Goroda i Gody. Roman. (Cities and Years. A Novel).

Leningrad.: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel'stvo., 1924.. Contemporary calf-backed marbled boards and endpapers, banded spine with title gilt and gilt vignettes in six compartments.. 8vo.. First edition of Fedin's autobiographical first novel.'Cities and Years', Konstantin Fedin's first novel, is an intense exploration of war and its aftermath, and examines the rôle of the intelligentsia in the inevitable revolution that looms over society. The titular cities are Berlin and Moscow, and the years those of the First World War and the Russian Revolution.Fedin, in his capacity as First Secretary of the Union of Soviet Writers (a position he held from 1959 until his death in 1977), had in the 1960s prevented the publication of Solzhenitsyn's exposé 'Cancer Ward'; accusations that Fedin was 'a writer who puts the noose around the neck of another writer' (Kaverin, letter to Fedin, 1968 - see 'Survey', no. 68, 1968) followed.'His first novel Cities and Years (Goroda i gody, 1924), one of the first major novels in Soviet literature, embodied Fedin's quest for a new literary statement. Its displaced chronological sequences bring 'time out of joint', accentuating a sense of turmoil. Different kinds of speech and genres, telescoped together, also contribute to its dramatic effect. Cities and Years foreshadows a recurrent theme in Fedin's works: the Russian intelligentsia, typified by writers and artists, in their relation to history and society. In Cities and Years a representative of the intelligentsia fails to find his place in the Revolution.' (A Handbook of Russian Literature, Edited by Victor Terras, 1990).