Page 62 - Making Books

135.
Evgenii Rein
Долгоиграющая
The long-player
Moscow: Goppe, 2014
160 x 188 mm. 16 pages
Edition: 18, copy № 1/18 with the original designs

Evgenii Rein (born 1935) joined in the early 1960s a group of poets
around Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966) in Leningrad. In 1971 he moved
Moscow where he still lives and works. ‘The long-player’ contains
seven poems dating from 2010, that for the most part are devoted to
a journey into memory, describing the mood that marked the decline
of the era and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Goppe designed the
cover in the form of a vinyl LP. His lithographs follow the narrative
of the poems, for example in the image where Venice and Russia
are joined together. The central pages, in gloomy crimson and black
colours, show the four poets around Akhmatova in the early 1960s:
Dmitrii Bobyshev, Evgenii Rein, Anatolii Naiman and Joseph Brodsky,
who are also known as ‘Akhmatova’s Orphans’. All four appear in
strange shapes such as a toothed bird, shapes in the form of a cat and
a mouse, and a shaded male head with a hat. Goppe also included
in the book two lithographs after drawings by Igor Shelkovskii, one of
them a white dove: the image of the poet, observing the city.

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