BLOK, ALEKSANDR ALEKSANDROVICH. 1880-1921.
Stikhi o Rossii [Poems about Russia]. Petrograd: Otechestvo, 1915.
8vo. 45 pp. Original decorated wrappers designed by Georgii Narbut. Original decorated wrappers. Wrappers reglued; bottom left hand corners of front wrapper and first leaf restored.
PRESENTATION COPY, inscribed on the front free leaf to Nikolai Alekseevich Mazurov, December 1915. Aleksandr Blok was one of Russia's greatest poets. Known primarily as a Symbolist, he had enormous impact on his contemporaries. Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetaeva, even Vladimir Nabokov all dedicated poems to Blok. Although he did not entirely approve of the jingoism of the publisher Otechestvo [Fatherland], Stikhi o Rossii reflects on his country's past and present. Blok at first embraced the Bolshevik Revolution and was just as quickly disillusioned. When he fell ill, he was unable to secure a passport from the Soviet government to seek treatment abroad and died.