Gastev Editor (1 results)

Moscow: RIO VTsSPS, 1924. Octavos (25 × 17 cm). Bound together into a single volume with contemporary cloth over boards; original self-wrappers preserved; ca. 95 pp per issue. Illustrated from drawings and occasional photographs. Private ownership note to front free end paper; evenly toned due to stock; else about very good. A complete yearly run of this illustrated publication by the Central Institute of Labor (CIT), edited by the Institute's founder, revolutionary, avant-garde writer, and theorist of labor, Aleksei Gastev (1882-1939). The editorial statement calls for the "mechanization of man" and the "montage of labor", early articulations of Gastev's theory of biomechanics. Issues include articles on various aspects of work management, from studies of the day of a factory brigade manager based on photographic evidence, to articles with instructions for setting up labor efficiency experiments. One illustrated double issue is devoted to the structure of the Central Institute of Labor (CIT) and an overview of a conference on the Scientific Organisation of Labor (Nauchnaia organizatsiia truda; NOT). Some issues with publisher advertising to rear wrappers, including numerous works by Gastev as well as translations of foreign texts on the scientific study of labor. Founded in 1921 and associated with avant-garde cultural tendencies, the Institute ceased to exist in 1940. An early member of the Russian revolutionary movement, Aleksei Gastev was a veteran of the 1905 Revolution. He later became close to the Bolsheviks and was in personal contact with Lenin until 1907, and again after the October Revolution. Following numerous arrests he fled abroad, where he came into contact with French Syndicalism and various forms of labor organization, while working in factories. After the October Revolution, Gastev initiated the NOT movement, aiming at the scientific and rationalist organization of labor based on the ideas of Frederick Taylor. His lyric poetry and prose poems formed a unique genre blending this fascination with physical labor, the machine age, and the human body: "Gastev's collection of hymns to factory work, Poeziia rabochego udara (Poetry of the Worker's Blow, published in 1918), mixes revolutionary agitation with cosmic symbolism and a futurist cult of the machine age. His best-known work, the prose poem 'My rastem iz zheleza' ('We grow out of iron,' 1914), evokes a sort of transsubstantiation from flesh into steel, as the narrator merges with the metal girders of a blast furnace to become a gigantic human machine" (Adrian Wanner, Russian Minimalism, p. 37). The poet would later refer to the Institute as his "final artistic creation." In 1938, Gastev was arrested during the wave of violent repressions Stalin initiated after the murder of Kirov, and executed in 1939. As of March 2026, KVK, OCLC show scattered issues at three institutions in North America.