"By the Rivers of Babylon", Poetry Collection Edited by Leib Jaffe – Moscow, 1917 – Cover Designed by El Lissitzky
У рѣкъ Вавилонскихъ, національно-еврейская лирика въ міровой поэзіи [By the Rivers of Babylon: National Jewish Lyrics in World Poetry], a collection of poems and texts edited by Leib Jaffe. Moscow: Сафрутъ, 1917. Russian. Cover designed by El Lissitzky.
Anthology of poems and texts by various writers and poets, both Jewish and non-Jewish. The works included in the collection are intended to reflect the Jewish experience from diverse angles, dealing with various Jewish themes and motifs.
Among the better-known contributors whose poems are included in the collection are: Rabbi Yehuda Halevi, Lord Byron, William Wordsworth, Heinrich Heine, Sholem Aleichem, Chaim Nachman Bialik, Theodor Herzl, Victor Hugo, Samuel Marshak, Shaul Tchernichovsky, Yehuda Leib Gordon, Ze'ev Jabotinsky, and others.
Handwritten inscription (Russian) on the title page, dated: 24.11.17.
219, [4] pages. 23 cm. Fair-good condition. Stains. Worming to pages and cover, with minor damage to text (restored with paper on cover and title page). Bound (with original cover) in cloth binding, old and damaged.
MoMA 157.
El (Eliezer Lazar Markovich) Lissitzky (Ла́зарь Ма́ркович (Мо́рдухович) Лиси́цкий; 1890-1941), a Jewish-Russian artist, designer, photographer, teacher, typographer and architect, one of the most prominent and important members of the Russian avant-garde.
Lissitzky, an architect by training, contributed much, together with his teacher and friend Kazimir Malevich, to the conceptualization and development of the Suprematism movement – the abstract art focused on geometric forms. He also designed numerous books and journals, exhibitions, and propaganda posters for the communist regime in Russia and influenced the Bauhaus and Constructivist movements in Europe.
In 1921, Lissitzky moved to Germany, where he served as the Russian cultural ambassador, engaged in forming connections between Russian and German artists and continued to design books and journals; there he also created some of his most well-known works in the field of book design, including the issues of the journal "Veshch/Gegenstand/Objet", which he founded together with the writer Ilya Ehrenburg, and a volume of poetry by Vladimir Mayakovsky.
Lissitzky died in Moscow at the age of 51. In his final years, his artistic work was dedicated mainly to soviet propaganda; yet it seems that the same worldview accompanied his works throughout his life – the belief in goal-oriented creation (Zielbewußte Schaffen, the German term he coined) and the power of art to influence and bring about change.