Storia della poesia Ceca contemporanea [History of contemporary Czech poetry].; L'arcipelago , vol. 1

Rome: Le Edizioni d'Argo, 1950. Quarto (25.5 × 22 cm). Contemporary half-calf over laid paper with original wrappers bound at the back; frontispiece illustration by Josef Istler; 111 pp. Numerous photo-illustrations throughout. Gilt title to spine. A very good copy. First edition of this illustrated monograph on Czech poetry and art from the turn of the twentieth century to 1950, by the noted Italian Slavist, translator, and poet, Angelo Maria Ripellino (1923-1978), in a fine contemporary binding (unsigned). This was one of the first foreign works on contemporary Czech poetry, which remarkably considers not just interwar literary trends, but also accounts for a number of WWII tendencies as well as artists who emerged immediately after the war, such as the Skupina Ra (Ra Group) and Skupina 42 (Group 42). Ripellino's work was never republished in any other language. Among early twentieth-century Czech poets, Ripellino singles out Jiří Wolker, Josef Hora, Vilém Závada, František Hrubín, František Nechvátal and provides translations, commentary, and context for their texts. Ripellino discusses Cubist and surrealist art alongside the poetry, and includes photo-illustrations of works by Toyen, Karel Teige, František Janoušek, Kamil Lhoták, František Hudeček, and Jan Smetana among others. The book closes with a short discussion of Socialist Realism, the state-mandated aesthetic of all Soviet bloc nations, of which Czechoslovakia became a part in 1948. Ripellino subsequently published anthologies of both Czech and Russian poetry, which he translated into Italian. He was also friends with a number of the Czech and Soviet poets, including Boris Pasternak, whom he visited in his famous summer house Peredelkino. In 1967 Ripellino was banned from entering the Soviet Union after writing in support of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in the Italian press. The following year, after his press coverage of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia he was also banned from entering the Czech Republic. No 26 of 400 copies printed. Outside Italy, KVK, OCLC only show copies at Indiana, Yale, St. Gallen, and Giessen. (Inventory #: P5249)