Mehring Books will officially launch its newest release, Art as the Cognition of Life: Selected Writings 1911-1936, by Aleksandr K. Voronsky, at a series of events this week in New York City, September 24-27.
Translator Frederick S. Choate will be signing copies of Art as the Cognition of Life at Borders Book Shops in New York City. Thursday, September 24, 6-8 p.m. he will be at the Park Avenue Borders, 461 Park Avenue, near 57th Street. On Friday, September 25, 6-8 p.m., he will be at the World Trade Center Borders, 5 World Trade Center
Mehring Books will also be participating at this year's New York Is Book Country, Sunday, September 27, 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Its kiosk will be located on Fifth Avenue, between 51st and 52nd Streets, on the west side.
Voronsky was a major figure in the Soviet Union in the period following the Russian Revolution. He supported Leon Trotsky and the Left Opposition in the struggle against Stalinism, and was an authentic representative of classical Marxism in the field of literary criticism.
The first anthology of his works to appear in English, the volume contains Voronsky's major literary essays as well as writings on Plekhanov, Tolstoy, Freud, K.S. Stanislavsky, H.G. Wells, Gorky and others. Also included is an appendix of documents crucial to an understanding of the events of the 1920s in the Soviet Union.
At the Borders book signings translator Frederick Choate will speak on the life and work of this fascinating, but little-known, Marxist author. Choate has done extensive research on Voronsky, having spent four years in the early 1990s in Russia studying his writings and life, and is currently working on a biography.
On Sunday, September 27 Mehring Books representatives will man an exhibit at the New York Is Book Country fair in Manhattan, featuring the new Voronsky book as well as a wide range of other Mehring Books titles. The New York City book fair is in its eighteenth year, and features workshops, author presentations, performances, slide shows and hundreds of publishers and antiquarian booksellers.
Also prominently displayed at the fair will be 1937: Stalin's Year of Terror, by Vadim Zakharovich Rogovin, published earlier this year. This is the first major study by a Russian Marxist historian of the most tragic and fateful year in the history of the Soviet Union, presenting a detailed and penetrating analysis of the causes and consequences of Stalin's purges. Rogovin demonstrates that the principal function and aim of the terror was the physical annihilation of the substantial socialist opposition to Stalin's bureaucratic regime.
Vadim Rogovin, the author of a monumental six-volume study of the Trotskyist opposition to the rise of the Stalinist regime within the USSR, died of cancer in Moscow September 18 at the age of 61. Rogovin was among the most highly regarded sociologists in the Soviet Union.
See also:
A.K. Voronsky's 'Art as the Cognition of Life' - Art as the discovery of truths, large and small
[19 September 1998]