov, a costume designer, has traversed forty years of European cinema.

Alexandre Blok (in Russian: Алекса́ндр Алекса́ндрович Блок, Aleksandr Aleksandrovitch (von) Blok) was a Russian poet born on November 16, 1880 (November 28 in the Gregorian calendar) in Saint Petersburg, where he died on August 7, 1921.

His most famous work remains the poem The Twelve (sometimes titled simply Twelve; in Russian: Двенадцать, Dvenadtsat; 1918). "An act of rupture, Twelve is above all defined by the lyrical outpouring of subjective poetry. It is therefore neither a collage nor a narrative, but a rhythmic unity that makes the poem's voice the theater for a multiplicity of voices, and vice versa." His only masterpiece inspired by the Russian Revolution, which for him was both the supreme hope and the supreme disillusion.

According to the French critic Jean-Baptiste Para, Angelo Maria Ripellino described with impeccable precision the brilliant and disorienting style of this poem:

Writing, violently jolted by syncopations and ruptures, by metric leaps, by harsh dissonances (whistles, the wind barking, trampling, bullets crackling), mixes in an unusual lexical paste political posters’ slogans and prayer formulas, constructions of solemn odes and street insults, the coarse terms of proletarian slang and notes of romance.

“Alexander, our Sun,” as Anna Akhmatova wrote on the day of his funeral, dies in Petrograd in 1921 of despair, after long months of physical and moral suffering. “Of course, Blok is not one of us. But he had an impulse toward us… The fruit of that impulse is the most considerable work of our era: the poem The Twelve will remain eternal,” wrote Leon Trotsky in Literature and Revolution (1924). On 16 April 1920, Blok had written a note on The Twelve:

We shall see what time will make of it. Perhaps all politics is so dirty that a single drop spoils the poem and ruins everything else; perhaps it won’t destroy its meaning; perhaps, ultimately—who knows!—it will prove to be the ferment by which The Twelve will be read in a time that will no longer be ours.
Wikipedia