[LABOR PERIODICALS] HARDMAN, J.B.S. (ed); Lev LUNTZ (contrib)

Labor and Nation Vol. VI, No. 3 (Summer 1950)

New York: Inter-Union Institute, Inc., 1950. First Edition. Quarto. Staple-bound, printed card wrappers; 64pp. Covers rubbed, with small losses to extremities (not affecting text); text clean and unmarked; Very Good.

An anticommunist but pro-socialist labor periodical which drew articles and influences from across the left-right spectrum of the post-war labor movement. This issue includes what appears to be the first (and possibly only) appearance in English of Russian playwright Lev Luntz's dystopian drama The City of Truth, first published posthumously in Berlin in 1924 (translated by Hannah G. Hardman). The play envisions a society in which children are reared in an environment completely devoid of motherly love -- a theme that would be revisited in a number of mid-century anti-communist dystopias. Luntz died in a Hamburg sanitarium in the same year this work was published, leaving behind a small body of work. He was only 23, but his passing drew commentary from no less a figure than Maxim Gorky, who wrote, "...he was talented, wise, exceptionally educated for a man so young. One felt in him a rare independence and daring of thought...it is difficult to write about this sad loss, the untimely death of a talented man." This appears to be the only one of Luntz's works to have been translated into English, and this the only appearance of the translation. This periodical not noted in Goldwater, Radical Periodicals in America (New Haven: 1966).

Price: $100.00

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