I. Selvinsky. Early Selvinsky.

I. Selvinsky. Early Selvinsky.
M. - L. Publishing House. 1929, 256 p. Hardcover, native dust jacket, size 13.5 x 18 cm. Good - very good condition, additionally wrapped in the owner's plastic cover.

Lifetime edition. Many poems are dedicated to the Crimea, as well as Jewish and Gypsy themes. Constructivist dust jacket. Circulation 3000.

Ilya Selvinsky (born selevinsky) was born on October 12 (24), 1899 in Simferopol in a krymchak family. His grandfather, Elia (Eliahu) Cholewinski, were the cantonments of Fanagoria regiment. Father, Leib Alisherovich Zelevinsky participated in the Russian-Turkish war of 1877, then traded furs and furs. Mother-Hope (Neha) Lvovna Selvinskaya (1856-1938), whose ashes are buried in the New don cemetery. As Ilya Lvovich wrote in his autobiography (1967), his father "was a furrier, and then, having gone broke, turned into a furrier."

Fleeing from the 1905 wave of pogroms, the mother and her younger son and daughters went to Constantinople, where in 1905-1906 Ilya attended a school at the French Catholic mission, then an Arab school in yedikul, and a few months later they returned to Simferopol. In the middle of 1909, the family moved to Odessa, where Ilya entered the state school. In August 1911, they moved to Yevpatoria, where Ilya entered the city's primary four-class school, and in 1915-1919, he continued his studies at the Yevpatoria men's gymnasium. Since 1915, he began to publish his works (in particular, in the newspaper "Evpatoriyskiye Novosti").

After graduating from high school in 1919, he spent the summer in haymaking and as a cabin boy on a schooner, and in the fall he entered the medical faculty of the Tauride University, then dropped out of school and entered the Tavrida cannery as a worker. In 1920, in addition to working at the factory, he worked as a day laborer and returned to the Tauride University, but already at the faculty of law.

During the revolution, he took part in the revolutionary movement, and was a prisoner in Sevastopol prison. He changed many professions (he was a loader, model, reporter, circus wrestler, etc.).

In the summer of 1921, he moved to his sister Henrietta Lvovna Kovner (1887-1958) in Moscow and transferred to the faculty of social Sciences at Moscow University. He lived with his wife at his sister's house in Bolshoy Kozikhinsky lane. In 1923, Selvinsky graduated from the faculty of social Sciences of the 1st Moscow state University. The actual leader of the constructivist group. In 1926, he published his first collection of poems. In the late 1920s, he wrote experimental epic poems.

In the mid-and late 1920s, Mikhail Savoyarov, a popular eccentric artist and chansonnier, performed experimental "left-wing" poems and poems by Ilya Selvinsky in his concerts. In particular, he read (and sometimes even sang) to musical accompaniment the poem "Ulyalayevschina" in the costume and aesthetics of the Blue blouse theater.

In 1927-1930, Ilya Selvinsky had a sharp publicistic controversy with Vladimir Mayakovsky. In 1930, he made penitential statements. At the same time, as follows from his autobiography, he went "to work as a welder at an electric plant."

In the early 1930s, Selvinsky wrote avant-garde verse dramas.

In 1933-1934, he was a correspondent for Pravda in the expedition led by O. Y. Schmidt on the steamer Chelyuskin, but he did not participate in the drift and wintering: as part of a group of eight people, he landed on the shore during a stop at Kolyuchin island and went with the Chukchis on dogs across the ice of the Arctic ocean and tundra to Cape Dezhnev.

Since 1937, crushing party resolutions were issued against Selvinsky: on April 21, 1937, the Politburo resolution against his play "Umka-the White Bear", and on August 4, 1939, the orgburo resolution on the magazine" October "and Selvinsky's poems, which were called"anti — artistic and harmful". Since 1937, he has written historical dramas in verse.

Member of the CPSU (b) since 1941. Since 1941, he was at the front in the ranks of the red army, first with the rank of battalion Commissar, then Lieutenant Colonel. He received two concussions and one serious injury near Bataisk. The Deputy people's Commissar of defense was awarded a gold watch for the lyrics of the song "Fighting Crimean", which became the song of the Crimean front.

At the end of November 1943, Selvinsky was summoned from the Crimea to Moscow. He was criticized for writing "harmful" and" anti-artistic " works. It is believed that he" incorrectly " told about the Jewish victims of the Nazis. According to another version, Selvinsky's quite harmless poem "Whom Russia cradled..." (1943) shrewdly saw a caricature of I. V. Stalin (hidden under the word "freak").

He was discharged from the army. Benedict Sarnow describes this event as follows:

The case takes place on February 10, 1944. <...> There is a meeting of the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the CPSU(b). < ... > the "ideologically vicious" poem by Ilya Selvinsky "Who was rocked by Russia"is being Discussed. Suddenly, in the meeting room, Stalin appears and, pointing to the poet who has failed, throws this remark:

- This man should be treated carefully, he was very much loved by Trotsky and Bukharin.

Apparently, he was forgiven. Selvinsky was eager to return to the front. Finally, his request was granted in April 1945, and he was reinstated in rank.

In the 1950s, he returned to the beginning of his work and made new versions of the works of the 1920s.

In 1959, at the height of the persecution of Boris Pasternak, Igor Selvinsky published a poem:

And you, a poet who has been caressed by the enemy,

Just to please us,

You allowed it, and any bastard,

She went dancing and somersaulting.

Why was there a lavish waste

A soul fire that was so pure,

When now for the glory of Herostratus

You put your homeland under the whistle?

Ilya Selvinsky died on March 22, 1968. He was buried in Moscow at Novodevichy cemetery (plot 7)