Black Bonfire: (Negros about Negros). The Harlem Renaissance literature in Russian.
Black Bonfire: (Negros about Negros). The Harlem Renaissance literature in Russian.
[Walrond, Eric D.; van Loon, Hendrik; Matheus, John; White, Walter] [Black Bonfire: (Negros about Negros)]. Chernyi Koster: (Negry o Negrakh). Stories.
[Translation by N. Kamionskaya and I. Srednik].
Edited by E. Lundberg.
Cover by [A.] Levin.
Moskva-Leningrad, Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1928.
8vo, 151, [1] pp.
In original pictorial boards.
In good condition, rubbed, small loss to spine, spotted, minor soiling to some pages, small owner signature to title and front free endpaper.
One of 7 000 copies printed.
First and only Russian edition.
This collection of stories includes: 'Drought' and 'Subjection' from the short story collection 'Tropic Death' (1926) by Eric D. Walrond (1898-1966), an Afro-Caribbean Harlem Renaissance writer and journalist; 'The Way of War' (1924) by Hendrik van Loon, a Dutch-American historian and journalist; 'Swamp Moccasin' (1926) by John F. Matheus (1887-1983), an African-American writer and scholar active during the Harlem Renaissance; and 'The Fire in the Flint' (1924, likely a shortened translation) by Walter White (1893-1955), a civil rights activist, chief secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and writer.
All of these authors have connections to 'The Crisis', the official magazine of the NAACP and the world's oldest continuously published Black-oriented magazine, in print since 1910. For instance, Matheus won first prize in 'The Crisis' magazine's 1926 contest with his story 'Swamp Moccasin'.
The translations of Eric D. Walrond's stories were done by Natalia Kamionskaya (1901-1997), who also prepared Russian translations of works by Liam O’Flaherty, Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, and John Dos Passos.
OCLC locates one copy of this edition only: in the New York Public Library.